The apparent rise in autistic people in the last 40 years

Question

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

Answer 1

Autism has more or less become a catch all term. People use it to describe conditions that are not actually autism or just self diagnose themselves, causing further confusion. Two people with polar opposite conditions will both claim to be autistic when it reality neither actually are. The word has lost a lot of its meaning.