Do you have any basis for saying the autoimmune hypothesis is "advanced primarily by parents?"
I ask because I have a son with autism, and I have met leading immunologists in famous medical schools who subscribe to this hypothesis. That doesn't make the hypothesis right, but it is taken far more seriously than your comment would imply.
Second, "severe autism is really some amount of autism with very low IQ" part is also wrong in my opinion. Autism can be so severe that it makes IQ irrelevant (even in cases where it can be demonstrated to be high). The analogy here is with other mental illnesses like schizophrenia - when it is severe enough, it masks every other trait of that person, including IQ. That does not mean "severe schizophrenia is really some amount of schizophrenia combined with very low IQ". There are many severely autistic individuals who also demonstrate high IQ in specific areas (but still cannot lead anything close to a normal life), directly contradicting your statement.
I expect a little more thoughtfulness on a top comment in HN.
The basis for my comment on the autoimmune is relatively poorly documented, because by definition it happened outside of academic literature. A bit of intelligent Googling will turn up a great deal of lay discussion that substantially pre-dates the earliest peer-reviewed publications on the subject. It is clear from perusing the relevant discussion forums that there are a great many parents who are advocating the autoimmune hypothesis; While this of course has no bearing on the validity of the theory itself, it is highly pertinent when considering the theory's prominence in the mainstream media.
As regards autism and IQ, your analogy to schizophrenia is completely inaccurate. Someone with high IQ can develop strategies to ameliorate essentially every aspect of their autistic symptoms - learning social and communication skills, structuring their life to deal with overstimulation, participating in behavioural therapy to minimise repetitive and autostimulative behaviours etc. Schizophrenics are by definition unaware that their delusional beliefs are delusional, whereas any intelligent autistic can be made aware of their social deficits and behavioural quirks and can learn to adapt around them.
As you said, some autistic people have high IQ in some areas but are still unable to live a normal life, but this is because their cognitive problems render them unable to overcome their autism symptoms. A specific cognitive impairment is still a cognitive impairment - strong arms do not nullify paraplegia.
While it may be the case that there are some individuals that have high IQ but severe levels of impairment, they are very much outliers. There is no generally-accepted classification for the severity of autism symptoms, but it is worth noting that those systems which simply use IQ are not obviously less useful than more complex schemes; IQ correlates as strongly with functional impairment as any other factor.
> Schizophrenics are by definition unaware that their delusional beliefs are delusional
delusions are not necessary for a schizophrenia diagnosis
also, during periods of convalescence, on hallucinations: "they may learn to ignore them, or treat them as benign accompaniments of everyday living" --http://www.schizophrenia.com/family/delusions.html
I don't think it's an entailment of schizophrenia that the sufferer is unaware that their beliefs are delusional. Even with that awareness, a schizophrenic idea can be very compelling. Even people who don't suffer from schizophrenia can get irrational ideas that interfere with their life despite decent self-awareness about these ideas.
While schizophrenia can have many very strong symptoms and is obviously not 'psychogenic' (e.g. in a Freudian sense), schizophrenics can and do learn skills to help them feel better and pass better and intelligence is an asset there.
I will agree that autism seems MUCH vaguer than schizophrenia as a diagnostic category, but that is also true of most other psychological disorders...
You said: Someone with high IQ can develop strategies to ameliorate essentially every aspect of their autistic symptoms - learning social and communication skills, structuring their life to deal with overstimulation, participating in behavioural therapy to minimise repetitive and autostimulative behaviours etc. <End quote>
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There are severely depressed people with very high IQ and they are fully intellectually aware of their depression, they try hard to compensate for it, doing all the types of things you mention in the context of autism. Tragically, for at least some of them, nothing seems to work.
My point is that it is more complicated than what you are asserting.
I have Aspergers, and I feel the same way that Autism might be incurable for those who already have it. This research may help future generations, but I'm not hopeful that it will help me.
I am probably going to get downvoted for being realistic about it, but if you don't have autism you really don't know what its like. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, and I would do anything for a possible cure, but I can't allow myself to be filled with a false hope that someday I can live a normal life.
Normal is after all a common average and in that is overated by the masses. Remember if 99% of the human population was a psycopath then what would normal be then.
If your saying normal people have a smoother life then I'll admit I'm starting to become jelous, but if i lived on a island alone with no communications then in that I guess everybody would have a smoother life alot of the time :).
I read jdietrich's comment about "severe autism is really...is really overdiagnosed..." not as "is always" (which you seem to have chosen to interpret it as) but "is more often", which doesn't contradict your "autism can be...that it makes" response: I seriously doubt that jdietrich is claiming that no such people exist, and thereby the fact that "there are many severely autistic individuals" doesn't show the statement to be false.
Of course, it may be false, but so could anything people say, even when backed up by "sources"; however, I really do feel the need to point out that it isn't false only because there are exceptions, as the word "overdiagnosed" only implies "more often than is warranted" and doesn't in any way leave out the possibility that it is sometimes correct, or even that there aren't "many" cases: just that the number of people who are diagnosed is larger, and possibly still much larger (even with "many" real cases), than the number of people who truly have the issue and should be diagnosed.
(To be very explicit: nothing I have said here relies on specific information about autism, nor can it, as I know absolutely nothing about that disorder.)
I ask because I have a son with autism, and I have met leading immunologists in famous medical schools who subscribe to this hypothesis. That doesn't make the hypothesis right, but it is taken far more seriously than your comment would imply.
Second, "severe autism is really some amount of autism with very low IQ" part is also wrong in my opinion. Autism can be so severe that it makes IQ irrelevant (even in cases where it can be demonstrated to be high). The analogy here is with other mental illnesses like schizophrenia - when it is severe enough, it masks every other trait of that person, including IQ. That does not mean "severe schizophrenia is really some amount of schizophrenia combined with very low IQ". There are many severely autistic individuals who also demonstrate high IQ in specific areas (but still cannot lead anything close to a normal life), directly contradicting your statement.
I expect a little more thoughtfulness on a top comment in HN.