Rush to diagnose ADHD and autism can damage children: As rates soar up to 40-fold, a major review warns of the toll on those wrongly given a label

[Rubydobydo]

Britain risks harming a generation of children by over-diagnosing ADHD and autism, a major review warns today.
Parents are incentivised to have their children diagnosed by misguided schools and welfare systems that reward such 'labels', the report found.
Youngsters have also been influenced by social media posts that wrongly present common traits as evidence of the conditions.
https://www.dailymail.com/health/article-16194777/Rush-diagnose-ADHD-autism-damage-children.html

Discuss?

My eldest son had speech delay and had a very good speech therapist. No-one mentioned autism, although this was 25 years ago, when you were only considered autistic if you had the more serious form.

Maybe this is why there is such a push to get assesments and diagnosis while still in education clearly pathways and more information to present.

The report did focused on under 24 where they say there was a big rise but I bet the young adult end were like my DC at uni or education of some sort but has also been on many lists for years. Even in uni it can access more support.

Under 24 will most will have grown adults who knew them in childhood very recent educational records and GP reports - so should have substaional information to work with and IME it was used.

Nope. I specifically stated that your claims that autism is caused by environmental factors in the child’s life after their birth are, by definition, not autism because autism is defined as a developmental condition so any impact caused by childhood experiences doesn’t meet the diagnostic criteria. The diagnostic process is specifically required to look at the child’s life history for factors - e.g. childhood trauma or any other environmental factor in the child’s life that could be causing some similar presentations to autism (but usually wouldn’t meet all diagnostic criteria, anyway, in terms of how the child is affected) - to ensure that these are not mistaken for autism, for which there has to be evidence that it was present since birth because it is a neurological condition. By definition, therefore, impacts on a child caused by trauma in their life, or “time spent in childcare” or “permissive parenting”, or “using screens” or “childhood exposure to chemicals” (this one is particularly amusing and identifies people who don’t understand science) or any of the other ridiculous suggestions on this thread are by definition not autism.

I don’t remember that. DD1 was in special language provision from age 4, over 25 years ago, until she was 16. There were always children with autism and speech/language disorders in her class. The autism was quite subtle in most of her friends - certainly not the severe form. I remember one of her friends had a diagnosis of PDDNOS. Her specialist speech and language school said, 40% of their intake were on the autistic spectrum. Their view was that their language tended to be better than the language disordered children, like DD1, which was a good model for them; but the language disordered children had better social skills, a good model for the children with autism. However, the school had to be careful not to become top heavy with autism, as that didn’t work.

There was a lot of discussion around that time about the overlap between SLI (specific language impairment), as it was then and autism, especially about semantic-pragmatic disorder (now iirc usually called PLI or pragmatic language impairment). Some people believed all children with semantic-pragmatic disorder were on the autistic spectrum, while others believed some children were and some weren’t. I regularly heard from mothers for instance that she’d taken one of her children to Margo Sharp for assessment, but not only had that child been diagnosed the autism, but the father and older brother had come away with a diagnosis of autism too! It must have been subtle, as the severe form would have been obvious!

I never came across the automatic assumption a child with speech or language disorder was autistic, until I came on MN much later. We were always told the incidence of speech and/or language difficulties in children was ten times higher than autism (although the incidence of that has been revised from the 1 in a 100 back then).