The Science Vs. podcast just did an episode on this.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2eKgmLJZrEKTbVzCVYzp0u
Spoiler: It’s exactly as the meme describes. Autism rates are rising not because more people are becoming autistic, but because we’ve expanded the definition and improved how we recognize and diagnose it.
improved how we recognize and diagnose it.
Well, we at least have changed how we recognize and diagnose it, I’m not totally convinced it’s 100% an “improvement”. We’ve kind of jumbled up a whole bunch of people under a common umbrella and diluted the implications of the term, to the point where it tells you negligible practical information when someone is described as “autistic” or “on the spectrum”.
Yeah, that’s a totally fair concern and is one of the points the episode addresses. Researchers acknowledged that the definition has broadened, but they also emphasized that it reflects a better understanding of autism as a spectrum. It does make the label less specific, but it’s also helped a lot of people. Especially women and people of color. It helped them get more accurate diagnoses instead of being misdiagnosed or ignored.
Overall, it’s a stat worth celebrating as it means more people are getting the support they needed all along.
I hope that’s the net result, just afraid that so many others will be dismissive of someone asserting autism, particularly with certain folks seeming to think being autistic is a license to be inconsiderate while claiming it also means you are smart and so is worth declaring a self-diagnosis.
Probably the same reason there’s so much more breast cancer since the invention of the mammography machine.
hey guys! If we stop testing for covid, the number of covid cases will go down!
slowbro.pcx
Why are people so fucking dumb?
“Probably”? Can someone point me in the direction of something slightly more conclusive? Cuz it could be that… but I could totally also believe that it’s chemicals and shit in our food and environment.
somebody get that graph of left handed people
Everytime a magat brings this up I always hit them with the counter conspiracy that it’s the microplastics
People still believe that long debunked “study” Wakefield did? it’s because autism is more recognised now. my mom recently got diagnosed and she’s in her 50s
Do we know if autism is genetic? Otherwise the question is not entirely wrong. There could be a cultural influence that we should figure out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the factors is ‘we stopped beating kids’. Back in ye olden days, they’d hit kids until they stopped being ‘weird’. You obviously can’t do that today.
Wasn’t Pluto “discovered” around the time autism was first “diagnosed”?
Aha! So it was Pluto causing autism and the push to reclass it as a dwarf planet was an attempt to reduce its power!
This is so on point it kinda hurts.
Sick burn.
