Article: France’s autism problem – and its roots in psychoanalysis

[Andy]

France has a problem with autism. The country’s highest administrative court estimates that there are 700,000 autistic people in France. However, only 75,000 are diagnosed. Autistic children have historically been diagnosed later in France than in neighbouring countries. They have often been excluded from mainstream education and lacked access to support services and extracurricular activities.

Many French autists are confined to day hospitals and live-in institutions, isolated from the community and frequently unable to communicate through speech – whereas in the US, for example, public schools are required by law to fully include autistic children in mainstream classroom education. For years, families in northeast France have taken autistic children to Belgium, to access its superior services.

https://theconversation.com/frances-autism-problem-and-its-roots-in-psychoanalysis-94210

 

[Hutan]

This is a good article.

Why has France lagged behind? The blame appears to rest with the dominant influence of psychoanalysis over French psychiatry in recent decades. Many psychoanalysts argue that autism is not a neuro-developmental disorder with, as is now globally accepted, a high degree of genetic heritability. Rather, they see it as a psychologically-generated condition originating in a disturbed family environment – specifically, problems in the child’s relationship to its mother.

As analyst Charles Melman, a proponent of these views, put it in a 2014 interview, an autistic child:

has suffered from something very simple. His mother … has not been able to transmit the feeling that his birth was a gift to her … the prosody of the maternal discourse plays a role in the development of autism.​

​

The author is Richard Bates, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Nottingham. He says

As a historian of ideas, I am interested in how France reached this point.

Perhaps someone might like to suggest that the story of CFS in the UK would be a good one for him to look at next?

 

[Agapanthus]

'In 2011, a large, systematic meta-analysis of early interventions for autism found no evidence supporting a psychoanalytic approach for the condition. Yet if French parents oppose it, they can face dire consequences, including the forced removal of their children to institutions or foster homes. Langloys says social workers can label a family as troublesome just for seeking out a second opinion. “Social workers know nothing but psychoanalysis, so for them the mother is always too fused or too cold,” she says. To them, she says, “it’s normal to take away her children.” Her association has counted several hundred cases of children being separated from their parents in the past 15 years. In 2014, Autisme France began offering its members access to legal aid services to help families facing court proceedings to remove their children.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-care-support-french-healthcare-a8161416.html
Sound familiar?

 

[Sean]

Aren't we peasants so lucky to be blessed with the wonders of modern psychiatry.