There has been parallel creep on the psych side, as well. Over a decade ago, I remember a HS teacher in an affluent suburb saying that she had kids with IEPs for various “stress” labels, relating to quitting smoking, breaking up with a boy/girlfriend etc. They were very quick to tell teacher that they “couldn’t help doing (whatever) because of their diagnosis, too.

I remember how ridiculous it was to hear from a Boston autism ‘expert’ that everyone at MIT is ‘on the spectrum’ and has a ‘bit of the ’tism.’ Give us a break!

Alas, when a diagnosis is so over-extended, it ceases to have meaning and seems to serve the servers more than the served.

So, what’s new here? The same thing has been happening with the diagnosis of LD for 30 years. LD never developed a valid definition or valid diagnostic criteria. Thus, “everybody” became LD and the number of diagnoses exploded. Now, no one agrees on what LD is and how it is diagnosed. For a good review at the postsecondary level, see the two recent papers (2009) published by Sparks and Lovett in the Journal of Learning Disabilities.

A good basic axiom is this: The more you expand the parameters of a concept, the more you undermine the concept. That’s what happened with LD. Now, the same thing is happening with autism. As a result, we see and hear nonsense about autism, e.g., 1 in every 130 children is born with autism. The increase in autism diagnoses is a social phenomenon, not a genetic one. For reference, see Gernsbacher, M. et al. (2005). Three reasons not to believe in an autism epidemic. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 (2), 55-58.

For more information:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/119299.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/health/01autism.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism

In the case of the Somali children, parental education is not the determinative factor.

BTW, how do you embed a live link on this blog? Since there is no “preview” feature for comments I don’t want to fill the box with HTML that may not work.

So it’s not a toxin unless it’s uniformly distributed across Denmark. If it is, it’s only a toxin by definition, i.e. it can do bad stuff in sufficient dosage. Like water, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

The only “toxin” that has a distribution controlled by education is ignorance.

Better educated parents here in the U.S. have heard of autism. Better educated parents here in the U.S. are less likely to be buffaloed by a district “specialist” who’s more interested in not spending that precious Title I money on yet another kid with problems.