Are ASD's overdiagnosed?

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My family went through hell because a genius overpaid state funded shrink diagnosed their kid on the spectrum. Their relationship with their own child was shattered because they thought he was just a late talker (he was). Granted he isn't the most talkative or social but NO ONE thinks there is anything wrong with him now at age seven. OOOH magic, state cured. All these people with HFA and Asperger's, maybe they're just too smart for their own good and don't fit the mold. Parents are jerks. They petition the state for more and more and more services when real and rare autistic, kids with real diseases could be getting even more help. Rich parents want free babysitting and to make their kids better faster, poor parents don't want to do jack s**t so all their kids are in special ed. Newsflash- YOU CANT CHANGE I.Q.! It is largely if not all genetic. You don't learn social skills from an overpaid teacher showing you how to pretend, pretending should be natural!! ! All these self proclaimed aspies are frauds, if you know you're an aspie, if you have that recognition, you're fine. you're allowed to have quirks, to not like people. stop the madness! I think kids turn out much smarter and more well adjusted when parents take more of an active role in their lives which doesn't mean teaching them everything second, it means living a NORMAL life. There are SO MANY actual genius kids pushed so hard they never amount to much of anything even having wowed others as kids. why? no normalcy. Love your kids and have some damn patience people!

P.S. most people here are talking nonsense. pretend you never had a label and live your life. you have alot of time to kill on messageboard interacting "socially"

I think in general everything like that is over-diagnosed. People want labels and the services/medication that comes with it. Like someone else said though, there isn't a blood test or anything that can tell these things. It's all about observation and the person's subjective view on subjective symptoms. Mistakes can and do be made, probably a lot. Other people can't possibly see what's really going in somebody else's head. I agree in general with what another person posted above about not living your life through a label(though probably not the rest of the post )

@Leelee22:
1. Some kids do get misdiagnosed with autism. These children may or may not have other disabilities. It is possible that some psychiatrists would overdiagnose a bullied, eccentric child as autistic, but it not widespread.
2. I am sure there are some adults who seek a diagnosis of AS mostly for affirmation, rather than having actually significant problems at work or in their social lives. Technically, these people don't meet criteria and should not be diagnosed, since the diagnosis requires that you have significant problems in social/occupational functioning. However, again, it is by far not like most Aspies are like that.
3. Society is a lot more complex than it was a generaiton ago. People are required to take in a lot more information and stimuli at a faster pace, and act on these stimuli. Social skills are also becoming more inportant relative to intellectual abilities. Autistics with milder difficulties might've slided along just fine in a society that didn't value this type of processing (which is after all damaged in autistics), but get stuck now.
4. Some people start to fall apart when they enter adulthood, when they don't have the security of the parental home anymore, or even when a spouse dies, who used to provide them with enough preidctability in their daily lives. These people usually had problems as children, too, but were able to just barely hang on by having enough support around them.
5. Prentending you never had a label, will not work for eveyrone, or even most Aspies. I for one am not using my AS as an excuse not to have to achieve, but if I were to pretend my diagnosis hadn't existed, I would fall flat on my face. In fact I fell flat on my face in independent living when I was only semi-diagnosed, and the psych hospital that I had to be admitted to, immediately threw out the diagnosis and would only consider it again until when a psychologist evaluated me and said so.

