Tourette’s Syndrome

This may seem a bit like a tempest in a teacup but there’s a good point here, even if the players are a bit unusual.

It seems Dear Abby (Jeanne Phillips) raised a bit of a stink when she referred to autism as a “mental illness.” Doctors, neurologists, and psychiatrists quickly chimed in that she was completely wrong, and she owned up to the error.

In one of the more intelligent responses from the medical arena was this: [A]utism is “genetically predetermined — biologically based” or “neurologically based,” it is not a mental health disorder.

They went on to add: Autism can be heartbreaking for parents; certainly it is a neurodevelopmental disorder, and if that’s what families prefer to call it, we should probably all join in. But then, the question arises, what is autism being distanced from? What do we make of families whose children suffer obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, and the rest? We might note that autism overlaps substantially with those very diseases.

OK, I’ve never been a fan of calling Tourette’s Syndrome a disease because it strikes me that a disease can kill you, syndrome’s and disorders can’t. But I’ve got better things to do than take on the medical community in a battle of semantics.

Bottom line: the distinction being made here is that being born with a neurological disorder does not make one medically ill - so say the medical community. And that’s powerful stuff when facing down the ignorant we all  too often encounter.