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10:03pm January 15, 2012

Why is it…

allies-person:

that there is so much talk about the DSM V autism changes in terms of merging diagnostic labels, but very little discussion (that I’ve seen) about the actual criteria themselves?

I don’t know.

I hate the new criteria.

They will result in lots of autistic people getting completely removed – that is people who would now be diagnosed with autistic disorder, who have a lot of criteria in the communication area and not as many in social.

They focus on social impairment above all else, even though that’s perhaps the least central of the entire triad.

There’s going to be a new condition called something like Social Communication Disorder. Lots of people who are definitely autistic will be dumped there. Yes, regardless of the part that says you have to make sure they’re not autistic (under the new criteria of course) first.

The severity scales are insulting.

I can’t even figure out where a lot of people currently called PDDNOS will go.

And so many people seem to think this is all okay because at least Asperger’s will disappear, so everything must be okay, right?

The only thing good I can see in all of this is that more people will hopefully see how arbitrary and unscientific psychiatric classification is. But I can see a lot of bad things happening in the process.