> understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice
Yes, this absolutely. You can't study something after altering it.
The "treatments" for people with any kind of neurodivergence (real, or imagined) in the past were often interventions that destroyed enough of their brain or body to prevent them from exhibiting any neurodivergent symptoms (e.g. lobotomy, EST/ECT, teeth-pulling[1], etc).
There is no direct link, but the point is that an increasing trend in diagnosis of ASD is not surprising when the baseline is coming from a time when doctors thought cutting out parts of your brain to make you more calm was a good idea. Basically, we shouldn't look at numbers reported by doctors willing to perform lobotomies for depression as a reliable indicator of the incidence of ASD in the population at the time.
We understood more about various conditions and treatments, so we stopped doing harmful things like lobotomies and refined the definitions on some conditions as needed. Those are not directly related though.
Sorry, still not that clear to me.
Are you saying that there is no direct link but rather understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice?
> understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice
Yes, this absolutely. You can't study something after altering it.
The "treatments" for people with any kind of neurodivergence (real, or imagined) in the past were often interventions that destroyed enough of their brain or body to prevent them from exhibiting any neurodivergent symptoms (e.g. lobotomy, EST/ECT, teeth-pulling[1], etc).
[1]: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/01/henry-cotton-psychiatr...
There is no direct link, but the point is that an increasing trend in diagnosis of ASD is not surprising when the baseline is coming from a time when doctors thought cutting out parts of your brain to make you more calm was a good idea. Basically, we shouldn't look at numbers reported by doctors willing to perform lobotomies for depression as a reliable indicator of the incidence of ASD in the population at the time.
We understood more about various conditions and treatments, so we stopped doing harmful things like lobotomies and refined the definitions on some conditions as needed. Those are not directly related though.