[murron]

I have been saying this for years, just not calling the little ones brats. I’ve used the same terminilogy as disease du juor. First it was asthma, then it was Attention Deficit Disorder, and now it’s autism. All of these diseases are subjective diagnoses by the physicians who diagnose them, so it is easy to say that this child has the newest disease, and whamo, the Mom gets a disability check per child. It also seems that more than one child per family all has the disease. If they weren’t getting the disability checks, I wouldn’t be so cynical about it, and would give the benefit of the doubt that there is a problem with the health of the children in minority families.

[Nonstatist]

First it was asthma, then it was Attention Deficit Disorder, and now it’s autism. All of these diseases are subjective diagnoses

That is BS , Mommy. Catscans of Autism patients show up significantly differently than those of "normal" patients. Autism is NOT ADD, it is not a subjective diagnosis.

Probably the worst thing Dipsh*t Savage did was to conflate the two for the uninformed, which unfortunately is the majority of his listeners.

[ClearCase_guy]

Maybe I'm biased, but I think there's something really going on. First, I have no doubt that there is a degree of mis-diagnosis. That's easy to believe. The question is: How large is the margin of error?

I've often said that many (not all) of the ADHD kids were just behavior problems. Now, my wife generally has a lot to say about parents who don't parent -- she rolls her eyes at many kids that we see and mutters about their need for discipline. But she also works with autistic kids. She has no doubt that there is something seriously wrong with these kids. They just can't function in a normal way. She doesn't think it's parents, doesn't think it's discipline.

I dunno the answer, but I do think something is going wrong.

[ktscarlett66]

Who gets disability checks for autism or ADHD or asthma? You don’t.