[kough]

It's stories like this that make me wish as hard as I do for better pre-birth screening for mental disorders, including autism, and continued support of abortion. It's an unbearable burden - to the parents, society, but most of all to the children themselves, who are utterly blameless and must suffer the rest of their lives as a result. I try to debate rationally and understand that other people have their own opinions but I feel sick arguing with people about this. My family has had it easier than many, certainly nowhere as bad as the family in this story, and I love my brother, but if we could choose between him existing and him not existing the latter is clearly better for all involved, including him.

[abortoTheClown]

But if we aborted every deviation from the norm, we'd probably slip into monoculture as a species, and risk falling prey to a mass extinction event, beyond our understanding.

Somehow, the cold statistics of DNA mutation would leave us behind, and we'd become creatures with no means of adapting, until one vast catastrophe forces the issue.

What might feel practical in the moment, for one, might be terrible for the collective.

[gherkin0]

> But if we aborted every deviation from the norm, we'd probably slip into monoculture as a species, and risk falling prey to a mass extinction event, beyond our understanding.

But he wasn't talking about that. A lot (most?) people with serious disorders will not have children, and from an evolutionary perspective that's practically the same as if they died young. There's already selection against those traits.

[inopinatus]

Human evolution is more complex than the survival of an individual, since many of our adaptations are transmitted as ideas not genes.

Following that line of thinking leads to notions about the presence & importance of second-order interactions (especially the impact of ideas on the survivability of a group); these make it hard to reject the hypothesis: production of outlier individuals is essential to our species.

Sadly outliers occur on all sides of the distribution, including the unhappy ones.

[hugs]

One of my parents has a serious mental illness. It first manifested and became obvious (requiring multiple hospitalizations over the years) in their late 20's after I was born. I don't have the data in front of me, but I understand a mid-to-late 20's onset and diagnosis of mental illness is not rare -- plenty of time to have kids beforehand.

[beparanoid]

That's not how genetics works in a sexually reproducing species. Most selection is via modifying allele frequencies.

[guardTheGuards]

The underlying point being there might not be much to learn from, if every problematic situation is swept under the carpet, so we can pretend it's not there.

[user9982]

You can't pre birth screen for schizophrenia. Child onset schizophrenia is incredibly rare, normally manifesting between 16-25 in males and 25-30 in females and there is no consensus on the causes of schizophrenia.

[beparanoid]

Child onset is likely due to a variant of large effect. Adult is not. The glass is half empty, half full. Some schizophrenia is probably screenable most is not.

[jsprogrammer]

According to other sources, the parents of these children have shaken, beaten, and overdosed at least Jani. The father also apparently admitted to molesting Jani as a baby as well.

Things might have turned out much differently for these children had they been treated differently while growing up.