Link between mental illness parents and autistic kids
May 8th, 2008 by Lilian
I picked up another news which is of concern to us parents. I think many of us are still very clueless about an autistic child. We are not aware of the severity of them, what are the symptoms and signs and even how to manage it. There are not many specialists around and early intervention is usually very lacking.
I have a friend whose child is autistic and he doesn’t feel pain. Once, he broke his arm at the monkey bar and he didn’t show any distress. It was only much later when he cried a bit that the parents suspected something is wrong with him. The doctor was shocked to find that he broke his arm.
It is a challenge to bring up a child with autistic and I have seen some children being neglected simply because the parent does not know how to deal with it. One of them is my own relative. The poor girl died at 16 years old because she choked on her own phlegm as she didn’t know how to cough it out and the parents didn’t realised.
Now, this news that there may be a link between autistic kids and a mother with some form of mental illness does make me ponder a bit. Both my friend and relative do have mental depression. Is there really a link after all?
BEIJING, May 6 (Xinhuanet) — Having a parent with psychiatric problems doubles a child’s odds of being autistic, researchers said in a study released on Monday.
Doctors found that rates of autism rose substantially if parents had suffered schizophrenia, depression or a range of other personality and psychiatric disorders.
“Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism,” said Julie Daniels of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who worked on the study published in the May issue of Pediatrics.
“We also saw higher rates of depression and personality disorders among mothers, but not fathers,” she said in a statement.
Researchers, led by Julie Daniels at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined the medical records of 1,237 children in Sweden born between 1977 and 2003 who were diagnosed with autism before the age of 10. They were compared with families of nearly 31,000 children who did not have autism.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/06/content_8113877.htm