A while back, when I was a teenager, there was a great hue and cry over the "increase" in teenage pregnancy. As soon as the excitement died down, it started to become obvious that there wasn't a significant rise in the percentage of teenage pregnancy, but a rise in two other things: the number reported as opposed to hidden, and the number of teenage girls.

This sudden "increase" in autism, I suspect, will turn out to be something similar.

Parents notice something wrong with their child's social skills and take him or her for analysis. This in itself is a break from the patterns of the past. In the past, children who were bright but had social deficits were just labelled by their peers (geeks, weirdos, and when older, eccentrics) and left alone -- often very alone, which is another problem. Those with serious behavior problems were put into one of the available diagnostic boxes that allows society to "manage" people. (Remember the deaf labelled as retarded?)

Now that we know about autism, expect more diagnoses of autism. But look at the older disorders, and see if the diagnoses of those have dropped before assuming that we have an epidemic of anything. Maybe we just have a statistical spike due to the new discoveries.

Btw, identifying the phenomenon formerly known as "eccentricity" as a disorder implies that it ought to be "cured". Is there anyone else besides me that finds that scary?

What if someone had "cured" Thomas Jefferson or Albert Einstein?

Regards--
Mary Anne