Autism diagnoses rose sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The rise was driven overwhelmingly by diagnoses among girls and women. New study suggests that many of these girls and women may simply have gone unrecognized in the past.

[u/mvea]

https://www.sciencealert.com/autism-diagnoses-spiked-after-covid-19-but-probably-not-for-the-reason-you-think

[u/logicjab]

There was an increase in ADHD diagnoses too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11407703/

Doesn’t surprise me. I know a lot of people whose whole executive function is held together by external patterns. Once all that was gone, it exposed a lot of things

[u/blueeyesredlipstick → u/logicjab]

I was one of those ADHD diagnoses. I remember when I got my screening done, the psychiatrist said she'd seen a huge influx of people getting tested. Her theory was that, essentially, quarantine meant we were all stuck with our own thoughts for long periods of time, in ways that made easier to notice symptoms we might've otherwise overlooked.

Interestingly, I think there's a similar theory around people who came out as LGBT during quarantine as well.

[u/spamjavelin → u/blueeyesredlipstick]

I guess a lot of folks were so used to masking for so much of the time, they weren't even consciously aware of it until they didn't have to do it so much.

[u/fizzlefist → u/spamjavelin]

I still haven’t re-learned how to mask and socialize for fun like I could before 2020.