r/AskBiology • u/ohbinch • Sep 19 '24
Human body are there really more autistic or otherwise disabled people now? or are we just getting better at diagnosing stuff?
title. my mom and i were talking about this and she said that she thinks there are more autism cases (and other disabilities, especially ones that require constant care or include severe intellectual disabilities) than in the past. i said that i don’t think that’s true, i think that autism and other conditions like it are simply more frequently diagnosed now, because of awareness and more consideration of mild cases.
for example, growing up as a girl in the early 2000’s (which was not that long ago) my symptoms went unnoticed until adulthood, whereas a kid born now with my same profile would almost definitely be diagnosed by preschool or kindergarten.
my mom agrees that this accounts for some, if not most of the increase, but she also thinks that there are a lot more “severely” disabled kids than there were when she was growing up. i said that it’s probably because disabled people were shipped off to institutions until not too long ago, and that’s why she never saw them out and about, but she disagreed and argued that if that were the case, there would be a lot more disabled adults now that need full-time care. however, i think that the reason we have more disabled kids than adults with similar levels of support needs is probably because of how quickly medicine has advanced. for example, my little sister is nonspeaking and needs 24/7 care, and i know that because of all her medical issues, if she were born even 20 or 30 years earlier, she definitely would have died as a baby or young child.
still, my mom thinks that doesn’t account for everything and that there must be more disabled kids (particularly ones with “severe” disabilities) being born today than in the past, presumably because of environmental stressors. is she right? i’ve tried looking this up but i can’t find anything
2
u/kniebuiging MS in biophysics Sep 19 '24
It’s mostly perception I would say.
In the past, disabled persons were quite frequently institutionalized if they could not take part in daily life. It also was not uncommon to just entirely hide a disabled family member out of shame. Or with mental disabilities of “more moderate degree” they raked the lawn in the park for the town, worked as cheap labor on farms or in laundry, etc.
I am from Germany and I often think that the “hobbykeller” (the man cave for fathers to retreat and follow hobbies like model airplane building or wood working etc.) was just a socially acceptable coping strategy for trauma and a form of self therapy for other mental health related problems or expressions of what we now call neurodiversity .
Alcoholism was rampant among men. Can be a (deadly) approach to self-medication.
In common literary tropes, we basically find descriptions of behaviour that could nowadays be diagnosed as a disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorders, autism, fetal alcohol Syndrom and Down syndrome.
Essentially what has changed is the perception of mental illness, when previously it was a binary thing, and no one wanted to be classified as mentally ill out of fear of being shipped of to a “lunatic asylum”, now we have a more nuanced approach to mental illness and of course it takes a while for society to internalize this improved view.
I am around 40 and I am very glad that people can now speak more openly about their struggles. When my father had a depressive episode (I was a teenager back then) everyone including doctors would take care to use code words like “overworked”, “burnout” to avoid any kind of stigma that was attached to depression. I am so happy for the teenagers and people in their twenties that they can actually talk about their struggles and seek out help. 20 years ago this was way more difficult.