Atypical minds and developmental support: we haven't learned much in 15 years

I wrote the first ‘best you can be’ post almost 12 years ago. #1 was 7 then, #2 was 5. E and I already had years of experience with cognitive disabilities, autism spectrum, and atypical minds. We already understood how worthless the classifications we’d studied in medical school were. Autism, ADHD, Asperger’s (defunct now) — very rough labels that are primarily useful for obtaining services and perhaps for initial medication selection.

We thought there would be progress. 

There really hasn’t been much that we’ve seen. We still have most of the original classifications (frozen in DSM V) and I haven’t seen any useful research emerge. We’re going nowhere.

If someone were to drop a few million dollars on me I’d start by defining 5-8 axes of thinking/feeling — measures of things like external-word vs. internal-world orientation, spatial processing, impulsivity, short-term memory, etc. Things that can be tested and measured. 

I’d mine the existing literature for axes to study, but otherwise I’d toss out most of it. Test a few thousand late teens/early adults and plot them on a “spider graph”. Run the analysis to see if there are any useful clusters. If there are useful clusters, then name them. Use that as the basis for future research.

Basically, start over.