Abnormal Psych class and Autism

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I am not sure it is CDD, as it tends to happen later than the regression.

I also know that some people experience "regression" (or "burnouts") as adolescents and even into adulthood, and lose skills. Jim Sinclair talked about having to relearn how to read three or four times due to losing that skill.

You can actually download e-lectures from most of the major universities offering psychology.

This was from one lecture given by a prominent Australian university (that shall remain unnamed).
"So... is there convincing evidence that autism involves some form of brain damage?
"Actually 75% of the individuals with autism have some level of mental retardation, around 20% of people on the spectrum have normal intelligence and only 5% have above average intelligence."

The use of the words "brain damaged" and "mental retardation" to characterize ASD should ensure that many hundreds of future Australian Psychologists will go into the workforce thinking most autistic people are brain damaged.

Yup. CDD is defined by regression. It's also known as Heller syndrome and is one of the most rare kinds of autism. The other kind of autism with prominent regression is Rett syndrome, which is also rare and associated with a certain mutation and more than just the autistic traits (there are other neurological features too).



I find it quite amusing that they say that "only 5% of autistics have above average intelligence", as though 5% is a small number! It's actually double the number of NTs who have above-average intelligence, because the average range is the part of the IQ score distribution within plus and minus two standard deviations of 100--so, 70 to 130. The scores above that range represent only 2.3% of the total, not 5%. And "above average" can't mean "over 100", because he's already quoting 20% for the average range.

Non-autistics' IQ scores go like this:
Mental retardation, <70, 2.3% of the total.
Average range, 70-130, 95% of the total.
Above average/gifted, 130+, 2.3% of the total.

You can see how it's symmetrical, right? That's the normal distribution. They divide IQ scores up into those three categories with a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15 and a mean of 100.

I quite doubt that 5% is the actual number of autistics in either the 130+ range or the 100+ range. It may be that back in 1980 when your prof took psychology, only 5% of the autistic people diagnosed had gotten IQ scores of 100 or more. Or, which I think is more likely, it's an entirely made-up statistic that's been bouncing around for so long that nobody actually knows its origin.

So yeah, not only does your prof not know anything about autism, he also can't do statistics worth crap. I say: Do your own research, do your own learning, and don't expect to learn much in this class unless you teach yourself.

I do like statistics, but however much you display pretty normal curves, that doesn't answer the question of whether the IQ score means much for autistics. I would say, no, it doesn't. If it predicts anything, it may predict academic performance, but you can't use it for much beyond that. It doesn't seem to predict how well you learn everyday skills or how your development is going to go. The overall score can't be used to figure out specific subscores because of all the scatter. And that's assuming you can even get a fair score for someone who is probably working against a communication barrier and executive-function and sensory issues that are unrelated to the task at hand.

Hmmm that's interesting, guessing the lecturer hasn't got a lot of personal experience dealing with autism. I've got a lecturer for psychological assessment who specializes in early intervention in autism, and listening to her autism stories are one of my favourite parts of study. I guess it's dangerous quoting statistics in something that is rather under-diagnosed.

Yes they are true. Some children develop normally and then suddenly show autistic behaviours. We don't know causes. So your professor is wrong. Many parents blame vaccinesas cause.
This is not my son's case, he's born autistic. What I learned from other parents is that regressive autism is often associated with physical illness as gut issues.

Very true.

I also disagree that Rainman was very high functioning.

Compared to today's spectrum, the depiction in Rainman--where even as an adult he is not yet independent--is probably in the lower percentiles of GAF. At his age, most autistics are independent or semi-independent.

Even if it is true or appears to be true (and I'm fairly certain that it isn't and doesn't) that 70% of diagnosed autistic people test at below 100 for an IQ test, is it not impossible that many people who are autistic and have average/above average intelligences simply hide their autism well enough that they are not "spotted" by these statistics? And in that case, even valid statistics with the given information are suspect and should not be taken seriously.

I posted the link as well as asking the question about regressing into autism on my class forum, and the teacher answered, but he just restated what he said in class - the the regressive cases were usually Childhood Disintegrative Disorder or Rett's Disorder.

Oh well. I have the second Autism lecture today, in a couple of hours. Maybe I'll have more to add after that.

MR isn't below 100; it's below 70. Below 100 is just "below average", and in the 90s, so slightly below average that you can't even tell. These people are B students who get college degrees. People with IQs in the 80s generally find schoolwork a little harder, but tend to graduate high school; they will more naturally gravitate toward practical jobs that use skills not measured on IQ tests (sales, mechanics, carpentry, factory work, transportation). In the 70s people start to talk about "borderline", and these kids will usually be given extra help in school. They might go for a vocational high school degree or a regular one, depending on how motivated they are. Once again, they tend to go for jobs that don't involve heavy academic-type skills, of the same sort that you'd expect from the 80s-range individuals.

IQ scores were designed originally to predict academic performance. They are somewhat valid for those in the NT bell-curve--that is, for those with typical development. But even then, with typical development, one cannot use an IQ score to make global predictions about the person--only about their possible range of academic aptitude. There's some correlation between academics and other skills, but I think it's too weak a correlation to really make meaningful predictions with.

