What bothers me the most about modern mental 'disorders' is that they seem to have come about as a result of a 'popular' rejection of Freudian psychology -- in particular, relating to the role of nurture on the psyche.
The sad truth is, people who are afraid of social rejection probably learned that fear from the actions of their parents. Period. Now, I'm sure all of you self-protective parents are going to shortly mod this post into oblivion, but as someone who fell under the wheels of the 'autistic' bus, only to emerge and prove that diagnosis to be largely unfounded, I am quite adamant about my position.
If you parent improperly -- if you teach your child that people cannot be trusted -- you will have socially maladjusted children. It's just how it is. Simple cause and effect. Nurture, not nature.
However, much to my great personal suffering and on-going chagrin, we now live in a society that has decided, at some point along the modern road of ever-sharpening curves, that it's 'unproductive' to criticise parents about their parenting, but impractical to educate them properly, and politically difficult to take their children away from them when they're obviously doing them mental damage.
This has in turn led to a disastrous multi-generational scenario where children who had bad parents grew up to -- guess what -- be bad parents.
And now, to make that problem even worse than it already was, the 'powers that be' have decided 'in their infinite wisdom' that the nebulous definition of 'Asperger's Syndrome' could have been leading to 'unproductive' guilt in the minds of the parents of so-'afflicted' children, and that to solve this 'problem', we've opted to move this collection of symptoms over to the autism spectrum in an effort to re-assure these disconcerted parents that it's really a physical problem -- a congenital birth-defect -- and not anything they've personally done to their child.
To be quite frank, this is bullshit. Parenting is hard -- I understand that, and nobody is questioning that. But no parent should ever be given a 'free pass' to disassociate themselves from their child's social difficulties by being absolved of blame at every turn through bullshit 'diagnosis' that attempt to make everything a 'developmental' problem.
This does not encourage behaviour change on the part of parents, and only serves to only allow the damage to continue unabated, further aggravated by the ultimate stigmatisation of a child who is ultimately told that they were 'born defective', and that normality will be a hard road, if one even traversable at all.
The reality is, bad parenting breeds anxious, depressed, socially awkward children. This is obvious to anyone who contemplates it for even but a moment. This is the 'elephant in the room' -- children do not want to blame their parents. Parents do not wish to feel guilt about the lives of their children. So, we all dance around, blaming it on in-vitro 'accidents', or poor genetics -- anything but to face the truth, that socialisation is the ultimate responsibility of parents, and the failure of socialisation lies chiefly at their feet.
Well, I am here to lay that blame. It will not make me popular. But parents need to know that it may not be a congenital defect, but instead that at a crucial moment, you laid little Nancy down when she needed you most. Nobody wants to deal with that, but for the sake of the child, they should.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/b-OSYG3TW-U/story01.htm
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