http://www.beautifulson.com/
It's of course a documentary about a couple trying to 'heal' their son of autism due out in Fall 2006... they are asking for donations from people to help finish the film.
Strange they call it beautiful son when they seem to want to change him :cry:
Hmm. A charity that is making a film. The parents are making the film about their son. I wonder how much they are paying themselves?
In my country, a charity can not collect money to be given to a single family or individual. They would not be allowed to issue tax receipts or be called a charity.
Hmm, they want to "recover him from autism". :shock: Like it's some sort of rampaging monster instead of who he is.
And I found their stats interesting: again, that 1 in every 166 is diagnosed with autism. Maybe all we'll have to do is wait a few more years, and everybody'll be born with it. No more problem, apart from a few "odd" NTs who'll probably be born now and then, and who'll have an inexplicable need to kick balls around. I suppose we can always establish special schools for *them*. Meh.
Alison
Dear oh dear, I can't afford a single penny to help this couple (sarcasm).
1 in every 166 is diagnosed with autism
I don't think this sounds unrealistic, actually. I've heard a similar quote on a credible radio show yesterday.
Did you see the latest study in America? Its actually 1 in 340.
I have never seen where 1 in 166 originally came from, its just repeated everywhere.
Amy, if you have the time to read through this radio show transscript, a Canadian autism researcher explains how that statistic was obtained. I must point out that this transscript has some mis-transcriptions in it. I listened to the show and Fombonne has a thick French accent that is hard to understand at times.
Take special note that this radio show is about "Autism Spectrum Disorder ", which as far as I know isn't an actual diagnostic category, but seems to be a catch-all term for anyone who has any kind of PDD or autistic condition.
Norman Swan: But the proponents of the argument that say that it's truly gone up, that it's not diagnostic phenomena they point to studies I think in California and elsewhere and they say that when you compare apples with apples there is a rise still.
Eric Fombonne: No, there is actually no such data and the Californian data have been misused to put this argument forward. So I know them very well and I can tell you for instance that today there are about 29,000 clients registered in the California Department of Services data base, 29,000 subjects today. If you look at the population of California today it's about 36 million of which you have about 8.5 million who are between the ages of 3 and 17. So if you apply to these 8.5 million people aged 3 to 17 the current traits that we have for autism spectrum disorder which is .6% you expect to have in California, in this age group, at least 50,000 subjects. If you have a more conservative rate it would be like even at least 30,000 subjects. So the fact that there are not even 30,000 subjects for all age groups in this California data base clearly does not suggest that there is an epidemic. The fact that the numbers have increased over time is good, it means that more children are accessing the public services whereas in the past they were not. In the past these children, because there was no systematic effort to give them treatment of services, children were not accessing services or they were subsumed under different diagnostic categories. And we have evidence from several studies that there have been diagnostic switching so in the early 80s it was better to be diagnosed with a diagnosis of mental retardation than with autism. Because autism did not really give you access to any kind of good services whereas if you were mentally *** or recognised as such you had actually access to a range of services.
And there was a big shift which occurred in the US. In the early 1990s there was a change in the individual disabilities educational act, which is a federal law which mandates each state to provide services for subjects with various handicaps. And autism became a mandatory reporting condition by states where it was not the case before. So suddenly you had a big shift, states started to count and report autism as a separate condition and states were also mandated to provide services for this population and that occurred in the early 1990s. And if you look at all the trends in all states in the US in 1990, 91 and 92 you can see this rise in the number of children who are identified with an autism spectrum condition. So the fact that it has risen reflects that there was change in the law, there was a new awareness about the conditions, better services and it cannot be interpreted as an epidemic.
Norman Swan: And you've studied this in Quebec, in school registers, what have you found here?
Eric Fombonne: We surveyed a big school board which has about 30,000 children from kindergarten to grade 11 and we obtained a rate of PDD including all forms of PDD, autism, Asperger's, atypical autism, PDD and OS. For the children we do not permit the full criteria for autism.
Norman Swan: And you found the same rate as others have found elsewhere in the world?
Eric Fombonne: We just reported a rate of .65% which means that about one child in 160 communities is affected with an autism spectrum disorder. That's why it has been now reported by at least ten different studies. When I was in the UK I did two studies which confirmed this high estimate.
California is not representative of the rest of America, and certainly not of the world, the lastest study found that California diagnosing rates were a lot higher than anywhere else.
That seems to say more about whatever practices they have there, its possible in 5 years we will hear of many 'recoveries' of children diagnosed as autistic who are now nt-like in the California area.
I have heard that in order to secure therapies and help, children that would normally be diagnosed with learning disorders or MR were given the more recognisable and specific dx of autism to secure medical insurance payouts.
Maybe the 1 in 166 includes all us BAP's hehehehe sounds like a hot dog stand.
From my reading of the transscript Fombonne was claiming to have found a rate of .65% in 2 UK studies and also in Quebec, Canada, and was also claiming that other US states besides California have had increases in the diagnostic rate.