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
Imagine a very specific set of characteristics, and give it a name (e.g. [frindle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frindle); it’s a fun enough word). When you describe this characteristic (for example, people with brown hair that is curly), *you* are the only person that knows what this ‘frindle’ means. So you tell the nearest ‘frindle’ that they are a ‘frindle’. They realize, “huh, so it is.”
This one interaction increased the amount of ‘frindle’ cases by an infinite value (0 to 1) in the time span of 5 seconds.
In socially diagnosed conditions, if the word doesn’t exist yet then the cases of the condition are 0. Further, if society doesn’t understand the condition (such as ‘they are just a trouble maker’ when they actually have an attention issue), the condition will be underreported. This is a large reason why ‘autism’ has been diagnosed more often in the last few decades: we know more about it now then we used to, and are willing to use that information to help people.
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