You think families with autistic kids have it lousy here in the US?

[Archae]

What, with Jenny McCarthy and RFK Jr. spouting their anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, quacks like Andrew Wakefield faking studies so he moves to Texas after losing his license in the UK, not to mention all the other quacks coming up with fake chelation "cures," or parents taking the kids to exorcists?

In France they never got out of the 50's and 60's when it comes to autism.

#4. French Doctors Still Practice Freudian Psychoanalysis

Back in the 1950s and '60s, things weren't so great for people with autism. Doctors at the time explained the condition using the theory of the "refrigerator mother": a cold, unloving maternal figure who unconsciously hates her own child. This repressed hatred causes the child to shut down like an angry spouse after a drunken Thanksgiving dinner incident, and voila! Autism.

Obviously, that theory is dumb, and doctors have known that it's dumb for decades now. Today, autism is recognized as a neurobiological problem that has nothing to do with repressed parental emotions, and this view is shared by the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Society for Well Duh. It is not, however, shared by France.

French psychiatry has views on autism that make Jenny McCarthy look like Bill Nye. Many French psychiatrists still follow the teachings of Jacques Lacan, a Freudian psychoanalyst who believed that autism was caused by a mother viewing her child as a replacement for her own missing penis (no, I'm not making that up). For some bizarre reason, Mom Penis Lacan never made it big in the English-speaking world, but he remains a hit in France. So even in recent years, French mothers of autistic children were commonly interrogated about things like whether they'd really wanted a baby, and what sort of dreams they'd had while pregnant.

The penis-mom attitude has started to change in the last couple of years, but this doesn't help most of the current generation of autistic French people. While most First World countries now treat autism with behavioral therapy designed to help patients cope better with their daily lives, French people with autism are more likely to receive Freudian talk therapy, or maybe a charming practice called "le packing," in which patients are wrapped in cold, damp cloths in order to rid them of their "pathological defense mechanisms," because apparently dressing up as an ice mummy is the best way to do that. These treatments work about as well as you'd expect, which is probably why France has 17 times fewer autistic people studying at university than the United Kingdom. It's almost like it's not wise to treat a neurological condition with unproven theories about missing penises.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-modern-countries-with-surprisingly-backward-technology/

[phil89]

1. Glad we moved toward evidence based

Practice here. Psychoanalysis is a disgusting, harmful practice.

[nolabear]

2. Actually American psychoanalysis is doing fairly well, but not that variety.

I completely agree that Lacanian psychoanalysis is pointless in the treatment of autism. Those who believed in the "refrigerator mother" were wrong. Personally, I think Lacanian analysis is bizarre at the best of times and insane at its worst. Lacan was.

But in this country now, psychoanalysis (though it's varied) is used to treat people who typically are struggling with long term inabilities to change their personalities and the way they view the world, and are suffering. It incorporates ideas from neurology and other areas of psychology, and has a focus on being a two-person process, a contract between the patient and practitioner to walk as fearlessly as possible into the darkest, most terrifying territory of the patient's mental life, to try very hard to shed light on it again and again, and to provide a safe place to imagine that it might be thought of and experienced differently. It's respectful, has more in common with the realms of art and philosophy, with making meaning and overcoming obstacles, than with pharmaceuticals, though in some ways bathing the brain in endorphins and seratonin via a comfortable, adventurous and affirming relationship is no different from doing it via pills. It's just that it is the original way we do it, and the pills mimic it.

It's a complicated field, and as with all mental health treatments it helps some and doesn't help others, and has good practitioners and, sadly, bad ones. You'd be able to find examples of bad work. But your assessment is, in the main, wrong.

Autism is one of the most baffling, difficult and upsetting disorders there is. Honestly, no treatment works wonderfully. The spectrum is huge and I suspect someday the diagnosis will be refined into a number of them, more than the usual Asperger's Syndrome/Autism.

[Archae]

4. The most unfortunate thing about US psychology...

The "Satanic Panic" of the 80's and 90's.

How many jackass "therapists" convinced kids based on nothing, that they had been "abused" in "Satanic cults" and were in "denial."

There still are some of those jackass "therapists" out there, still molesting kids the way they did.

http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2014/03/976-diana-napolis.html

[nolabear]

5. I know. There are so many who call themselves "therapists" who are not.

The whole idea, and sometimes it's a tough one for practitioners, is that you serve the patient's desires. Unless we're talking about certain abusive situations, you want to help the person be more themselves, to be less fettered by whatever is holding them back. Some people want to be more successful at doing things that are very disquieting. You either get over that and help, or refer them. The whole "reparative therapy" crap and recovered memory (though sometimes that's real and that makes the task even tougher for all involved) movement and various others have done real and lasting harm.

[Jefferson23]

3. :(