I think they meant "people who didnt die before 25." I don't know much about autism, but I had three friends who died before 30 in accidents that were almost certainly related to ADHD. Two of them were doing behavioral therapy but didn't believe in pharmaceutical treatment. One of them was generally medicated but wasn't taking their medication on the day they died (due to medication shortages for ADHD drugs).
That last one rear-ended a semi-truck at high speed. Probably after getting lost in thought after reading a "You shouldn't text and drive. If you text and drive, it may be the last text you ever read. Remember, don't read superfluous text; pay attention to the road, for your own safety and the safety of those around you." Obviously I don't know that last part; I am just bitter.
I knew someone in high school that had ADHD. He totaled many cars when he wasn't on meds for things like game day for sports (not sure if that's a performance or health thing).
What baffles me, is how someone diagnosed with a condition that affects driving is allowed to drive without the condition being treated - especially if they are under a prescription and just not taking it, and also if they have multiple accidents attributed to the condition. We already require this for people with seizures, for people needing glasses to wear them, etc.
For example, I have ADHD. I learned to drive at 15, got my license at 16, and managed to get my first speeding ticket at the age of 30, and my first car accident at 31 (of which I wasn't at fault). I wasn't diagnosed/medicated until I was almost 23.I do not think I am any better nor worse than the average driver either. Perhaps I have been lucky, but who knows?
Also, just because one is medicated does not mean it magically reduces all symptoms. IIRC, I think most adults only get something like 50% reduction in symptoms at best.
In my experiences, I find the efficacy of ADHD medication to be vastly overstated. I think this is mainly due to a strong honeymoon period the medication provides in the beginning. What I mean is that, the medications are extremely effective for a certain time period, but the longer one is one the medications the greater the diminishing returns become. There are only so many options/formulations and dosages can only be increased to an extent.
Also, euphoria is a very common side-effect when first starting the medications. So, a lot of life-changing anecdotes that people comment on the Internet in the beginning of treatment should be taken with a grain of salt. After a decade of treatment, most people cannot tell if I am medicated or not anymore. As in, most people think I am not medicated despite being so.
That's mostly the same for seizures - affects people differently (and different effects), medications provide various effectiveness, and individual evaluation is needed.
> We already require this for people with seizures, for people needing glasses to wear them, etc.
But then you have the same problem against something which is much harder to measure.
Many people have glasses even though their vision is mostly fine and it's perfectly reasonable to drive without them, the glasses just make things slightly more focused. Other people are effectively blind without corrective lenses.
ADHD is the same way only you don't have a nice mathematically precise lens prescription to tell you the degree of it, and with no objective way to measure the severity, just asking people a question that everybody knows can cause you to have a restriction placed on you is pointless and only invites people to lie. Which in turn may make them less likely to seek and receive medical treatment -- the thing you want to happen if they are a hazard without it.
This is further complicated by what the treatments for severe ADHD are. Can you imagine the headlines? "Government forces drivers to drive on meth."
The easy thing to measure with it is how many accidents are attributed to the person in a given time period. If you have 5 accidents including totalling 3 cars in the last 2 years of high school, you shouldn't be driving.
That doesn't actually tell you anything. Someone who drives 100,000 miles/year at the same level of safety would have 20 times more accidents in the same period of time than someone who drives 5000 miles/year. Certain areas have more traffic or are otherwise more prone to accidents. 5 is not a large enough statistical sample to know if someone is the cause or just unlucky.
Yeah yeah, you have to report mileage for insurance and registration so of course that will be taken into account. Even if you drive 100k miles in 5 years, you should not have 5 accidents that were your fault. That's just insanely unsafe.
The cause isn't determined by luck or number - it's determined by the facts that show you or the other person was at fault (or that nobody was at fault).
> you have to report mileage for insurance and registration
You don't necessarily have to report mileage for insurance, it only happens for registration when the vehicle changes ownership, and in either case that is the mileage on the vehicle rather than the driver. Someone who drives 100,000 miles a year might very well be doing it in multiple different vehicles.
> Even if you drive 100k miles in 5 years, you should not have 5 accidents that were your fault. That's just insanely unsafe.
It's not a large statistical sample. A large proportion of the people it happens to will be drivers of average skill operating under conditions with above-average risk. Being an unsafe driver isn't the same thing as driving in an area with unsafe intersections.
> The cause isn't determined by luck or number - it's determined by the facts that show you or the other person was at fault (or that nobody was at fault).
Most of these investigations are cursory unless someone dies, and under those conditions they're basically impossible to get right except by chance. One car rear-ended the other, the driver in front says the other one was following too closely, the one in back says the other cut them off and then slammed on the brakes, there were no unbiased witnesses. Whatever goes into that report is going to have the accuracy of a coin flip if the accident isn't one that warrants a thorough investigation -- and even then there may be no way to ever know what really happened.
My state requires mileage every year. Even if it's not accurate for everyone, it's accurate enough for vast majority of people.
Even if you talk about someone cutting you off, that doesn't happen often. You aren't going to get 5 "coin flip" accidents in 5 years. There are dash cams if you're really that concerned. Which brings up another good point. If you really think that fault will be attributed to you incorrectly that often, then your insurance will surely go up, so you already have a dash cam to protect yourself from this existing reality you are peddling?
> Even if it's not accurate for everyone, it's accurate enough for vast majority of people.
It has to be accurate for everyone. You're talking about imposing a restriction that amounts to house arrest for anyone who can't afford a city apartment or a chauffeur.
> Even if you talk about someone cutting you off, that doesn't happen often.
I see that you have not experienced the wonders of New York traffic.
> You aren't going to get 5 "coin flip" accidents in 5 years.
If you flip a coin 5 times in a row, the chances of it coming up tails every time is 1 in 32. Against a hundred million drivers that's a lot of people.
And that's assuming it's fully random and not e.g. you have the first two falsely attributed to you at random, at which point investigating officers see your record and become biased to finding you at fault in any case going forward.
> If you really think that fault will be attributed to you incorrectly that often, then your insurance will surely go up, so you already have a dash cam to protect yourself from this existing reality you are peddling?
People don't think it will happen ahead of time, they realize it can happen after it already has.
US motor vehicle laws are also (presumably intentionally) designed to let the police come to any conclusion they want as a pretext for searches or revenue-generating citations. For example, hardly anybody follows the speed limit, so if you drive below the speed limit then you're impeding the normal flow of traffic (nominally a violation), and causing a (real) hazard because other cars will bunch up and perform lane change maneuvers to go around you. It's also "suspicious"; the people who do it are disproportionately drunk or in possession of contraband. But if you drive with the flow of traffic then you're speeding which is also a violation.
A dash cam might then help you if an accident is caused by the other driver doing something egregious, but if it's caused by e.g. bad road design and the officer is nonetheless expected to assign fault to somebody, now you're handing them a pile of evidence from which to identify common violations. It's not obvious that it helps you.
But what does the have to do with Autism? That quote seems to be more about people not finding fulfillment/confirming to social expectations/wasting their lives vs. a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Not the GP, but since they mentioned high-functioning autism I’d guess they meant people with autism able to (very) successfully adapt to social expectations will likely forgo self-fulfilment in order to conform, without even necessarily being fully aware of it.
"only 10–20% of children diagnosed before 5 years of age able to live independently as adults"
^ the article and the medical treatment is aimed at those so severely impacted/compromised that they cannot live independently.