Autistic disorder

The term "autism" was first introduced by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to refer to a schizophrenic disturbance (Bleuler also coined the term "schizophrenia"), "namely the narrowing of relationships to people and to the outside world, a narrowing so extreme that it seemed to exclude everything except the person's own self" (Frith, 1989, p. 7). Although the psychiatric community now classifies autism as a developmental disorder, the name, derived from the Greek autos (self), persists. Both Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, publishing independent studies of autistic children in 1943

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to be severely retarded. Autism is diagnosed in two to five cases per 1,000 children and is more likely to occur among siblings. The DSM-IV estimates that about a third of all patients will eventually be able to function on a partially independent basis but will continue to exhibit problems. Current study of autism is still unable to isolate its causes. Bruno Bettelheim (1967), who conducted extensive early research with autistic patients, believed that the roots of the problem could be found in the first two or three critical stages of personality development, though he refused to argue conclusively whether such roots were likely to be primarily biological or the result of imperfect parenting. His experience did lead him to suggest that nurturing mistakes might contribute to the problem: "The experience that [the child's] own actions (cry or smile) make no difference is what stops him from becoming a human being, for it discourages him from interacting with others and hence from forming a personality through which to deal with the environment" (p. 25). However, he notes that many autistic children apparently never exhibit the instinctive types of behaviors that allow the individual to begin to test out the limits of the wo
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Approximate Word count = 2520
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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