Autism when was it discovered

Before his diagnosis of autism, Donald had been placed in an institution. This was typical for children diagnosed with a mental disorder at that time. Parents of children who were diagnosed with a behavioral disorder were encouraged to place their children in a facility separate from their families. His parents were allowed to visit him monthly. Donald was taken to the institution at age three and remained there a year.

He became more isolated during his time there, and this concerned his family. After a year in the institution, his parents brought him home, against the suggestion of the doctors. His parents were determined to find answers for themselves and for Donald. But it may also be that we are getting better at finding those people who merit the diagnosis and were once overlooked.

Most famously, some activists blamed modern vaccines—a now discredited theory. Air and water pollution have also been posited. Such 20th-century factors accord with the history of autism as a diagnosis: The condition was not even named in the medical literature until the late s. Yet even the man usually credited with first recognizing autism, a Baltimore-based child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner, doubted that the profound impairment in social relatedness he first reported seeing in 11 children in was, in fact, something new in human history.

His contribution, he said, was not in spotting the disparate behavioral traits that constitute autism—strange use of language, a disconnectedness from human interaction and a rigid affinity for sameness, among others—but in seeing that the conventional diagnoses used to explain those behaviors insanity, feeblemindedness, even deafness were often mistaken, and in recognizing that the traits formed a distinctive pattern of their own.

Looking back, scholars have found a small number of cases suggestive of autism. The best known is the Wild Boy of Aveyron, later given the name Victor, who walked naked out of a French forest in , unspeaking and uncivilized, giving birth to fantastic tales of a child raised by wolves; in recent decades experts have tended to believe that Victor was born autistic and abandoned by his parents. The behavior of the so-called Holy Fools of Russia, who went about nearly naked in winter, seemingly oblivious to the cold, speaking strangely and appearing uninterested in normal human interaction, has also been reinterpreted as autistic.

Granted, retrospective diagnosis of any sort of psychological state or developmental disability can never be anything but speculation. Plus, his quantitative approach vouches for his credibility as an observer, despite the fact that he believed in phrenology, which purported to study the mind by mapping the cranium, long since relegated to the list of pseudosciences. The tables cover a wide range of measurements as well as intellectual and verbal capacities. Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi became the first child diagnosed with autism.

Billy was Number 27 in the survey. Across 44 columns of data, we learn that he was 5 feet 4 inches tall, his chest was 8. At least one of his parents was an alcoholic, he had one near relative who was mentally ill or disabled, and Billy himself was given to masturbation.

Howe subscribed to the once commonly held view that masturbation was a cause of mental disability. Experts today refer to the tendency to repeat words or phrases as echolalia.

Echolalia does not necessarily persist for life. Like Billy, he had an unusual gift for remembering songs; as a toddler, Donald was singing complete Christmas carols after hearing them just once.

Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. Theories of autism were then associated both with schizophrenia in adults and with psychoanalytic styles of reasoning. The second half of the article explores how researchers such as Victor Lotter and Michael Rutter used the category of autism to reconceptualize psychological development in infants and children via epidemiological studies.

These historical changes have influenced the form and function of later research into autism and related conditions. The concept of autism was coined in by the German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe a symptom of the most severe cases of schizophrenia, a concept he had also created.

According to Bleuler, autistic thinking was characterized by infantile wishes to avoid unsatisfying realities and replace them with fantasies and hallucinations. Psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in Britain used the word autism with this meaning throughout the s and up until to the s e.

Piaget, However, in the s, many British child psychologists challenged the contentions about infantile thought assumed by Bleuler and created new methods to validate child psychology as a science, in particular epidemiological studies. The meaning of the word autism was then radically reformulated from a description of someone who fantasized excessively to one who did not fantasize at all.

This article traces this radical transformation of the concept of autism in Britain, exploring the reasons behind the shift and the impact that it has had on psychological sciences relating to infants and children. It argues that the change in the meaning of autism was part of a more general shift in Anglo-American psychiatric reasoning which sought to understand psychological problems through epidemiological studies rather than individual cases.

