There are enough people taking advantage of autism.
First of all there is a definitional problem and the inclination that parents have to hope for autism as an alternative to the very negative diagnosis–mental retardation.
And it goes downhill from there. Hate to bust anybody’s balloon, but autism used to be called mental retardation and the number of MR diagnoses has declined with the increase in the number of autistic diagnoses.
Nothing that I can do to change the reality.
http://acsh.org/2014/04/lowest-low-quack-treatments-autism/
yes, the number of MR diagnoses has declined sharply, but the total number of diagnoses of autism and asperger’s is far higher than the number of MR ever was, even as part of the population.
50-75% at least of boys and young men will be so diagnosed at some point, and a goodly percentage of girls and young women.
Compare that to the 5% at most that ended up diagnosed as MR.
It’s a massive sham, perpetrated on a society that aims to see life itself as a mental illness and something that needs to be regulated and drugged into submission, with the government supplying the drugs of course.
And there’s a lot of money in it for interested parties, ranging from psychiatrists to pharmacists to drugs manufacturers to government agencies.
Of course it makes parenting so much easier too if your children are drugged into a stupor rather than getting themselves dirty and the occasional scrape or bruise playing.
And teaching, no more having to keep order if you can just order any pupil who’s in the least active drugged.
As a child, I was diagnosed as MR and now, 4 college degrees later, turns out I have Asperger’s. Back when I was young, that diagnosis was not available.
Considering that with the redefinition of Asperger’s, a good fraction if not the majority of engineers are technically autistic, I think that we have clearly reached the point where the phrase “autistic” is as meaningless as “mad” used to be.