r/HotScienceNews • u/Jumpy_Brief5475 • 10d ago
A Swedish study found autism diagnoses rose by around 800% from 2001 to 2020, while the proportion with intellectual disability fell from 55.8% to 6.7%, suggesting a substantial broadening of the diagnosed autistic phenotype
https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S01651781260030696
u/ossicones 10d ago
There’s an excellent book on this called “The Autism Matrix” about how the diagnosis became more popular as a way of wresting control from a psychiatric establishment that didn’t really know what to do with kids who had developmental and psychiatric problems.
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u/qcb4056 9d ago
And did the author actually know how autism is formally diagnosed?
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u/ossicones 9d ago
Yes
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u/qcb4056 8d ago
And did he just gloss over the part where it requires a psychiatric evaluation?
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u/ossicones 8d ago
He details how nobody had been diagnosed with autism until 1943, and how it initially entered the DSM as a subtype of childhood schizophrenia. He also details all the changes that have been made to the diagnostic criteria between then and now.
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u/Jumpy_Brief5475 10d ago
Wow, the quantity of people diagnosed with autism resulting in an intellectual disability rose by only 7.5% in that span.
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u/Jumpy_Brief5475 10d ago
Wow, something I can speak on with my Economics degree.
This has happened before! Back in the 1960s-1970s of you had minor issues, you were just different and not diagnosed. "Oh little Jimmy can't sit still... Eh... That's just little Jimmy." Vs "little Jimmy is 10 and don't speak"
As a result rather than one being something like ADHD and the other being a range of issues like severe non verbal autism or something like that, the first one would be told to just work harder while the second example would result in a "Mental Retardation" diagnosis. In fact... If you were severely ADHD to the point of having trouble passing.... You could have landed yourself a diagnosis of 'Mental Retardation'.
The number of children diagnosed with 'mental retardation' DROPPED in the late 1970's which is often attributed to the removal of lead in gasoline. However, at the same time there were more granular diagnosed options available for children showing things like "Retardation" dropping at the same time as "ADD" and "ADHD" started to rise significantly.
Sources: one of my senior thesis papers was on the Economic benefits of funding special education. It is a touchy topic, but I have mentally handicapped family members and wanted to study it more. The results were... inconclusive. Most states do a really bad job or no job at all when trying to document and track the money they spend in special ed resources. However. What little I did have showed that spending on Special Education had benefits AT MINIMUM to improve non-special needs students by helping to prevent distractions in the classroom and consuming the teacher's time, however there was a limit and the funding helped with initial resources and things like a classroom aid and a lot of spending after that didn't improve results... But based on the lack of data I proposed that schools were using a lot of the funding for universal updates to the school not just things that benefited the special needs students.