posthumous diagnosis.....

[Heddi]

So earlier today (actually 6am, but who's keeping track) I was watching educational TV and one of the series of shows I watched was on psychology....one of those video series they show in college classes. I'm a nerd...I like this stuff.

Anyhoo..

The videos were on different psychological diagnoses, their history, their signs/symptoms, and treatments.

One of the videos was about mental disorders, and how our definition and treatment of them have changed throughout the ages. These videos are from the early 90's, so there was brief talk about autism, mental retardation, schizophrenia, etc.

The point was made that for the majority of human history, people who were "different" were locked away in asylums or prisons early in life and it wasn't until relatively recently in our history that we began to study these folks and understand their wiring, how to treat them (hint: not asylums!), etc.

And that got me thinking.....which is always a dangerous thing....about autism rates, and how reliable our "rates have increased since X years" train of thought is, and how quick we (as people) can be to posthumously diagnose people with certain medical diagnoses that they may or may not have had.

How accurate are the rates of percentage of a given population having X disorder if that disorder wasn't even a medical term until, say, 1950 (just pulling a year out of thin air). For viral and disease issues, I can see where this may be somewhat valid, but still not definitively valid since we didn't have the diagnostic tests to differentiate, say, AIDS, from other cancers.

But with mental illness, how can we say that X illness started increasing in rates when we don't even have a way to know how many people suffered from X illness prior to it being a true medical diagnosis?

If you look back in history, there are millions of people who were locked away for being "different". Different could mean bipolar, or schizophrenic, or mentally retarded, or austistic, or whatever. But unless we have complete records....back to the 1200's or 1500's...of all of those that were locked away, exiled, or killed for being "different", we have no way of knowing how prevalent these illnesses were in those times.

Could it be that throughout human history, the prevalence of autism, or schizophrenia, or mental retardation HAVE been static, we just didn't know how to recognize these issues as true medical diagnoses until relatively recently?


Am I making sense?

Kind of like cancer---throughout literature there are accounts of people who were taken by these terrible illnesses that were never called "cancer", but looking back through our more advanced method of diagnosis, we can conjure with relative certainty that some people DID die from breast cancer, or uterine cancer, or lung cancer. We can make that diagnosis now when we weren't able to make it then (thank you scientific method!!)

I guess what I'm saying is that it's hard for me to take at face value the idea that X medical diagnosis has just EXPLODED in the last 30 years when prior to 30 years, it wasn't a diagnosable disorder, or it was thought as of something else....

----
Oh, and another thing that really annoys me (hence the subject title) is the posthumous diagnosis of everyone who ever did anything moderately great. "OH, Einstein was DEFINITELY Aspergers! Totally!" and "Thomas Jefferson is a CLASSIC case of Indigo. TOTALLY!!"

I understand the need to validate our own...struggles? I don't know if that's the right word...I'm not trying to demoralize or downplay any kind of mental health issue that someone is struggling with. I know it makes me feel....more connected...when I find out that someone famous, or popular, or intelligent went through a thing that is similar to something I went through.

But I don't like the idea of cherry picking people who very little may have been written about to begin with, being labeled with all of these terms and diagnoses that they may or may not have had. Just because someone was smart doesn't mean they fit somewhere on the ASD. IT doesn't mean that they didn't, either.

In any event, I have seen lists where very non-medical minded individuals list all of the "dead" people in our history, that happened to be very intelligent, as having fitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. I mean EVERY SINGLE HUMAN that contributed something worthwhile to societal or scientific advance, everyone who was ever mentioned in our history books, has autism.

Homer
Michaellangelo
Raphael
Jesus
Sir Isaac Newton
Einstein
Cleopatra
Shakespeare
Ramses III
George Washington
Abraham Lincoln
Thomas Jefferson
Teddy Roosevelt
The Other Roosevelt (:D)
Aesop

I think you get my drift. Only these lists are pages and pages long.

And it makes me think, linking to my point above, that doesn't THIS prove that Autism rates probably haven't skyrocketed like we've been told they have? That the numbers are pretty static, especially if EVERY SINGLE PERSON that is in our history books is given a Dx of Autism?

and why only the "famous" people we know? Why not "Jimmy the water fetching boy" or "Mathildae, the bar wench"?

[trotsky]

1. You're making perfect sense.

I've wondered about that too. Bottom line is, we don't have the data, and we can't go back and interview these people to properly diagnose them. (My TARDIS has been in the shop for some time, unfortunately.) But you gotta figure from a societal evolutionary standpoint, the people who get highly focused and obsessed with a particular subject (classic symptom of Asperger's) would be a helpful member to have in a group. The guy who sits and experiments with banging different rocks to make fire. The woman who plays with her voice to develop vocalization sounds for a language foundation. Fascinating stuff, too bad we'll never know for sure.

[onager]

2. Ramses III had bigger problems than autism...

Like a collapsing economy and social upheaval (sound familiar?). His reign may have seen the first labor strike in world history. Workers were so pissed off at being overworked and underpaid/fed, they just put down their tools and walked off their jobs.

And he may have had the most humiliating death in Egyptian history. He was poisoned by two of his concubines, in the "Harem Conspiracy."

You can still read the ancient Egyptian court records of their trial here:

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/judicial_turin_papyrus.htm

So why am I thread-hijacking and posting tedious crap like this AGAIN?

Because in R&T, I have seen (more than once) the argument that the Biblical Exodus yarn is probably true. But there is no mention of it in Egyptian history because the Egyptians were "too embarassed" to mention the incident.

Just wanted to note that the Egyptians kept careful records of even more embarassing stuff.

I learned this from my usual arcane academic sources--by watching the damn Discovery Channel.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. Have you seen the autism personality test?