However, few people have explored this in relation to child psychology and psychiatry. This article examines the way that epidemiological methods shifted and morphed central concepts in these fields, in particular the concept of autism. It argues that the diagnostic practices required of psychiatric epidemiology in the s continue to influence contemporary theories and descriptions of autism in Britain. There has been a phenomenal increase in diagnoses of autism since the s which has attracted the attention of many researchers ranging from psychiatrists and social scientists to literary analysts e.

Murray, ; Nadesan, ; Silverman, Gil Eyal et al. London worked hard to ensure that new treatment methods were developed to enable their children to adjust to the new social roles that they were being forced to adopt. This led to a growth in new behavioural treatment methods as well as a massive backlash against psychoanalytic styles of reasoning. However, it is important to position these changes in relation to broader shifts in the disciplines of child psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis.

Epidemiological studies in child psychiatry experienced a period of expansion in s Britain in the wake of the Mental Health Act. Autism had always been central to the study of childhood psychopathology in Britain and the introduction of epidemiological studies provided the concept with a new framework in which it has since flourished.

As Gillian Sutherland, Deborah Thom, Nikolas Rose and others have documented, the s and s in Britain witnessed a vast expansion of charitable and governmental services to cater for the psychological problems of children Rose, ; Sutherland and Sharp, ; Thom, In that same year, Cyril Burt was appointed as the first official government psychologist in the UK and tasked with assessing the levels of psychological disturbance in the child population.

He worked with infant welfare centres, school medical inspection officers and reformatory and industrial schools in order to do this Evans et al. In the late s, the Commonwealth Fund, an American philanthropic body, began to provide funds for the purposes of improving child guidance services in Britain Thom, Early child guidance clinics were used to direct child-rearing practices and to guide the behaviour of problem children Jones, The expansion of psychological services offered growing opportunities for child psychological professionals to observe and assess infants and children.

These were associated with a burgeoning discourse relating to the developing subjectivity of infants and children.

The early 20th century had witnessed growing speculation about the nature of infantile and unconscious thought processes and their role in causing mental illness. Bleuler, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Pierre Janet were all significant thinkers in this period who sought to unearth the forces that underlay psychological illness in the thoughts, experiences and traumas of childhood Ellenberger, A lot of this work was taken up readily by a new generation of child psychological professionals in Britain, such as Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and Mildred Creak.

In , Janet had explained the function of reality as a synthesis of all psychological functions ranging from automatic functions at the level of the nervous system up to complex thoughts and actions.

If the nervous system was weak, psychological tension would drop and an individual would lose the ability to synthesize these complex functions and also lose the sense of reality Janet and Raymond, According to Bleuler, when schizophrenics tried to conduct logical operations in thought, they were unable to draw upon all appropriate associations in the mind, thus leading to an unsatisfactory sense of reality. They therefore substituted this unsatisfactory reality with fantasies that more readily satisfied their affective needs.

By blocking off the perceptive-sensory stimulations of the outside world, autistic thinking then came to obey its own special laws, which were no longer bound by the rules of logic Bleuler, [] : Freud would later expand on the way in which autoerotic thinking and, what he termed, primary narcissism were transformed via the onset of the Oedipus complex.

However British researchers such as Creak, Klein and Isaacs followed Freud and Bleuler in linking autistic and autoerotic thought with hallucinatory thinking. They also drew substantially from the work of Jean Piaget in making these claims. During this stage of thinking, children could not follow logical rules and did not think conceptually and there was a predominance of visual imagery in their minds Piaget, : — These thought processes subsided as the infant became more aware of the concrete objects and reality surrounding him or her.

Piaget drew direct analogies between infantile thinking and unconscious symbolism as described in psychoanalytic theory Vidal, : — In Britain, child psychological professionals introduced these theories in the s and s. In , she argued that schizophrenia and psychosis should be diagnosed more often in children as this would help child psychologists to understand infantile thought and its extreme pathologies Klein, In addition, she had been greatly influential in guiding government policy on childcare and education; for example, giving evidence to the Hadow Committee on Infant and Nursery Schools in and later the Home Office Care of Children Committee in ibid.

Mildred Creak was another important British child psychological professional who sought to develop ideas on severe psychopathology and hallucination in infancy.

She had trained in medicine at University College Hospital, London, and was appointed as head of child psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in Along with Klein and Isaacs, she paved the way for more detailed discussions on the way that severe psychopathology should be conceptualized in infants and children.

