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
Consider ADHD as another example of something that has had an incredible increase in diagnosis. I am one of those “new” cases.
I am a high functioning 43 year old man with a wife, 2 kids, my own business, home, cars and all the other bits. And yet I was recently diagnosed with inattentive type ADHD and started treatment. To say that taking the stimulant medication made a huge difference would be a massive understatement.
As a kid, my grades swung between A+ and a C, depending on the subject and the teacher. If I engaged with the subject and the teacher I fucking aced it. If it was something I wasn’t drawn to I checked out. This is despite desperately not wanting to check out. When I got to university this became even more pronounced. I wanted to do the work and the study, I just couldn’t.
For people who don’t have adhd I found it impossible to explain why I would just not do the things that I needed to do, that I wanted to do. Until it was framed to me that what I feel when trying to do these tasks would be the same as a normal brain going out on a Friday night, getting hammered, coming home at 2pm and then their alarm going off at 6am to go for a 10km run. That is how hard doing tasks that aren’t in my current interest focus are to do.
Now I take dexamphetamine, which is a stimulant and part of what is in Adderal (don’t get that here). Now I can just do the things that I want and need to do, without them either being a passion or earth shatteringly critical. Doing my job is so much easier that it’s a fucking joke. I can remember to do things, I don’t forget where my keys are constantly.
Back in the 80s and 90s there was zero chance of me being assessed, let alone diagnosed, because I didn’t have the behaviour issues and I got good enough grades to get by. But I had it. So clearly looking back I had it. And the thing I struggle with the most, and have to be very careful about not dwelling on, is how many opportunities I missed, how many fuck ups I made, and how many friends I lost because of undiagnosed ADHD.
There are just as many people who got through life not being diagnosed as on the autism spectrum.
A book that is used to officially diagnose autism changes definition from revision to revision and the spectrum broadened in the last 40 years, now the reference is more common. In the first revision it was barely mentioned because of the origins of the word. Look it up.
There are other reasons.
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.
Keep in mind that Reddit inflates autism numbers by the majority claiming it through self diagnosis. Actual diagnosis’ are up but not nearly as much as Reddit would have you believe.
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. 🙂
A combination of more testing for it, a better understanding of it, and less stigma about it meaning less incentive to hide it if you can.
Same general idea as the famous graph of number of left-handed people spiking up to 12% after we stopped forcing everyone to learn to write right-handed and stigmatizing left-handedness. The number of left-handed people didn’t grow and was probably always about 12%, but the number of people who reported being left handed increased to nearly everyone who was.
It was called something else. Tuberculosis is an ancient disease, but you won’t find any mention of it prior to the 1880s because it was called consumption. And was common enough that it was considered a personality trait.
There’s terms like Idiot Savant that started in the 1880s as well. Mental Retardation from around 1901. Imbecile entered English around 1550, but the meaning which transferred to English from French hasn’t switched meaning since Latin. Cretin from 1775.
In the 1980s terms like Mental Retardation were on their way out, but I remember being called “Slow” and being called an Idiot Savant.
1. A number of previously separately classified disorders/conditions have been consolidated under the single term Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
2. Our understanding of and willingness to acknowledge ASD has lead to doctors/therapists/psychiatrist being better prepared and willing to diagnose people
Having said that there are a LOT of people who self-diagnose and while some probably would qualify, others would not. So fake/misapplied diagnosis has also increased the apparent number.
If I was in school now, and I behaved like I did back in the 90s, I would be diagnosed with autism. However in the 90s, nobody gave a shit, I was just an annoying, weird kid.
Autism has always been there, we just didn’t used to care.
Eh, every peice of media set in a grade school has the autistic characters, they were around and common, you just never called Paul from wonder years that
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