In this episode, Dr. Steven Gutstein explains co-occurring conditions in autism and how they differ from autism itself.
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Full Transcript
The interesting thing about co-occurring is there is two ways you have to think about it. One is that there are certain co-occurring disorders that really may be a consequence of living with ASD and it’s important the things that, the psychiatric disorders for instance. And there are others that may be really just co-occurring from birth.
In other words they may just be another vulnerability and some of those you can see from early ages and others may not even emerge like seizures with many people with ASD don’t even emerge until later on. So it is important I think to make that distinction when we talk about it because it has quite a different spin to it.
If you think about things like intellectual disability. That’s another thing that we used to believe was a synonym for autism for a while even though that’s not what Canter said that’s not what Hans Asperger said. They never thought that intellectual disability was part of autism. In fact that’s what intrigued them about autism. They saw this group of children that did not classically have an intellectual disability yet were still impaired. It was that discrepancy that was striking.
And then in the 60’s the 70’s by then it started to become, the IQ became the thing to the point where everyone thought that was major issue and the point like ABA or those treatments or the teach program or ABA program were designed basically to address intellectually disabled children who happened to have autism. And now if you look at the latest Center for Disease Control studies it’s finding that it’s not even a majority of those children that have intellectual disabilities, it’s a minority so that’s sort of a third group of things.
And then there is lot of myths about co-occurring, things like everybody with autism has sensory problems which is a complete myth. Its funny different issues, it’s very interesting, there is so many different issues that when talk about something that is co-occurring so maybe we can think about which ones we want to address first but they’re all equally interesting to me (woman speaking) Well you know I can remember and I still hear it today even friends of mine, parents say that “Well I’m told that autism is just a speech disorder” (end of woman talking)
Speech right, that’s another one , that’s like an intellectual disability where the idea was speech was the problem so you had treatments like verbal behaviour which is if you give them speech everything is going to be fine and we find out low and behold that its a rare, it does occur some people have severe, also severe intellectual abilities and it looks like they have severe forms of neurological impairment have difficulty developing speech and a few do but it’s a much more rare co-occurring disorder than we used to believe right?
But you look like a miracle worker if you give this therapy to people who aren’t yet speaking but will speak no matter what we do, they’re just late speakers then they start to speak and you say waalaa cause you treated this kid and it makes you look really smart. But right its another one so yeah you’re absolutely right that speech is even a rarer co-occurring disorder. It’s not rare in the sense of less than 1% but its less frequent than intellectual disability which is less frequent than we thought it was ya know.
None of those are completely attached to ASD as similarly sensory issues are not attached to everyone with ASD and if we can get past those myths somehow that those are parts of this disorder then I think that’s going to be great. And to understand that yeah there are people that may have those types of problems as well they’re certainly not, you should never make the assumption they are.
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