In this video I describe some symptoms and prevalence of several disorders in the Neurodevelopmental Disorders category of the DSM-5. This category includes intellectual disability, communication disorders, learning disorders, and motor disorders. In this video I focus on Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Please note that the symptoms described in this video are not comprehensive and there are other symptoms involved in diagnosis for each of these disorders.

Related video on Autism Spectrum Disorder and Cognitive Development here.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the category of neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM-5 and this is a category that refers to disorders that have their onset during development, so this includes things like intellectual disability as well as communication disorders, so problems related to language, speech, stuttering, or social communication, as well as learning disorders like dyslexia and dyscalculia, and motor disorders like tic disorders and Tourette’s syndrome. But in this video we’re going to focus on just two disorders; autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

So we’ll start by looking at autism spectrum disorder and this is a disorder that I talked about in a previous video in the unit on development and I’ll post a link to that video in the description, but what we see in autism spectrum disorder is a range of developmental problems. And this relates to a criticism that it’s become a catch-all diagnosis because there’s a number of unrelated problems that are all considered to be part, or could be part, of autism spectrum disorder. So these include problems related to language, problems related to motor skills, as well as problems related to socialization, such as difficulty recognizing facial expressions or expressing other nonverbal communication cues.

And so children who have this diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder may show problems with their social relationships, they may have hyper-focus on certain things, what we call fixated interests, and they may have a tendency to prefer rigid routines and rituals and they can become very upset when those routines or rituals are violated. And they may engage in some repetitive motor behaviors such as hand flapping or repeating idiosyncratic phrases.

Now the prevalence for autism spectrum disorder has increased rapidly in recent years and the DSM-5 gives a worldwide estimate of about 1% of children being affected by autism spectrum disorder, but we’ve seen the prevalence increase fairly rapidly in some places, particularly in the United States. So this raises the question of why this might be rising. And one possible answer to this is that the diagnostic criteria have been changed and so it might be easier to get this diagnosis now and this also relates to that criticism, my criticism I mentioned of this being sort of a catch-all, when there’s a developmental problem people think maybe it’s related to autism and so the expansion of these diagnostic criteria might be part of the reason for this rise in prevalence.

But it’s also possible that there’s just greater awareness of the disorder that more parents are likely to seek out help for a child and as a result children who actually do need help are actually getting it and that will mean that the awareness is the reason for the increase in the prevalence. Although it’s also possible that changes in the assessment methodology, so there’s maybe new tools for assessing certain symptoms related to autism, and these could be improvements that are now catching more cases that would have been missed in the past. Or it could be the case that there is a true increase that, you know, the disorder is actually on the rise that more and more children are being affected by it over time.

And what we see in autism spectrum disorder is it’s about four times more common in males than females and amongst children who have this diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder about 70% of them will also be diagnosed with another disorder, although this is frequently another neurodevelopmental disorder like intellectual disability.

Okay the next disorder that we’ll look at is attention deficit hyperactive disorder or ADHD and this involves two main categories of symptoms; symptoms related to attention and symptoms related to hyperactivity. So in terms of attention children who are diagnosed with ADHD often have difficulty with paying attention to fine details of things. They have a tendency to be careless and they may have problems with organizing tasks, with maintaining focus and they frequently become distracted or forgetful and so those are the symptoms related to attention problems.

And then we have symptoms related to hyperactivity and so this can include fidgeting behavior, lots of squirming behavior or restlessness, as well as inappropriate running or climbing. And in addition to hyperactivity some children will also show impulsivity, meaning that they have a tendency to interrupt others or intrude on others conversations, other games, other activities and this can show a lack of foresight or a lack of behavioral control on the part of the children.

Now this brings us to a criticism of ADHD which is this idea that children are supposed to be able to sit still and they’re supposed to avoid feeling restless or intruding on things and that one of the reasons we might see this diagnosis of ADHD as a pathologizing of normal behavior is that maybe children aren’t meant to be doing things like sitting in school for eight hours a day. And so it’s that we’re putting these sort of unnatural demands on children’s behavior and then when they can’t meet those demands we might have a tendency to say that they’re abnormal or that they need to receive a diagnosis. So this is one criticism of this hyperactivity component of ADHD.

Now it’s estimated that about 5% of children will receive a diagnosis of ADHD and most children have the onset before age 12 and there’s a ratio of about two to one for males to females and we also see that the prevalence of ADHD for adults is much lower it’s about 2.5% and so this suggests that this is a disorder that you can grow out of. And another way of interpreting that would be to say that maybe this is something that you grow into, which is greater cognitive control. And maybe the reason that children can’t control their behavior and they have these problems with cognitive control with focusing their attention or with restraining their physical movements is that they just don’t have the cognitive abilities yet to do that and as they get older those develop and so they grow into greater executive function and that’s the reason why their symptoms are reduced over time.

And one way we can see this is a Canadian study that looked at the fact that diagnosis is more common in children when they’re young for their grade level. And this suggests that there’s a misinterpretation going on; that these are children that are actually just relatively immature compared to their classmates and as a result teachers see their reduced level of cognitive control or behavioral control as a sign of a disorder rather than recognizing it the fact that these children are just younger and they haven’t had as much time to develop control over these areas.

Okay so those are some neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM-5 I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!