[size=13px]And now we’re seeing another perverse incentive: To ‘over-diagnose’ ASD or ‘misdiagnose’ ADHD as ASD in order to gain NDIS funding and other special support.[/size]
If you can get your child diagnosed with Level 2 or 3 ASD rather than Level 1, the NDIS funding rolls in.
A snippet from many available articles:
Some observations that have been drawn from the recent survey include:
- teachers pushing families of children with ADHD to try for a diagnosis with better funding, such as autism or oppositional defiance disorder (ODD)
- funding being allocated to a teacher's aide, which some experts say this is not necessarily helpful as 'you are putting the least qualified person with the child who needs the most qualified person'
- it encourages the "agglomeration process" where you get one diagnosis and then keep adding on top of each other until you tip a child into emergency funding
- pushing for an incorrect diagnosis could affect a child's self-perception and inappropriate adjustments might be put in place by the school
- distorting figures through "diagnosis substitution" creates the perception that autism and ADHD are over-diagnosed.
I shake my head in astonishment at the number of parents who are off to the doctor as soon as their child sneezes these days. I can remember seeing a doctor twice in my childhood: getting my tonsils out at around the age of 4, and just before joining the RAAF as an apprentice.
I honestly can’t comprehend how these children could provide an accurate medical ‘history’ later in life, or how they could possibly ‘satisfy’ the likes of CASA Avmed of compliance with aviation medical standards, without submitting themselves as guinea pigs to extensive, expensive and intrusive demands from the bureaucracy. I very much doubt that the parents realise they’re effectively dooming their children to a life of being treated as a collection of medical ‘conditions’ to be ‘managed’, in some cases even for conditions they never had but for which it seemed like a ‘good idea’ for them to be diagnosed at the time.