Don't Panic

Full Frontal s01e25 

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

The only geographical pattern for autism is that it clusters in wealthy areas with highly educated parents - who are more likely to hire a good pediatrician, so they’re not clusters of autism, they’re clusters of autism diagnosis.

The term “autism” was not actually coined until 1911, and then it was used in Switzerland to talk about a subset of schizophrenics. It wasn’t used in its current sense until the 1940s, and until the 1960s it was still thought autism and schizophrenia were connected.

So, obviously, there’s no chance of people who lived before that being diagnosed. Analysis of people’s lives has sometimes indicated the possibility - it’s pretty commonly believed that Einstein was on the spectrum from the way he dealt with/didn’t deal with other people.

Now, here’s a big part of it.

The two major researchers who established autism were Hans Asperger in Germany and Leo Kanner in the United States.

Asperger’s view of autism was much like how we see it now - a spectrum, with some people only showing a few traits and some showing more of them.

Kanner thought it was a rare condition AND he thought it was caused by bad parenting. And THAT is the view of autism and autistics and parents of autistics that dominated in the US for a long term. He framed it as psychosis, favored institutionalization (because they needed to be rescued from the bad parents who caused it). And because he said it was a rare and severe psychosis only the most severe cases were counted.

What’s actually happening now is that people are acknowledging that Asperger was right and Kanner was wrong and counting the people Asperger would have counted all along.

Hence, sudden autism epidemic.