First of two posts from Seth Mnookin of Huffington Post.
It’s been almost four years since I began work researching and
reporting on autism. The bulk of that work was focused on my book The Panic Virus,
which examines the spurious fears over a connection between vaccines
and autism. (There’s more information about the book, including a summary and links to reviews, on my website.) The Panic Virus
was released in hardcover last January, and over the past twelve
months, I’ve learned enough — about human nature, about fears and
prejudices, about rationality and superstition and medical ethics and
public health — to write several more books. (I’ve also learned
first-hand about the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with being a
parent: In December, my wife gave birth to our second child.) I
incorporated a very small amount of this new information into an
afterword that is included in the paperback edition, which was released a few weeks ago.
One thing I did not get to address is how dramatically my own
conception of autism has evolved. Human beings have a fundamental need to classify and label; it’s one of the most basic ways we make sense of
the world around us. Because “autism” is a medical diagnosis, it might
seem, at first blush, to be an immutable definition — but as anyone who
has looked at the issue knows, this is most definitely not the case. Just last week, The New York Times made a huge splash with a front-page story detailing how changes in the “official” definition of autism
in an upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM) could dramatically reduce the number of people
being diagnosed with autism or “autism spectrum disorders” like
Aspergers syndrome.
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