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What do you think about the whole question of austim rates? I am listening to Trump's press conference from 2024/12/16 and at one point he talks about how he totally supports vaccines like the one against Polio, but he wants to research modern vaccines more thoroughly, and now we have 100 times the autism rates that we did back in the day?
My immediate reaction was to think that this is either false or just an artifact of reporting rates and aspects of modern society that have nothing to do with vaccines. But who knows, maybe there is actually some underlying real issue. I certainly don't believe that there is 100 times more autism now than there was back in the day, but I think it's certainly possible that maybe there's like 2 times more. Not saying there is, necessarily, but I find it credible at least.
My opinion is that most likely, supposed changes in autism rates have much more to do with changing social phenomena than with anything more on the biological level. The more humanity pushes mentally away from its instincts' origins back on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago, the more one will see supposed mental disorder rates go up. The more stress is necessary to turn a human infant into a modern human adult, the more mental trouble is probably likely.
To be fair, this is neither new or necessarily a bad thing. I am not a Christian, but I believe that Christianity did a lot of good in changing human morality from "haha tough shit you're a slave who got crucified, the gods must hate you" to "even the lowest man can talk to God".
And in doing this, Christianity pushed us a bit further from the monkeys. Which maybe added some stress to us, but also helped us a lot... and in any case, the added stress might be made up for by the new morality's tendency to make society less scary than one based on blood feuds, which then in turn might even help unlock creativity and scientific revolutions and economic prosperity and so on.
In any case, not sure how Christianity did it, I like reading about early Christianity but I still have no clear idea how it won against its competitors. Yet it is pretty clear to me that it pushed us further from the monkeys, despite its supposed core being the rather unscientific idea of having faith that a man a while ago rose from the dead.
Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?
But back to autism... what do self-reported autists think about the genesis of autism? My personal opinion is that autism is probably almost entirely determined by genetics and early upbringing, yet there may be cultural factors that make it so early childhoood development is extra stressful, in part because it takes us further away from the monkey. Which would tend to more and more children becoming in some way abnormal, because they face more childhood stresses in being made into a modern human. Which is not to say that is necessarily a bad thing. Mentally so-called abnormal people in the modern West are probably much less violent on average than the typical person back in the Bronze Age
Is there any reason to think that autism is well-defined? If there is, is there any reason to think that autism rates have been rising? And to be fair, if the rates were rising, would that even necessarily be a bad thing? It's hard to say, most self-reported autists whose words I've heard expressed that they would rather not be autistic. So I guess making there be less autism in the world would be a good thing. I don't know, I do know that there is also a very small subset of autists out there who think that autism is more like a new Homo species, similar to the whole X-Men concept of mutant superhumans. I write all this as someone who has very limited experience with autism. I have known autistic people before, but to a very limited degree. Apologies for any offense. My understanding of autism is mostly limited to the 4chan meme idea of "autism", not to the medically-defined phenomenon.
I think that like a lot of other things, our current environment makes people much more likely to notice and seek help for ever more mild symptoms of mental illness.
First of all, the demand on the human brain in the twenty-first century are much much higher than in the twentieth let alone the 19th. We didn’t rely on our brains as much, most people did less skilled work, and so if something was wrong with your brain, you might never have noticed. It’s hard to catch on to dyslexia if nobody around you reads above a third grade level because you’re not that much off of the perceived baseline. In the twenty-first century, any such problem would be noticed and fixed if possible because almost all liveable wage jobs are at least skilled trades or reading screens as a primary task. If you’re struggling in school, people are alert to it because they don’t want you suffering for it. Autism, at least in the milder forms may not have mattered as much in the early days of humanity. You’d just be kinda weird or eccentric and so on. People learned to live with your symptoms. That’s Jim, the weirdo who knows the names of thousands of birds and only eats white pasta. He’s mostly harmless.
The other thing is that medical care and especially mental health care is much more available (I’ve said before that I think therapeutic ideas don’t work for normal people and may make them worse) so if you’re having specific symptoms of something or your child is acting weird, you go see a doctor and if it’s autism, it’s diagnosed and treated as well as can be managed.
Both together would clearly make almost any mental illness more prevalent in the 21st century than the 19th. Not because there’s actually more mental illness but because there’s more medical care available and people are using it more. I expect a big increase now that therapy can be done over texts.
I think people are mistaking “a little odd” with autism. Autistic kids frequently are non verbal etc.
The reason Asperger Syndrome was rolled into Autism Spectrum Disorder was because careful review of the diagnostic criteria found the only difference: autism had early mutism, Asperger didn’t. Both had high and low functioning people, often with sensory issues.
Both also have subclinical expressions, people who clearly have it but aren’t impaired enough by it to need treatment or medication.
Yeah I guess I’m being unclear. I see most of these traits as following the typical bell curve in which you can have everything from the very high end (in this case highly sensitive, with severe communication problems, and repetitive behaviors) to the very low end where you end up with something a bit like Sheldon Cooper who’s awkward, has very specific needs for an unchanging environment and has special interests. The thing changing in my view, not just on autism but adhd and the like is the threshold at which a parent might seek help, or at which a teacher might suggest a problem and thus the symptoms are diagnosed. In 1900, a kid with adhd was just ditzy or a wild child or something like that. In 1900, Sheldon is weird, especially if he memorizes the train schedules or something. But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease. And even if they did sort of understand it as a disease, they didn’t seek help as often as we do today, in part because medicine in 1900 was harder to access and in part because it was not able to do nearly as much as it can today. By 2024, we’ve gotten much better at medicine and medical care is generally more available. Add in awareness and concern about neurological disorders especially as we move to a knowledge based economy, and you have a society that’s more likely to seek medical intervention for perceived mental illness or deficiencies.
Ironic for all the talk of postmodernity that we’re coming into our best scientific (modern) understandings yet of these neural modalities and structural differences at the same time people are primed to believe them a coincidental set of symptoms overhyped by the sellers of snake oil.
On a side note, there are still battles over the reputation of Doctor Asperger: in 2015, it was believed he heroically kept the Gestapo from taking his clinic’s young patients, but as of 2023 it’s believed he himself sent low-functioning kids to extermination.
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