Summary History of Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome
[line-3,body-4]+ 1980s+ Coinage of Pathological Demand Avoidance+ Professor Elizabeth Newson coins "Pathological Demand Avoidance" to characterize a population of children referred to Child Development Research Unit clinic of Nottingham University in Nottingham, England for autism or Asperger's that do not show a typical presentation of either, and thereby tend to be stuck with an "atypical autism" or Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) label+ 90s+ Discovering of demand avoidance as core trait+ Elizabeth Newson and her colleagues at Child Development Research Unit clinic of Nottingham University in Nottingham, England observe common behavioral patterns among this PDD-NOS / atypically autistic population whose simplest explanation is a shared obsessive tendency to avoid everyday demands.+ Late 90s to early 2000s+ Compilation and refinement of clinical descriptions of demand-avoidant PDD population into a syndrome+ Increases in clinical and academic publications as well as experimental study on this demand-avoidant population allow the distillation of clinical descriptions and observations down to core co-occurent traits or behaviors, comprising a set of symptoms allowing Pathological Demand Avoidance status as a distinct syndrome.+ Early to late 2000s+ Hypothesis proposed for PDDs as a family of symptom clusters, foreshadowing the concept of the autism spectrum+ Elizabeth Newson of the Child Development Research Unit of Nottingham University in Nottingham, England proposes approaching pervasive developmental disorders as a set of symptom clusters whose different symptoms sometimes influence each other or overlap, or may coexist, in impacting similar problem domains. Any given child may fall within, but also amongst, any of the PDDs. She foreshadows the concept of the autism spectrum.