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
I believe part of the answer is that Asperger’s is no longer its own disorder and is now part of the Autistic spectrum.
There is a study which seems to suggest that prenatal exposure to air pollution can be linked to higher risk of autism in children.
study link: [https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP9509](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP9509)
Not diagnosed.
The first person to ever be diagnosed with Autism (Donald Triplett) died in 2023.
I’m high functioning autistic. 40 years ago when I was a kid, autism was something people only knew from Rain Man, where it happened to people who could barely function. I was just labeled as “gifted”, even though I’d struggled mightily (and to some extent still do) with social situations.
So yeah, we’ve learned more about it since then.
ok i try to go full ELI5 with this:
A long time ago, some people where just seen as weird, retarded or idiots.
Now we know why they behave different than most people and we know how to treat them better.
Those are the same people, we just know better now.
I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone with anything but it seems like the 20th century was riddled with weird idiosyncratic entertainers who were probably on the spectrum.
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.
3 things, primarily:
1 – They expanded the diagnostic criteria. You used to need to be *very* heavily impacted by autism in order to be diagnosed. Like, basically non-verbal and never going to live independently. Now you can be much less impacted and still qualify.
2 – There’s much more awareness, so a much higher percentage of those impacted are being diagnosed.
3 – There’s talk of “tech-induced autism” in education and psychiatry, where kids are lacking social skills because screen time is replacing socialization.
As others have said diagnosis is more common now but beyond that autism is also much, much more common. We don’t know all the reasons yet but mothers being exposed to BPA and PFAS is implicated in causing autism as a birth defect. ie. It’s most likely due to the increased use of plastics in the last fifty years.
An important aspect of understanding of neurodivergent behaviour is that it is maladaptive to the given environment. One can easily imagine how autistic trades can be advantageous is certain environments. For example, autism in a farmer living in a small, mono-culture community regulated by codified order, another words one of Mechanical Solidarity, would be well adapted and can be very positive. Thus, up until recently in human history, most of us simply didn’t live in environments that saw these behaviours as maladaptive.
Secondly, we have just begun to seriously seek and diagnose autism and its spectrum. The better we get at it, the higher the numbers will go until we reach the true population numbers. Then the rates will probably plateau given that it is most likely a genetic and not an environmental condition.
Latest Answers