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Out and About

July 28th, 2014 by drcoplan

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It’s always good to get out into the real world, to share my ideas face to face. I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a presentation this past week at the Autism Society of America’s annual national convention: (Mental Illness in ASD – The Elephant in the Room  ). It was hard trying to squeeze six hours of material into a 75 minute session, but I managed to cover the key points:
  • The bright line between ASD and “mental illness” is a myth.
  • DSM-5 perpetuates the “gumball model” of psychiatric diagnosis: A given patient may have one or more discrete disorders, that happen to co-exist. “Co-Morbidity” is the necessary fiction on which this model rests. In reality, disorders shade into one another along a continuum, or undergo metamorphosis over time.
  • ASD, Schizophrenia, ADD, Bipolar Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Depression have shared biological roots. A given genetic defect can give rise to disorders that “look different” on the surface (pleiotropy). Conversely, disorders that look the same on the surface may actually be due to very different underlying genetic mechanisms (phenocopies).

Myth and Reality in the etiology and classification of ASD and mental illness.

 (Click on graph to enlarge.)

 

Myth and Reality in the etiology and classification of ASD and mental illness Read the rest of this entry »

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Pathways To Crime. Asperger Syndrome and Crime.

June 14th, 2014 by drcoplan

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Dr. Coplan emphasizes the importance of being able to identify those individuals with High Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome who are at increased risk for committing violent crime, in order to reduce the potential for a catastrophic outcome.

The consensus among the world’s leading researchers is that “a small yet significant number of primarily higher functioning people with ASD will engage in unlawful behavior,” due to the combined effect of “generic forensic risk factors” plus “factors more specific to the autism phenotype.” (Woodbury-Smith 2014)

How often this happens is unknown, although it is probably uncommon. There has been no “explosion” in violent crime over the past 20 years in parallel with the hundred-fold increase in diagnosed cases of ASD. This is very reassuring, but the challenge remains to identify those few individuals with ASD / AS who are at greatest risk, in order to reduce the potential for catastrophic outcome. Read the rest of this entry »

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