Is insurance money driving autism overdiagnoses?

www.americanthinker.com

I have long thought that autism is being overdiagnosed in America for cultural reasons. Now, DataRepublican (small r) asks whether we should simply follow the money.

In April, when RFK Jr. suggested digging more deeply into the causes of soaring autism in America, I wrote an essay on the subject. I noted that there’s definitely a dramatic increase in diagnoses: “Autism diagnoses are rising like crazy, increasing by 175% in the last decade. The prevalence of diagnoses is highest in children aged 5-8, but the rate of diagnoses in adults between 26 and 34 went up by 450%.”

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I also explained that true autism is not a foreign concept to me:

I actually know a little bit about autism because I have the pleasure of knowing Ido Kedar, the brilliant author of In Two Worlds (a book I helped edit, although it needed almost no editing). Ido is autistic in the way that everyone understood that diagnosis up until just a few years ago: That is, he’s non-verbal, has limited impulse control, and struggles badly with the various stimuli around him. Although Ido hasn’t blogged in a few years, you can get a sense of how his syndrome affects him by checking out the videos on his site.

However, I went on to add that autism is now considered part of a spectrum. We definitely know there are kids who, while less manifestly affected by autism than someone like Ido, still have huge functional deficits. For example, Mark Rober, who came to fame for his wonderful glitter bomb attacks against porch pirates, has a son who clearly functions in a different framework from most kids, even though his autistic behaviors are not as severe as Ido’s:

However, what I’m sure all of us have also noticed is how kids whom we once would have called only “socially awkward,” “clueless,” or “engineering types” are now being clinically pathologized as “autistic” and “on the spectrum,” labels that will follow them for life. Aside from the modern urge to label everything, I hypothesized that the growth in the number of kids who fall under these labels may also be a problem of modern times:

No one is talking about the effect of the lockdown on the little kids, the ones in the 5-8-year-old cohort who were locked up and masked when they should have been laying down the foundations for socialization.

Also, no one is talking about the effect of screens on children and young people. If your social life is texting (as is true for so many) and your activities are computer games (which is especially true for young men who spent hours in darkened rooms frantically flicking their thumbs while talking to disembodied voices)...well, yeah, you won’t understand eye contact, you won’t pick up on social cues, you’ll lack empathy, and you’ll probably have high anxiety in most social situations. This could describe many of the people in the age 24-36 cohort who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum issues.

In other words, between COVID and our computerized society, our young people have become de-socialized.

I closed by noting that a friend suggested that the uptick in diagnoses could also be tied to pharmaceuticals. She said that this could manifest in two possible ways: (1) the ADHD drugs being handed out like candy may increase behaviors that can be tagged as “on the spectrum,” and (2) freely handed out autism diagnoses make available to worried parents drugs that could help awkward kids appear “normal.”

The ADHD connection especially makes sense when you consider that boys get diagnosed with ADHD/ADD and are on the autism spectrum at hugely higher rates than girls. I suspect these labels are often attached to what is normal boy-brain behavior, whether hyperactivity (exacerbated by being forced to live in the sedentary world of girl-oriented schools and post-school TV and computer games), or ordinary social awkwardness. Leftism’s cultural hostility to boys may help increase this social awkwardness. 

DataRepublican, who is “a 100% Deaf and nonverbal database kernel engineer with expressive dysphasia related to autism,” would probably agree with my friend. She, too, thinks there’s a problem with the soaring rate of diagnoses and, in true detective fashion, says that maybe we should follow the money:

I had this idea… “what if autism diagnoses are partially from fraudulent billing?” And then poked around a bit. And … turns out that the whole “1 in 30” statistic isn’t based on official diagnoses; ADDM has clinicians review school records and if the record fits then it counts as autism even if there’s no medical diagnosis.

Then that statistic is quoted to justify increased ABA centers, increased research, all kinds of grants.

I’m questioning literally everything now.

Something is very wrong with America’s children, especially the boys, but whether it’s organic, driven by our sedentary, non-social modern world and leftist hostility to boys, or the product of insurance and pharmaceutical money is an open question. I sincerely hope that the researchers moving forward under RFK Jr.’s initiative don’t focus obsessively on genetics and environmental factors (e.g., food, power lines) and instead remain open to the possibility of multiple factors, including culture and the flow of cash.