You couldn't tell if someone had an IQ score in the 70s just by talking to them. It just wouldn't be obvious. Okay, they probably wouldn't follow you if you started talking quantum physics, but that's true of most people. For that matter, you probably couldn't tell if somebody had an IQ score in the 50s and 60s unless you got to know them and talked to them for a while, or if you went to school with them and watched their performance. Practically all the cases that come with obvious physical features are in the moderate-to-profound range. If you look at what an IQ test measures, you see a bunch of school-smarts-oriented stuff; so naturally people who are bad at academics will score low. They are often average in other skills, like socializing, physical coordination, etc.

Actually, until IQ tests were invented, nobody even thought of the milder cases of intellectual disability as anything special. They were just considered to be regular people. Then, as people started to attend school en masse and it was discovered some couldn't keep up, a new category of mildly delayed people was named "morons" (today this is an insult; then it was a medical term). This is the same category we now use to describe the mild-range intellectual disability that shows itself primarily as difficulty with schoolwork and somewhat delayed development and slower learning.

I went to college in the 80's so the study of autism was drastically different than it is today. In my Abnormal Psych class we had The Empty Fortress by Bruno Bettleheim as a reading assignment. I believed its' Refrigerator Mother hypothesis completely. I had no reason not to. I lugged that stupid book from one apartment to the next until I finally threw it away. But not in disgust, sorry to say. I just got tired of lugging all my college books around simply because I had paid for them.

Whatever wrong things your professor said, they probably aren't as drastically wrong as Bruno Bettleheim was.

Recent research suggests that most children who are described as showing autistic regression (that is, apparently normal development, then regression around 18-36 months old resulting in an autistic clinical picture) actually had subtle abnormalities before their regression. However, they were a lot more normal pre-regression than kids who had never regressed were at the same age. It may be more on the level of an aspie infant becoming an autistic infant, rather than an NT infant becoming autistic.



Sounds like he's stuck in the past. That was a big thing in the autism field around the 40s-60s, but with the broadening of autism criteria since then, that's become a fairly uncommon behavior in autistic kids. Most kids who don't conform to being held are classically autistic, and not in the DSM-IV 'autistic disorder' sense, but in the 1 out of 10,000 Kanner autism sense (autism used to be a very rare diagnosis and most kids now called autistic were instead labeled with childhood psychosis). It's rare to find a child with any diagnosis who didn't conform their bodies to being held as an infant.

I had slightly more trouble paying attention to the lecture today because there was some work or something going on outside the lecture hall that gave some distracting background noise, but we mostly talked about etiology. At one point someone asked what the difference between autism and mental retardation was and the professor said basically the social skills aspect is the only difference.

He also said that boys have autism much more often than girls, and that when girls have it they are usually much more profoundly affected, and are usually low functioning. He said that made Temple Grandin very rare.

I always thought that judging by the population here, the gender differences were because of the way it's diagnosed rather than who actually has it, though.

Maybe there will be a term paper assigned and you can write it on the most recent research in autism.

Nope, unfortunately no term paper. All of our marks come from three tests throughout the term.

In my opinion, the gender difference is real, but it's not as extreme as they say it is.

It's got to do with the genetics of guys and girls. Almost all of the time, a guy has XY chromosomes and a girl has XX chromosomes. The guy's Y chromosome is pretty small and doesn't really have all that much stuff on it; so, when a guy has some trait on his X chromosome, it automatically gets expressed, full-strength. With girls, it's different: A girl's got that trait on her one X chromosome, but she might have a different gene on the other X chromosome, so they either cancel out or one gene decreases the effect of the other one.

The end-result of that is that guys' traits tend to be more diverse than girls'. There are, for example, more guys who are gifted and more guys who are intellectually disabled, while girls cluster more at the average. Guys just tend to be more extreme in both directions--not by that much, not so much you could make predictions about the average guy or girl; but it's detectable at the extremes.

Autism is a spectrum that continues into the typical. There are NTs with autistic traits, and NTs who are very nearly autistic, and autistics who are just barely autistic. So when you're looking at the extreme of the spectrum to see the cases that are diagnosable--that 1% on the edge of the population--then like just about any genetically-related trait, you will find more boys on the extreme end, and thus more boys with autism than girls.

Girls are however under-diagnosed, and I think this probably accounts for some of the "females with autism have more severe autism" idea. Females with less-severe cases simply don't get diagnosed; or they are diagnosed with something else. The stereotype of autism is of a boy. A girl with autism has to be pretty obviously autistic before the average pediatrician will send her for an eval.

Even among NTs, girls are better at speaking, writing, and using words--not by that much, again, but enough so that it's detectable at the extremes. That tendency can be just enough to edge an autistic girl out of the "obvious" range, because not speaking is the most obvious autistic trait there is. An autistic girl is more likely to be able to learn to speak and evade diagnosis until she's a good deal older--or perhaps have the autism missed altogether. An autistic girl who's non-verbal probably has a bigger dose of autism than an autistic boy who's non-verbal, just because it takes more of an obstacle for her female brain not to catch on to speech.