![]() ![]() Further reports that the proposal would narrow the criteria significantly sparked anxiety and deep worry among many. These reports noted that the pathways to an autism spectrum diagnosis would shrink from 2027 to 11 possible “symptom” combinations and that the committee had laid out an official goal to avoid false positives. ![]() Early media reports about the DSM-5 process suggested potential intent to narrow the diagnostic criteria. Though the expansion of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV had given large numbers of people access to legal protections, service provision, and a diagnosis and communal identity that helped them make sense of lifelong experiences of social isolation, odd interests, and other common autistic experiences, it had also sparked a backlash among some clinicians and members of the general public. ![]() The DSM-5 was the newly organized autistic community’s first opportunity to weigh in on the criteria that governed who the medical community considered autistic.īut the DSM-5 process attracted additional attention for another reason: many in the autistic and autism communities were gravely concerned by rhetoric that autism was “over-diagnosed”. Some of this was due to the simple fact that during the development of the DSM-IV, an organized community of autistic adults did not yet exist in significant numbers. While the DSM had been revised previously, the current diagnostic process took on outsized public attention for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, we maintain that the scientific and research processes are framed and mediated by larger social and political ones, and thus that dedicated advocacy and lobbying could influence the resulting diagnosis. As a representative acknowledged, “This is not science – this is a committee”. American Psychiatric Association ) consisted of researchers who conducted analyses and whose decisions received reviews from academic scholars, the process was still a political one, subject to efforts to influence the outcome. While the Neurodevelopmental Disorders Workgroup charged with revising the autism diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5 We sought to do this with a variety of goals in mind: to address existing diagnostic disparities, improve access to service provision where diagnostic distinctions interfered, and to prevent a loss in access to legal protections, social legitimacy, and service provision by the narrowing of the diagnosis. Because autistic people are shaped by the diagnostic process, one of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s priorities-as the leading organization run by and for autistic people-was to shape that process in return. ![]()
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