The Second World War increased the opportunities for child psychologists to study the psychological problems of infants and children. In Britain, over 1 million unaccompanied children were evacuated from cities and many high-profile psychologists and psychoanalysts including Klein, Isaacs and John Bowlby established the Cambridge evacuation survey to study the effects of such major environmental changes B.

Harris, ; Rose, : At the same time, Anna Freud established wartime nurseries in London for children who could not be evacuated Burlingham and Freud, Klein, Isaacs, Bowlby and Anna Freud employed theories of unconscious processes to explain pathological thought in the infants that they observed. All of these studies drew similar conclusions.

Bowlby and Bender, in particular, thought that these disturbances affected the unconscious mental processes of these children causing them to retreat from the outside world. Klein and her supporters claimed that they had found evidence for subjective responses to instincts in infants that presupposed the existence of complex mental mechanisms which could control, redirect and repress unconscious instinctual urges from the very first moments of life.

Isaacs claimed that from the moment that an infant experienced an instinctual urge, he or she also had the capacity to fantasize about that urge and to imagine the direction it might take. Fantasies could be associated with libidinal instincts or drives as well as destructive instincts and impulses.

Infants were also thought capable of altering and prohibiting their unconscious desires Heimann, []. Within this model, it was possible to understand how infants could employ hallucinations in a pathological way which prevented them from developing a satisfactory relationship to reality. Psychopathology could thus be created, via relationships, in infants from the very first moments of life.

The critics of the Kleinian analysts argued that they were attributing advanced psychical processes to infants without giving thorough evidence and explanation for these claims. The child had no awareness of the effects of his actions on others, had no sense of guilt or anxiety over his actions, and no sense of loss Freud in King and Steiner, : — These discussions of whether, and at what age, one could attribute desires and thoughts to infants were never concluded.

Yet they continued to exist as important conceptual problems in child psychology because they concerned the origins of relational thought. Cyril Burt and other educational psychologists in the s also debated how to attribute mental activity and thoughts to infants, clashing dramatically with behaviourists such as J. Watson who argued that it was not the vocation of psychologists to describe the thoughts that they imagined infants to have Watson, ; Burt, Unlike Klein and Isaacs, Kanner was reserved in the attribution of unconscious thought processes and a symbolic life to infants.

Instead, he described a list of cases in which he had observed similar symptomatology. He also noted that these children tended to use language in a very literal fashion and that they failed to relate to other people physically Kanner, However, his article was significant because it presented a new way to describe infantile thought. Rather than attributing complex unconscious thought processes to children that he observed, he simply described the behaviour of a group of children with similar symptoms.

However, this descriptive mode in child psychiatry was not standard at this time and many other child psychological professionals in both Britain and the USA continued to employ the concepts of autism in conjunction with autoerotism, primary narcissism and symbolic thinking to understand infantile psychopathology and problems with developing relationships.

After the war, the controversies over how to describe infantile thought continued. The diagnoses of schizophrenia, psychosis and autism in children were largely interchangeable during the s and s. In the USA, Bender and others employed a Kleinian model to understand infant and child psychopathology and focused on schizophrenia as the central psychopathological problem of childhood. Bender was an important figure in the development of perceptual tests for children. She defined childhood schizophrenia as.

Bender, : She also claimed that they were particularly driven by infantile aggression. Whereas in normal children, symbolism became abstract and appeared only in dreams, fantasies and fairy tales, the symbolic thought of schizophrenic children remained concrete and structured their entire thought disorder.

In the UK, Elwyn James Anthony and Kenneth Cameron at the Maudsley Hospital employed similar theories of the infantile unconscious to understand childhood schizophrenia and autism.

Parents need somewhere to go that doesn't just repeat information without taking the time to research it themselves. It's called illusory truth if I remember the term right from college. It shouldn't matter if every media outlet, every scientific journal, every doctor, and every government agency says the same thing.

The only way you should ever write down your words to be published is when you have research it yourself or You make clear the information is not your opinion. Don't be just another robot news source, have integrity and courage. You may have problems have some advertisers but the parents will buy your news. The History of Autism.

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