Comment by Seb-C
1 day ago
It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.
Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.
Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".
If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.
This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.
>It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.
>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.
A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.
Please read through this page shared here on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43813441
From the linked article:
"We can be certain that autism rates have gone up for artefactual reasons—diagnosis, changing awareness and incentives, etc. rather than real increases in the number of people with autism—by exploiting policy changes. For example, above, I mentioned the Massachusetts saw autism reports increase 400% in one year due to a change in school reporting."
This is exactly the issue that I'm getting at, which is shared with the above user's assertion. We cannot be certain of any of this. Especially not because of some handpicked examples by the author. None of this is provable or falsifiable, even if a the handful of disparate examples picked by the author seem compelling. Besides the examples of reporting changes, the author's arguments almost wholly rely on untestable counterfactuals.
Also:
"A single piece of evidence indicates that there is no real epidemic of autism. As remarked in a review in a 2020 Nature Reviews Disease Primers article:
No significant evidence is available supporting that autism is rarer in older people, which provides further evidence against the suggestion that autism is increasing in prevalence over time."
This doesn't provide evidence of anything. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. This is just an argument from ignorance. This is little different from saying that there is no significant evidence that people 500 years ago had lower rates of being diagnosed with a given disease, therefore the rates of people with that disease were likely the same as now.
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