What’s your take? I’m not sure if I know of an historic case of it like IDK maybe 200 or 150 years ago but nowadays I have several cases near of autistic people, so what do you think is old or new?
What’s your take? I’m not sure if I know of an historic case of it like IDK maybe 200 or 150 years ago but nowadays I have several cases near of autistic people, so what do you think is old or new?
You know how there’s the old schoolhouse stereotype that there’s always a “weird kid” in every class? There’s a good chance that kid was an undiagnosed autist.
The current estimates for autism rates is around 1 in 30. Which means every classroom is expected to have 1 autistic kid. Matches perfectly with the “weird kid in class” stereotype. People recognized autism since forever. That’s why the stereotype exists. It’s just that they didn’t have an actual word for it yet.
Yeah even when I was in my school days there was always “that kid” anyway I feel like in recent days there is a lot more of that cases like it was something external what is causing it but anyway it’s just a feeling I guess.
I get what you mean. I’ve suspected it’s a combination of factors:
People have a name for it now. You can’t announce or be prideful about something that you don’t have a name for
People are more accepting of autism now. You’d be more incentivized to hide autism if people thought it was a bad thing
Autistic people tend to attract other autistic people. If you know one autistic person, you probably know a whole bunch of other autistic people too
But also, I just think that a lot of people underestimated how many people were autistic back then. A lot of high-functioning autistic people can pass for normal until you really get to know them. For instance, I’m like 99% sure that both of my parents are high-functioning autistic, and nobody ever suspected they might be. I brought up the possibility to them and their response was just, “yeah, I figured.”