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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

As with every comment I write on this topic, there are surely different disorders called "autism" that are being lumped together. So their causes may actually be different.

If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly. So there's definitely types of autism that come from parenting.

But I would be shocked if autism at birth it is not being caused by environmental pollution and low nutrition diets. Which adds a tremendous body count on top of the already monumental body count directly attributed to the FDA and EPA, and the many political bodies that govern them.

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> If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly.

Citation needed. This is not accurate without some aggressive hedging on what we're calling autistic. Lack of socialization does tend to manifest in less social behaviors later on. And less social behaviors are common among autistic people. But that's not the same as saying lack of socialization causes autism.

I think this poster has an axe to grind, but there is definitely significant overlap between symptoms of child abuse/neglect and early signs of ASD and other mental disabilities. I am on mobile, and cannot right now give a compact source, but the lists on Mayo etc. have a lot of overlap.

There's also overlap between a stab wound and a heart attack. You may say there's a cardiac related problem, but you don't have a stab wound just because you have some of the overlapping symptoms.

Neglect can cause a host of behavioral and neurological issues but they're not autism. Medical literature consensus is pretty clear on this. It was a popular theory many decades ago. It's not held up to scrutiny.

Medical literature and consensus says autism is one disorder with a spectrum of symptoms and that Aspbergers is not a unique disorder and that is currently wrong. So citing some other very similar research isn't going to do anything for me.

Autistic children are born not caring for faces, or eyes, and social interaction. Feral children do not have eyes or faces or social interaction to look at. So if it's not technically autism, it's not any different than the myriad of disorders currently lumped together as autism.

Perhaps you should be more upfront when using a personal, not medically accepted definition of a condition when discussing its root causes

What's the point of using the medically accepted definition of a condition when it is wrong?

> What's the point of using the medically accepted definition of a condition when it is wrong?

Since you seem to have no opposition to using personal definitions of things based on personal opinions without feeling the need to clarify, I'm glad you agree with me 100%

If you want to actually engage with the topic instead of trying to start shit with me, that would be a lot more productive.

If you want to communicate, don't assert facts about things while secretly using your own definitions. That would be a lot more pudding.

In this case, to be clear, pudding means productive.

> but you don't have a stab wound just because you have some of the overlapping symptoms

Nobody said this was true for autism. Only that resulting misdiagnoses may be contributing to the uptick.

Nobody qualified did. But the parent that started this thread did.

> If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly. So there's definitely types of autism that come from parenting.

Aren’t wealthier families more likely to have autistic kids? Wouldn’t this contradict your statement of environmental pollution and low nutrition diets?

It would at least appear that children from wealthier families are being diagnosed with autism at a higher rate. Perhaps pollution/nutrition is actually a dead end, or maybe autism is less likely to be missed in the children of wealthy parents, or perhaps diagnosis is more subjective, enabling doctor-shopping, and there are perceived benefits associated with a diagnosis. It would be interesting to compare the rates of autism diagnosis amongst the children of teachers and psychologists compared to lower/middle/upper classes at large.

It could also be that milder forms are an asset in an information based economy

I haven't seen the data around wealthier families. But wealthier families have more access to healthcare and can get earlier (and more thorough) diagnosis than poor ones. So unless there was some kind of control for access to healthcare, I would question that correlation.

This. We're relatively wealthy (typical middle management salaries) and it took a string of doctor appointments over many months to get a diagnosis for our son. Several of these were multi-hour sessions. In addition to the time off work to attend appointments, there was time on the phone, time on the internet, time talking to school counselors/teachers, scheduling IEP meetings at school, and probably other stuff I've long since forgotten. There wasn't a lot of out-of-pocket cash cost (because decent insurance, not guaranteed in the US), but the time and mental energy expended was significant on its own.

And, 100% anecdotal, but my wife's brothers both have similar personality traits as our son. Neither was diagnosed (and as far as I know, neither tested - this would have been in the 70s and 80s). Both ended up as typical middle-class, working-class Americans (own modest homes, but no appreciable wealth beyond that).

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