is sn on the increase?

[spritefairy]

Now this is not to offend anyone with a child with sn but every other post seems to have someone who has a child with sn be it disabled or autistic. This makes me wonder.
Is sn on the increase or is it just diagnosed more than it used to be due to medical advances?

Yes I think there is, there certainly seems to be a lot of children with ASD about, then say 30 years ago. Yes dd8 has a dx of ASD and ds3 severe speech and Lang delay and social communication difficulties, though I don't think ASD. I feel parents and health care professionals are more informed, there is a tendency that the younger they are helped, the better the outcomes. Mabey changes in our food and his it's produced and environmental factors are also responsible.

How are they calculating these figures?
On being statemented?
What about people like my son who has a diagnosis but is not statemented.
Is he part of the figures?

He got no extra support or provision. That's because school didn't believe me.

But I do think there are more diagnosis of ASD. Ds1 is complex, but mild in many ways. And wouldn't have got a diagnosis 10 or 15 years ago.

This feeds into people think that 'every other child has an and the parents just want to get more money for themselves' attitude, which I think is prevalent atm.

Bertie, i agree with the theory of social conditioning, but i wonder how it "works" with my boys. As i said, they both present like me, more "drama queen histronics" than aggression, though like me they are both capable of it melting over into aggression.

I also wonder if it is becoming known that girls present differently, but that people are still missing boys-that-present-like-girls?

My grandad has has shock treatment for uncontrolled depression. It worked. I do wonder if he also has an asc? (oh and btw re everything in the triad being included, experts say 'autisms' plural, as it is believed to be many different conditions)

*histrionics

I think SEN is diagnosed more due to increased knowledge and research and the internet supports this. Would anyone have taken their child to an occupational therapist for a dyspraxia or SPD assessment in the 70's?

In my experience, once someones parents die, the care requirement falls to siblings. In our case, my mum arranges care for her brother (he has been in institutions for 50 years).

For a family friend, she took on the care of her downs sister when her parents passed away.

Not possible for everyone. They are very vulnerable. The stats on homeless people show that.

When I started teaching in 1973 children with special needs were routinely called Educationally Subnormal. Even deaf childre. were sent to schools for the deaf. I remember one head proudly saying 'We don't have ESN children here.'
By today's standards we did, and we failed them
Much later we successfully integrated a hearing impaired child because his mother refused to have him 'put away' and last time I saw him he was successfully managing a local shop.

I think so larry, the school system failed me, 0i had dev delay, dyslexia and dyspraxia. It is only when I applied to college for a course that I got the help I needed, I was assessed by an Ed Psych and given the appropriate help with my course and treated in a positive way like a human being, not a nucience or trouble, like school. I am 38, at school if you had an SN it was sink or swim. Even with people having trouble accessing help in MS school, I woukd love to be at school in this day and age.

I often think that mrsD that dd would be in an institution 40/50 years ago, not in a fantastic ASD school happy, calm and acieving. It is so scarey.

Ugger I like your style and accurate cynicism!

x2boys totally agree re people coming to threads because content relates to them. Therefore skewing how the population appears.

There's millions of people on MN. Maybe 50 posters here who have a child with SN/AD.

when I was a kid you didn't see disabled people really, they didn't live in the community, now thankfully they do.
places are becoming more accessible for wheel chairs(sadly not busses or toilets)

I love sitting and hear peoples i know with downs syndromes stories, some are really sad. There is one woman in her 50's now called Cathy, her mum refused to send her and her brother to a “hospital” and she went to primary school. The local policeman and the teacher was always giving her a clip around the ear because she was "Born slow".

Mrsdevere, you are describing one of the places my uncle lived. I guess he would now be described as high functioning. Very bright, high achieving. Just didn't fit the 'norm' expected. His parents were relatively wealthy and for many years he pinged between their care and institutional care.

They hid him though. He had no contact with the rest of the family.

I do believe sn has always been there. It's just more public than it used to be. It is also expensive to support someone who cannot support themselves. So I don't want to think what used to happen.

But a generation or 2 ago the chances are he'd have been in restraints at 5 because of his violence.

My nan and grandad wanted me locked away when i was a child. I only found that out recently.

It wasn't all that long ago that doctors advised parents whos babies who were born with disabilities to place them straight into care.

60 years ago things like spina bifida, Doctors would prescribe medication and slowly stop feeding the baby over the course of a month or so, ending it's life.

My dd conformed at school and fitted into society on the whole. She could pass for normal (whatever the hell that is!) Most of the bad stuff happened at home so we could've stayed under the radar back in the day.

She would definitely have been institutionalised now, as a teenager.

This is when all that "fitting in" came to a catastrophic head IMO. Depression, anxiety and finally, the worst of all, psychosis. I think she would've been locked away for being "possessed"!

She is starting at a Special school in September, she'll be in Year 11. Mainstream was the breaking of her.

Claire Rayner talks in her autobiography how when she was a young nurse, the Drs would leave babies to die who were seen as too disabled.