Why see a doctor, when you can diagnose yourself from a personality test in a magazine?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

[moggie]

5. Hmm, I score 40

"In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4". WTF? Those people must be weird.

[Heddi]

8. Woohoo I won

I got 17! Ha! AND I GOT ALL MY VACCINATIONS PLUS A COUPLE OF EXTRA!!! whee

[semillama]

15. I also scored 17!

And I've even had the dreaded Lymerix Vaccine!!! I must be unstoppable.

[enki23]

4. That's pretty much the standard interpretation, so far as I'm aware

I think that all goes more or less without saying among the great majority of people who actually study such things. Or rather, they say it so often they get sick of hearing it, and so end up failing to say it out loud every few minutes to remind the all-too-often-piss-poor science journalist they're trying to talk to of where they're actually coming from. Sorta like going to a tox conference and failing to hear "but it's the dose that makes the poison!" every five minutes or so. (Though, it has to be said, sometimes that actually *does* happen).

Anyway, that's pretty much the consensus. It's just that most people don't have enough experience with actual critical thinking (or familiarity with the subject matter) to get it. And the frauds, huxters, and true believers don't listen/care anyway.

[Orrex]

6. God damn it I hate that even more than I hate the Thimerosal/Autism madness

I find nothing more intellectually offensive than post mortem retro-diagnosis. It's purely speculative, and it seeks at once to trivialize and aggrandize people in the modern world who live with these conditions.

I've posted on this right here in the Skeptics' Group in the past, and I pounce on threads in GD or Health whenever I see them.


Aaaarrggghh! This infuriates me! :grr::grr::grr::grr::grr:

[Warpy]

7. It's like all those fabulous remembered past lives

Nobody was ever a goatherd or laundress.

[Heddi]

9. Exactly

Cleopatra has been reincarnated to 10,000,000 different people all born between 1943 and 1982, but Jugdish the dude that was helping with the Taj Mahal building but got brained by a falling brick...where are his reincarnations?

[onager]

10. Well, I found one right here on DU...

Over in those groups with all the "A's," "S's," "H's" and "L's" in them. Which I usefully suggested once, for efficiency, could be combined into one big group with an 8-letter (plural) acronym. Talk about ingratitude! My post got deleted!

Anyway, I was reading some entertaining past-life fooferaw over there once, in a whole thread about it. IIRC, somebody posted that she remembered being a maid in "18th-century England." But even she worked for royalty. First Maid of the O'erflowing Chamberpot or somesuch.

The post got boring fast, since it quickly degenerated into standard romance-novel crap. Like many similar posts.

"18th-century England" reminds me that those posts always share something else: a complete lack of chronological detail. The 18th century covers, obviously, a hundred years. If you had really lived in it, couldn't you nail down the timeline a little closer?

And never anything from the news! e.g., historians rank 1759 as one of the pivotal years in English history, right up there with 1066 and 1588. It was the year England conquered both Canada and India. And a few years after that, some grouchy colonists defeated the British army and set up their own country. Etc.

But nobody ever mentions that stuff. No, it's always "my lover the Duke Of Humpingbottoms couldn't marry me because I was a mere milkmaid..."

The Cleopatra angle always tickles me, since I've been living in her hometown for several years. Cleopatra was supposedly the only member of the Ptolemaic dynasty (Greeks) to bother learning the Egyptian language. She also spoke several other languages. But all her reincarnations can only communicate in modern English. Usually misspelled and unpunctuated.

[mr blur]

12. I think I'm related to the Duke Of Humpingbottoms,

my aunty remembers being cruely used by him in a past life.

Of course, she's totally bonkers.

[LeftishBrit]

11. All very good points

Lots of people go in for this 'posthumous diagnosis' thing, but there is one particular Irish psychiatrist, Michael Fitzgerald, who has made a big career of diagnosing practically EVERYONE famous from the past as having some form of autism. Including Hitler - I don't think so! his terrifying manipulativeness was at the opposite extreme of psychological disorder.

I do definitely agree that psychological disorders are better *diagnosed* now, and that there is no sense in talking about an 'explosion in autism', for example, when autism was not even diagnosed as a separate condition until the 1940s.

At the risk of doing a 'Michael Fitzgerald' myself, it's pretty clear that many characters in Victorian literature had psychiatric disorders of various sorts - Dickens' books are full of such people, for example. They just didn't have clear diagnoses. People were seen as either 'mad' if severely mentally ill, or as just eccentric.

[onager]

13. "Terrifying manipulativeness" exactly. Thanks.

I always hate it when people describe Hitler as insane. Many eyewitnesses describe him flying into crazy tantrums during negotiations, then acting very calmly and rationally minutes later--usually once he had gotten his way.

One of the most famous of these fugues took place during the sell-out of Czechoslovakia in 1938. IIRC, Hitler's ranting gave the elderly Czech prime minister a heart attack, or nearly did so.

By April 1945 Hitler was clearly near (or past) some sort of breakdown. But much of that can be attributed to his heavy use of quack...excuse me, Alternative medical treatments. :-) Even then he wasn't bonkers. His last-will-and-testament was perfectly consistent with his belief system for the previous 25 years--he blamed everything on the Jews.

The Allies did second-hand psychiatric analysis of Hitler throughout WWII. The result was published as a book after the war and still makes fascinating reading: The Psychopathic God by R.G.L. Waite.

[mr blur]

14. One of our sons is diagnosed with Aspergers -

the diagnosis took seven years, all in all. And he was here.

Good luck with diagnosing someone who's been dead for centuries.

(of course Joe loves the idea that all these great people "suffered" from the same thing that he does, although he doesn't see it as sufferng at all)