History of Autism Identification

History of Autism IdentificationNatures Smudged LinesWhen Kanner published his autism paper in 1943, he felt it was premature at that position to propose a driven of criteria for diagnosing the condition he described. To dissemble the pattern visible to his peers, he proposed two essential common characteristics shared by all electric shaverren with this syndrome. The early was a will to self-isolation, present from birth. The second was a fear of diverge and surprise. These two characteristics became the diagnostic basis known as classic autism, or Kanners syndrome.In 1961, a British psychiatrist named Mildred Creak led a working party that established a nine-point criteria for the diagnosis of autism, based in part on studies of 100 children she herself had collected. The nine points wereSustained impairment of social relationshipsUnawareness of personal identityPreoccupation with particular objectsStriving to take hold samenessAcute anxiety produced by changeAbnormal perce ptual experience (hearing and vision)Failure to develop speech beyond a extra levelDistortion of movementSome learning trickyy, but around islets of particular skills or abilities or knowledgeThese criteria represented the first organize of standardized criteria for the diagnosis of autism, which she called schizophrenic syndrome in childhood. They differed significantly from Kanners two-point criteria and were more difficult to apply in practice.***In the late 1960s, a young British psychiatrist name Lorna Wing set unwrap to help her husband, John, a schizophrenia researcher at the University of London, compile a database of case records in Camberwell to determine if the home(a) Health Service was providing the families of cognitively disabled children with fitting resources.John and Lorna had a daughter Susie, who was diagnosed with autism when she was three years old in 1959. It didnt take long for John and Lorna to figure come out of the closet that on that point were close to no resources in place to support the families of children like their daughter. But luckily they could send Susie to Sybil Elgars school.Sybil Elgar was a school secretary who was taking a rest course to become a Montessori teacher. After visiting an institution for bad and emotionally disturbed children in London in 1958, she started teaching classes for a small group of autistic children in the basement of her house in London. Susie Wing became unrivalled of her early students. In 1962, a group of parents from the National Autistic Society converted an old railway hostel in Ealing into the Sybil Elgar School using the money they raised. The Beatles visited the school one afternoon, and John Lennon became one of the schools first major donors and attracted other celebrities to the cause.In the late 1960s, when the Medical look for Council (MRC) asked John Wing to examine the prevalence of autism, he put a graduate student named Victor Lotter on the case. They sent out t housands of questionnaires to schoolteachers, learning center supervisors, nurses, and parents in Middlesex and screened the entire population of eight- to ten-year-olds. Basing his selection criteria for autism on Creaks society Points, Lotter calculated a prevalence estimate of 4.5 cases of autism in 10,000.A nigher look at the numbers reveals several problems. They found that several children had been screened out because they didnt fit Kanners criteria. Suspicious of the validity of Kanners criteria, Lorna Wing took a different undertake in analyzing the data. Rather than using a top-down method as Lotter had done, she employed a bottom-up approach, searching for aspects of autistic behavior among children in Camberwell who were already identified as cognitively disabled. She and a nonher MRC researcher named Judith Gould reached out to everyone whose job might bring them in contact with a child with special needs. Just as the Middlesex study predicted, they found only a han dful of children in Camberwell 4.9 in 10,000 who met Kanners criteria. But Lorna and Judith didnt stop there. As they do their rounds of the neighborhood, they noticed a much larger group of children who had signs of his syndrome, but were not eligible for a diagnosis under his guidelines.While Lorna was trying to make sense of what she was seeing, she came across a paper by Dirk Arn Can Krevelen inclination that Kanners autism and Asperger syndrome were distinct conditions. After John (who can speak German) translated Aspergers paper for her, she realize that Asperger had seen the same thing in Vienna that she was seeing in Camberwell.Lorne began a quiet but determined campaign to expand the concept of autism to take commonwealth who had been excluded from Kanners. To replace Kanners unified syndrome, she proposed the term the autistic continuum. While there were clearly many shades and hues along this continuum, all autistic people seemed to benefit from the same highly str uctured and supportive educational approaches, tho as Asperger predicted.It was apparent that a person could occupy one point on the continuum at a given point in their lives and another(prenominal) point later. Some children, like Susie, would remain disabled into middle epoch and beyond. But others blossomed in unexpected ways when given an accommodating purlieu and special consideration by their teachers. In 1981, Lorna codified the condition for Asperger syndrome by writing a case series of her own called Aspergers Syndrome A clinical Account.Over time, Lorna would lose her taste for the word continuum and adopted the term autism spectrum.