Autism-World

The history of autism begins in the early 1940’s.In 1943, Leo Kanner of Baltimore published his first paper identifying autistic children paper on the disorder,asserting he had noticed such children since 1938.In 1944,Hans Asperger, of Vienna, Austria, published another famous paper that first described a similar condition that later became known as Asperger Syndrome.Because the patients he identified all had speech, so the term Asperger’s Syndrome or Asperger Syndrome is often used to label autistic people who have speech.
In the late 1940’s,Bruno Bettelheim,an Hungarian Austrian-born art historian who became the director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago,claimed that children became autistic because of cold and emotionally distant mothers, women he referred to as ???refrigerator mothers???.His theories were internationally accepted for more than two decades. It was later discovered that much of Bettelheim’s “expertise” was exaggerated or unfounded, and that he did not have the necessary qualifications to either run a school or posit theories about the causes of autism.Unfortunately, understandings of autism took a turn for the worse under the leadership of Bruno Bettelheim.
In the early 1960s, a few people in the medical community such as Dr. Bernard Rimland and Dr. Eric Schopler, began to challenge Bettleheim’s opinion. In 1964, Dr. Rimland,a psychologist and father of a child with autism,provided a definitive review of evidence that established autism as a biological condition thus demonstrating Bettleheim’s theory was wrong. He also wrote a book of Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior.?? In his book, Rimland argued that autism was a biological disorder and not an emotional illness. This book changed the way autism was perceived and had an enormous impact on the future of treatment methods for people with autism and related disorders.
In 1966,Dr. Andreas Rett first described Rett Syndrome as a specific condition in a paper.
In 1977, Dr. Susan Folstein and Dr. Michael Rutter published the first autism twin study, which revealed evidence of a genetic basis for autism. Over the next ten years, researchers conducted additional studies that further yielded evidence of a genetic component to autism as well as refined the symptoms of autism.
In 1991, Drs. Catherine Lord, Michael Rutter and Ann LeCouteur published the Autism Diagnostic Interview.
In 1992, the American Psychiatric Association released the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), which refined diagnostic criteria for autistic disorder.
In 1993,The World Health Organization released a similar diagnostic manual known as the International Classification of Diseases .

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under History of Autism.