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
Mental health disorders are enumerated in something called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). This publication contains the guidelines that all healthcare professionals use when diagnosing patients who present a variety of symptoms.
The first DSM was published in the 1950s, but autism didn’t even appear in the manual until DSM-III (that’s Roman numeral three) in 1980 ([source](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-021-04904-1)). As outlined in the source paper, the definition of autism has broadened and narrowed over time, until we reach the modern definition of autism, which now defines a single, but multi-dimensional, disorder, rather than an enumerated categorical structure for classifying autism. This happened in DSM-5 — they ditched the Roman numeral system with the fifth edition — which wasn’t released until 2013.
This shift meant that disorders previously treated as separate, but related, were now just cases of autism with varying degrees of severity in the various dimensions.
This decision was not taken lightly, and was hotly debated amongst members of the mental healthcare field. Ultimately, it was decided that treating autism as a spectrum, rather than trying to classify each different type, opened the possibility to permit diagnosis in cases that would previously have gone untreated.
There is, of course, a lot more detail to it than that, but the paper is surprisingly accessible if you want to dive deeper.
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