I’m curious as to the seeming rise of autistic humans in the last decades.
Is it that it was just not understood and therefore not diagnosed/reported?
Are there environmental or even societal factors that have corresponded to this increase in cases?
In: Biology
So there’s an interesting phenomenon where when something becomes more societally acceptable it becomes easier to observe and thus might lead to the thing in question seeming ‘more prevalent’ or (as the right-wingers try to fearmonger 🙄) ‘everywhere all of a sudden’.
The cases that stood out the most to me were left handed people and, of course, the queer community. They were always here, they were just forced to learn writing with their right hand or stay closeted, respectively.
I work with young people with autism and it’s still very under researched (especially in young women, who often get misdiagnosed with personality disorders, OCD or anxiety), portrayals of the autistic savant in the media doesn’t help with understanding of autism either, but in general there is a growing interest in understanding neurodiversity, which hopefully will lead to more acceptance. 🙂
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