Evidence against ASD "epidemic" - the great reclassification

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I think there may be two contributors to autism recognition:

1. Mass education, mass culture and generally mass life makes any individuals who "stand out" more noticeable even if they could function quite well on their own / with local support of family and neighbours;
2. The extreme cases that used to be considered "mental retardation" etc. are only now starting to be a bit better understood.

Not autism related but my mother in law once told me about her brother who barely finished primary school, gaining opinion of an idiot because he was unable to learn orthography. He worked as a farmer so low opinion on his mental abilities didn't matter too much. Then he constructed a homemade electrical instalation (such times...) that was very smart and certainly disproved his idiocy. My mother in law concluded, he must have been dyslexic but no one knew of the condition back in post-war communist Polish countryside, so his teachers decided he was simply stupid - which he wasn't.

The neurodiverse conditions have always been there but only now we are starting to recognize them.

That is very true. I was at school from 1961-1975. I was very probably Aspergic, had dysgraphia,dyspraxia, and a learning difficulty , but was just described as badly coordinated,bad at drawing and writing, disorganised and messy.
That was as far as any recognition of things went. There wasn't the knowledge base of such things as there is now.

It took 45 years for any professional to see that there might be more going on than just mental illness. The result was substandard care and treatment.

As said during the 1960s if you were mildly autistic you were thought to be “weird”, ”eccentric”, “space cadet”, “painfully shy”, ”loner”, “having your head stuck up your ass”, homo/fa***t/queer. That made you a target in an era when bullying was thought to be a natural part of growing up , “boys being boys”. If you were more severely autistic you were thought to be deaf or a “mental cripple”. You were institutionalized for life in a hell hole or if your parents could not afford that chained to the bed in the attic or dumped in the street. There was still a massive stigma about mental illness, nobody talked about it. Outside of the immediate family either the person did not exist or if a person was locked upstairs and word got out that persons window became a target practice for local teenagers with rocks.

There was less sensory stimulation and less group projects required with the ensuing open classrooms. This means that people who would have struggled in the 1960s, can not hack today and need professional help.

^ My village vicar wrote to my housemaster about the fact I was being bullied . My housemaster's response was that some boys lent themselves to being bullied . That was at the end of 1970/beginning of 1971 .

I tend to agree with most here, that yeah, we are just getting smarter about seeing it and diagnosing it, as in the case of identifying more women with ASD. In the face of that, it doesn't seem as likely that the incidence of ASD would have increased so rapidly without an obvious cause.

But I also hold that 'other' maternal/environmental factors *could* play a role in etiology, and we just haven't been able to identify them yet. If the cause is also environmental, not just genetic, then these could increase as exposure to factor increases in our rapidly changing world.

I sort-of lean into the genetic causation myself as it seems pretty obvious to me that behind those diagnosed children there lurks an un-diagnosed parent; which further supports my initial statement here--and that of other posters.

On the genetic front- I've never noticed any signs of it within my immediate family. Having said that my stepdaughter has said my father is rather like me. The fact that he worked for the Foreign office for over 30 years which involved much interacting with other people,and the need for tact, rather puts the dampener on him being on the spectrum. Perhaps people on the spectrum are more likely to share certain non autistic like traits with a parent.

Not necessarily. John Michael Carley, founder of GRASP, worked as a minor diplomat at one point in his life. In one of his writings (which I can't find offhand) he explained that diplomatic interactions are highly structured and formulaic, dictated by policy and tradition, hence do not require the kind of on-the-fly social thinking that is required in ordinary chit chat. Hence it is not impossible for an autistic person to be at least a minor diplomat.

Anyhow, regarding the general question of why autism wasn't noticed earlier: The most important difference between the old days and today is that, back in the 1800's and earlier, most jobs did not require very much in the way of social skills beyond basic good manners. Social expectations have ratcheted up since then, and noticeably so, even within my lifetime. Even as recently as the 1980's and early 1990's, geeks were more-or-less expected to be geeky. Now even geeks are required to have "excellent communication skills."

Personal story time: I didn't learn to talk until age 4. In kindergarten I was frequently punished for various "bad behavior," most of which I don't remember what it was. Toward the end of the school year, my kindergarten teacher told my parents that I needed to either repeat kindergarten or attend a smaller school.

