Chapter 15 is all about Psychological disorders. It gives origins, conditions, treatments, and possible causes for many disorders such as: depression, anxiety, panics, phobias, post traumatic stress, moods, suicide, etc. Although each of these disorders have their unique and interesting descriptions, autism (or infantile autism) is a disorder I found very amusing. Autism is a disorder usually children develop around age 2. It is typically associated with mental retardation and has severe deficits in language, social bonding, and imagination. Autistic disorder has "skyrocketed" in the amount of individuals that are diagnosed. However, the biggest controversy involved with autism is its causes. Many parents of autistic children believe that their child's case is due to vaccinations. They have found that many individuals with this disorder developed autism around the same time as their vaccinations for diseases such as mumps, measles, and rubella. This also leads to their reasoning on the "skyrocketing" of the autism "epidemic". On contrary, others believe the existence of the autism "skyrocketing" is due to changes in diagnostic practices- especially in mild autistic cases. Whichever the case may be, shouldn't the point of all this debating be to find a cure to this skyrocketing disorder?
This diagram shows the increase in Autism diagnosis over nine years in the U.S. alone. As you can see, the graph increases exponentially as opposed to a linear graph:
Source: Lilienfeld's, Psychology From Inquiry to Understanding, page 625-626 and
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