Quote:
Originally Posted by Clodfobble
It's a question of overall prevalence. No doubt some people with autism have escaped diagnosis in the past, just as some do today, and I acknowledged that earlier. But it is impossible that all of the people currently diagnosed today would have escaped diagnosis in the past, because there are just too many of them. Far, far too many of them. I have posted my reading on the subject repeatedly--which Undertoad has also agreed to read, as an objective non-parent, and let us know what he thinks--as well as my own personal experience: as I said, I have personally sat in a room full of local autistic children who are not at a functioning level. They are not the handful of hyper-intelligent ones who manage to get by in school for a few years, they are the non-communicative, self-injurious, classically autistic ones, all diagnosed before the age of three, and they all live within my school district. This number of them simply could not have abounded in the past like they do now. These children would have been diagnosed. There are more cases today than there were in the past, and what's more, the rate appears to be accelerating.
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But it is indisputable that all of them evaded diagnosis in the past, or were misdiagnosed, because the diagnosis itself didn't exist until the 1940's and was not really in clinical use until the 1960's. It's come a long way in just the last twenty years, for that matter... my friend M is a social worker who specializes in working with severely autistic people, and in the past 20 years he's seen the diagnostic criteria, and treatment, change a lot... for the better, in his opinion. The definition of autism has been revised significantly, meaning far more people are now diagnosed with it.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/330/7483/112-d
A lot of disorders, such as ADHD, OCD, and depression, are sharply on the rise, and it's possible (perhaps even likely) that there are environmental factors, but I also suspect that diagnostic tools are simply getting a lot more refined and more people who would formerly not have been diagnosed at all, now are.