I think that lots of things like this are probably overdiagnosed with kids.. Well, some.. Especially when those kids have overly-concerned parents who go to the doctor about every little odd thing that their child does. They might notice a certain personality trait or childhood phase and a doc gives it a label.. It's pretty obvious that it's like that with ADHD, when a kid supposedly has it and then shows no symptoms of it at all into adulthood. They were probably just a particularly active kid being a kid, it's not always a disorder or different mental wiring that causes it. I think it might be the same with autism in some cases. A kid might have a perfectly fine set of natural social skills but prefer to so solitary activities most of the time.. This could get mistaken for autism, since our society seems to view anyone who is extremely introverted as if there must be something wrong with them. Or, maybe they have something else, like Social Phobia.. So they might have a perfectly good understanding of social situations but be too fearful to do anything. Then again, in low-income families who can't afford to go consult a doctor for everything that seems strange about their child, it may very well be underdiagnosed. So... yeah.. i guess it just depends on the situation. There are a lot of un-diagnosed people out there and i'm sure there's a lot of wrongly diagnosed aswell.
AS wasn't an official thing in the DSM until i was already 7 or 8, so i was always just called "shy," even though i didn't understand why i was "shy" because i talked whenever i wanted to say something, i just didn't always know when i was expected to say something. When i was a pre-teen it was suspected that i might have AS, but at the time i had very pronounced anxieties SO.. since i didn't have a rigid daily schedule and i said that i like to try new things on some of those questionairres, they stopped talking about the AS possibility and just treated me for Social Anxiety. But then, i gotten over the social anxiety to the point that i blurt things out in class all the time and will make random comments to people i don't know... Yet i still find myself clueless about what i'm "supposed to" do in different situations, don't know how to make friends, and all of that.. despite actually getting out and trying to. So it's obviously more than social anxiety that was holding me back socially. Not to mention obsessiveness, one-track thinking, sensory issues, and everything. So, a lot of kids probably just get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or something when they have AS, too.. Especially with females, since females are probably less likely to get bullied and stuff and it's not seen as as strange for a girl to be extremely "shy." A lot of my teachers thought that something was wrong with me, but i wasn't bullied or made fun of much(or, if i was i wasn't aware of it).. I just kept by myself to the side most of the time and people mostly left me alone.. Some other girls even tried to talk to me and help me make friends sometimes, even though it wasn't usually very successful.. So, since i didn't complain about bullying and stuff i guess it was just easy for people to qrite me odd as odd and quiet. I didn't start thinking about AS again until i started researching it and realized that it DOES match the problems i have had and continue to have. I'm sure that's the case with many people. Maybe it all balances out with the wrongly diagnosed and undiagnosed cases. Who knows.

I wish they would diagnose girls more efficiently/find a better test. I go to monthly "social meetings" for autistics and I'm the only girl in a sea of testosterone. Unless autism is in relation to testosterone itself, I don't see why I have to be the estrogenic minority at the sausage fest that is autism.

I think it is both over and underdiagnosed. I think that self diagnosis can be inaccurate. Not always, but it can be, especially if a person fails to look at origins of behavior, as in the why and when of certain traits. Professionals could miss that too.

i personally think that when looking at issues like over/underdiagnosis in ASDs, especially when considering the social defecits aspect of the criteria, the question we should be asking is not just whether a child or adult being considered for a diagnosis has significant social defecits, but rather why the social defecits (which i think are an integral part of ASDs) are occurring...

there are lots of people in the world that for any number of reasons have trouble in social situations. this could be caused by environment, personality, genetics, etc etc.... i think it is important to differentiate the reason for those social impairments when it comes to ASDs. A person with an ASD struggles with socialising for very specific reasons - those being sensory integration issues, language processing defecits, mind-blindness, etc. we have trouble socialising with other people because we have trouble in general processing the world around us, and as people are the most complex aspects of most of our environments, that is where most of us have most of our troubles. it's not because we weren't taught social skills as children, or were raised by abusive parents, or simply have personalities that are of the type that prefer to spend time alone. although we may share some of these traits/experiences with NTs, the reasons behind our troubles are different.

i think it is extremely important to emphasise the difference in wiring of those with ASDs. we act/react differently because we experience the world differently. our mental environments are different from the "norm" because the way our brains process information is different. i think this is what too often gets overlooked during consideration for diagnosis, and may be what's causing a lot of the confusion and possibly overdiagnosis of ASDs.

the difference in brain function, especially sensory processing and integration, is what is truly key to the diagnosis IMO, because it is what is behind the other difficulties such as socialisation.

With Asperger's we seem to put the emphasis on the social context of the disorder, which too frequently makes it a goto diagnosis for anti-social behaviors and oddities. What about the other side of the diagnosis? These seem to have a much more physical presentation, which could probably be easier to define from an outside perception. Obsessions, repetetive behaviors and mannerisms should have a cause/effect factor to them. Much of this can be stimuli based. Why is there no reference to reaction to stimuli in autism in the DSM IV when it is referenced in so many other disorders such as PTSD and Bipolar? With more people getting diagnosed with this disorder, one would think we would be gaining a more dynamic understanding of it. The opposite seems to be happening, an we seem to be generalizing the disorder more, and as such it encompasses more. This obscures the disorder to the extent that many I have encountered in the mental health profession don't even really want to discuss the disorder with me. How can we be comfortable with our own diagnosis if professionals are not even comfortable talking about it?

AS is more than just a social impairment. There are very real physical manifestations that should not be ignored. In fact I think we should be prioritizing these symptoms to better understand the syndrome. Does anyone know of a reliable site that details the current work being done on the autistic spectrum?

I'm set up to get alerts from PubMed. I don't know if you have access to that, but if you do, take advantage of it. Even if you don't, you should be able to get abstracts.