DR MAX PEMBERTON: Why we must stop diagnosing those who say they feel awkward as autistic By Dr Max Pemberton For The Daily Mail Published: 21:01 EST, 3 November 2024 | Updated: 21:01 EST, 3 November 2024 e-mail View comments Something strange is happening. Autism, a serious, neurodevelopmental condition, has gone from being relatively rare to being everywhere. Turn on the TV, open a newspaper or scroll social media and you'll encounter more and more people talking about being diagnosed.
What is behind this apparent epidemic? It's baffling, because until a few years ago, I could count on one hand the number of patients I had seen in general mental health outpatient clinics with autism. Now, I see at least one a week. Many of these new patients come complaining of social awkwardness, perfectionism, obsessive traits and so on.
However, having worked in learning disability services with people with profound autism, their complaints are nothing near what true autism, at least how it used to be termed, is like. Partly fuelling this epidemic is that in recent years autism was reclassified as 'autistic spectrum disorder' (ASD). Autism is a complex condition, and it was believed the idea of a 'spectrum' better captured the variation in how it can manifest.
Autism is a complex condition, and it was believed the idea of a 'spectrum' better captured the variation in how it can manifest But the problem is that in medicine, when anything is on a spectrum, there is inevitably a 'diagnosis .
