Inevitably, the more that clinicians and educators looked for a condition, the more they found it. The upward trend that began in the wake of the DSM-III-R began to snowball after the publication of the DSM-IV. In fact, the numbers were rising a little too steeply, because the DSM-IV editors had made a small but crucial error in the final run-up to publication. Instead of requiring that a child display impairments in social interaction, communication, and behavior before getting a diagnosis of PDD-NOS, the criteria substituted the word or for and. (In other words, a clinician could deliver the
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