My parents opted to send me to a small Lutheran parochial school. Thanks in part to the tutoring my parents gave me at home, I did well academically once I got into first grade, although I did not do well socially at all, nor did I do well in gym.

My parents were very proud of my academic performance, having worried earlier that I might be "ret*d." My parents didn't worry too much about my inability to fit in with age-peers.

^^Things may have changed in terms of how such things are described and ranked since my father took early retirement in the mid 1980s . His last two roles at the FO were Head of migration and visa dept , and consul general in Atlanta . The equivalent army ranking was brigadier. He has a 'Who's who' entry.

The ongoing idea at the time was it was your fault because you did something to start it or you did not fight back, or fought back and lost. People are winners and losers. If you were unwilling or unable to fight back you were weak, a loser, a wimp, a wuss.


There were certain jobs such as accountant, or computer programmer were you were expected be in a corner doing your thing. When I entered the workforce at the beginning of the 1980s I was often told that while your and you boss not hating each was a good thing all that was needed was that the relationship be professional, “This is a place of business, not a social club”.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 13 Jul 2019, 11:31 am, edited 2 times in total.

That's an interesting point.

As far as Autism not being recognized until the early 1900s and the influx of diagnoses in the 90s, that's difficult to say. There have always been syndromes and disorders that were similar. That happens a lot in medical history as doctors, parents, and teachers become more familiar with something and it's researched more. I think the same thing sort of happened with ADHD.

I recommend reading Neurotribes, it's a book about the history of Autism. I haven't finished it yet but I'm sure it has a lot of insight on the influx of diagnoses.

My parents didn't care about social stuff and my lack of interest in peers too and I don't remember my teachers talking about it. I think I went under the radar undiagnosed in childhood (in the 90s, no less) because I didn't have any "troubling" things going on and I was a "good" kid. I think that may have happened a lot to kids who didn't have severe outbursts or other such issues.

My son is almost seven and is doing really well in school, although he doesn't really care about other kids. I stayed home with him when he was a baby through pre-k. I had a background in early childhood education and I knew about Autism before he was born. I think I did pretty well as a parent and teaching stuff. However, I he did exceptionally better with social stuff and learning more when he started going to preschool half days.

You're right in that it used to be the family unit that primarily taught social skills, I may have misread your post in that sense. I think I'm just not entirely sure of the "how" and "why" behind that could correlate with the increase in diagnoses. I'll have to look into that more. You've definitely given me something to think about!

I have Autism and I work in a pretty social environment. It's hard for me but I had to work really hard to get to where I can be functional and learn different social scripts. I adapted, and I think most of us who were never diagnosed/not diagnosed until later have done the same thing. I suffer from burnout faster than NT people do I think, but I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't guess I'm Autistic (even with all my sensory issues and panic attacks) because I've learned to adapt and manage some of it, and even use it to my advantage. It means my career and higher education path were delayed and not straightforward but I'm successful, and I don't doubt that many Autistic people could be and are successful.

You might well be right, but personally speaking I don't think I ever did. I was always considered as odd , with that being attributed to severe mental illness . I was never in a situation where adapting or trying to adapt was essential. Bottom line I haven't got a clue about 'social scripts'

It still doesn't really make sense to me most of the time, so I definitely understand. It's been a form of survival for me. I was abused and had to learn how to survive.

I just now Googled Vygotsky to see what you were talking about here. It would appear that the social interaction Vygotsky talked about was primarily with adults and primarily parents. See, for example: https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html . So Vygotsky's theories do not, at all, appear to contradict anything I said about how the societal trend toward group daycare may have been good for NT children but not good for autistic children.


I'd like to start a separate thread about the controversy regarding ABA, if that's okay with you, to avoid derailing this thread.


ABA, being very expensive, was not and could not have been widespread until a lot of states passed laws requiring insurance to cover it, which didn't happen until after 2000, largely in response to lobbying by various parent-oriented organizations. But it has a long history of use by a relatively small number of relatively wealthy families, going all the way back to the 1960's.

Anyhow, on other topics, please see my reply to you here.