I honestly can't help but feel like the main point of people whinging at autism being a broad diagnosis is because they don't like that it makes getting treatment easy (especially coming from "the economist").
Maybe I'm not being charitable. But that really does feel like the only real outcome of trying to piecemeal the diagnosis.
I don't believe research or treatment is negatively impacted in anyway by the diagnosis being broad. If anything, that opens doors so that research isn't accidentally too narrowly focused.
The problem with broad definitions is that it causes false negatives in potential treatments. If you have a treatment that's effective on 10% of your group and useless on the rest you need a sample ten times as large to find an effect.
Or, consider TPA. It is an extremely dangerous drug (used correctly it still has greater than a 1% chance of killing the patient), if you administer it to "stroke" patients you almost certainly do more harm than good. The reality is that if you use it on a bleed type stroke it can (and likely will) only make things worse. Use it on a clot type stroke and you might save them. We of course know this and only use it when a CAT has confirmed it's a clot--but what would happen if we didn't distinguish the two cases?
> The vast amount of treatment for autism is therapies.
> It really doesn't matter if the underlying cause is very different in terms of treatment because a speech therapist works the same with a kid with autism as they do with a kid with down syndrome.
> If there were more pharmaceutical interventions then I might care a bit more. But there's just not.
There are a limited set of drugs involved in autism therapies, but they are general drugs that would be applied regardless the diagnosis (for example, antidepressants.)
In fact, it's much like depression in that sense in that it's a very broad definition with a number of causes. Some antidepressants even work better or worse for people.
I can't help but notice people want to define 'real autism' as only those who are impaired to the extent that they can't advocate for themselves, which conveniently means never having to listen to an autistic person's opinion on things. If you're communicating clearly, even through text on the internet, then you're just a quirky adult who is talking over the people with 'real problems'.
I'm rather dismayed by the recent outpouring of articles about splitting the diagnosis up by people who don't even have a horse in this race but have somehow become qualified to weigh in on psychiatric diagnosis.
Maybe I'm not being charitable. But that really does feel like the only real outcome of trying to piecemeal the diagnosis.
I don't believe research or treatment is negatively impacted in anyway by the diagnosis being broad. If anything, that opens doors so that research isn't accidentally too narrowly focused.