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by h0l0cube 883 days ago
> Commonly, there is lots of funding and resources available for the ASD label, little or none for any others. If the parents aren't open about what is really going on, few professionals want to go digging. So they'll diagnose the child with ASD.

I agree that there's probably a lot of mis-diagnosis, but that's hard to quantify as an outsider to the profession of psychology. I think this is separate to autism being a nurture over nature thing.

> Added to this, it isn't like "autistic traits due to bad parenting" and "autistic traits due to biological factors" are mutually exclusive categories. It is entirely possible the child already has a baseline genetic disposition to autistic traits, which are then being amplified by the poor family environment.

I agree that genetic, pre-natal, and very early childhood environments have a huge impact on behaviour. My opinion relies heavily on an assumption that there's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for autistic people, and that is probably the source of our disagreement (i.e., nurture vs nature).

1 comments

> I agree that genetic, pre-natal, and very early childhood environments have a huge impact on behaviour.

I agree, but I don't know why we should have "very early" there. Late childhood and adolescent environments can also have an enormous impact on behaviour.

> My opinion relies heavily on an assumption that there's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for autistic people, and that is probably the source of our disagreement (i.e., nurture vs nature).

There's genetic and pre-natal neurological/gene expression differences for lots of people–yes, including "autistic" people, but also including people with "non-autistic" disorders (such as ADHD, OCD, personality disorders, schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar). I'm unconvinced there is any fundamental difference between "autism" and "non-autistic neurodiversity"–"autism" is a heterogenous collection of many distinct differences, and some individuals with "autism" likely have more in common with certain cases of "non-autistic neurodiversity" than they do with most other cases of "autism". The same difference in gene expression or neuroanatomy can produce radically different behavioural results in different social environments