> Robert F. Kennedy junior, America’s health secretary, thinks that autism has become an “epidemic” in his country. His concern stems from figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which shows that the condition now affects 32 per 1,000 eight-year-old children in America (see chart). That is in contrast, he says, with the near-absence of the condition in his childhood. Mr Kennedy was born in the 1950s, and studies estimate a prevalence of autism to around two to four per 10,000 in the 1960s.
Read any old book (like from the 1800s), or look into anyone's family history. There is always some version of "Larry never leaves the farm". Nobody every diagnosed "Larry" so we don't know what he had and often we only have a small fraction of the symptoms recorded, but what we have sounds suspiciously like Autism (and one of a dozen other things we now have names for)
> The tunnels under the estate were reputed to have totalled 15 mi (24 km), connecting various underground chambers and above-ground buildings. They included a 1,000 yd (910 m) long tunnel between the house and the riding house, wide enough for several people to walk side by side. A more roughly constructed tunnel ran parallel to this for the use of his workmen.
> The duke was highly introverted and well known for his eccentricity; he did not want to meet people and never invited anyone to his home. He employed hundreds through his various construction projects, and though well paid, the employees were not allowed to speak to him or acknowledge him.
> He ventured outside mainly by night, when he was preceded by a lady servant carrying a lantern 40 yards (37 m) ahead of him. If he did walk out by day, the duke wore two overcoats, an extremely tall hat, an extremely high collar, and carried a very large umbrella behind which he tried to hide if someone addressed him.
> He insisted on a chicken roasting at all hours of the day and the servants brought him his food on heated trucks that ran on rails through the tunnels.
I think this explains at least some of it. In my childhood (1970s) as best I recall, these kids were hidden away. They went to separate special education schools or a separate classroom in the main school and didn't really mix with the rest of the kids. Today the attempt is made, for better or worse, to mainstream everyone as much as possible.
It still feels like there is more autism today compared to then though. I would guess that it's some combination of more people waiting to have kids until they are older, environmental factors, mania about cleanliness and sanitizing everything, maybe social factors such as putting more kids in daycare at a very young age, IDK. I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc. It was unusual among my friends as a kid, at least I don't remember it being common.
(read the other replies first, they make good points)
I knew plenty of kids in the 1970s that were "a little off" (probably including me), but they were not so bad that we would remove them from society which was the only option back then so we called them normal. Now that we have treatment we give it not only to those so autistic that they can't function in society at all, but also those who could function but not well and treat them.
No real argument, but I'm not talking about that long ago. When I was a kid, lots of parents smoked, in the house, in the car, everywhere. My father did. Yet I don't remember any of my friends having asthma or using inhalers. Peanut allergy is very common today, among my kids friends, several of them had it. Was almost unheard of when I was a kid, schools served peanut butter often at lunch. Nobody was ever asked what food allergies they had.
It's possible my anecdotes are not representative, but this is just what I have observed.
I think the argument still applies on a shorter timescale. The child mortality rate in the US fell from 26 per thousand in 1970 to 7 in 2020 [1]. It seems reasonable that some portion of kids that now have treatable but persistent illnesses such as allergies/asthma would have died just a few decades ago.
> Asthma was recognized in ancient Egypt and was treated by drinking an incense mixture known as kyphi. It was officially named as a specific respiratory problem by Hippocrates circa 450 BC, with the Greek word for "panting" forming the basis of our modern name. In 200 BC, it was believed to be at least partly related to the emotions.
You don't notice nearly as much as a kid as you do as an adult; nor do you get a representative picture of your friends.
Beyond that, there's a question of, while maybe they didn't have an inhaler, how many needed one but didn't get one due to awareness or whatnot? Or how many people had allergic reactions, because we didn't ask about their allergies?
Peanut allergies might be caused by poor advice in some cases. There was a period where people believed that babies should be protected from any food allergens, in case they were allergic. Later research suggested that early exposure to allergens might actually prevent allergies.
> I think this explains at least some of it. In my childhood (1970s) as best I recall, these kids were hidden away.
Depends. My childhood was in the 70s. Autistic kids with low support needs were labeled "gifted" and sent to the "gifted program" classroom one day a week. Autistic kids with high support needs were labeled "retarded" and kept in the special ed classroom all week.
In the 1970s it was still easy to just abandon the school system. Kids who didn't obviously thrive were usually treated as family burdens, and still mostly removed from society.
They also usually died young.
People with ADHD for example, are more prone to abusing drugs and alcohol. How many people died from alcoholism who were untreated ADHD cases?
>It still feels like there is more autism today compared to then though.
This is objectively true, do you know why? We changed the name of really poorly functioning people in some cases from "Mentally retarded" to "Autistic".
That's it.
Look at a graph of generic "mental retardation" diagnosis and it's fall coincides with the "rise" of autism diagnosis. Those people were always actually autistic, but we did not have the institutional knowledge and tools to know that, because the science of psychiatry and psychology is still in its infancy and struggled with rampant a-scientific thought even into today. Jordan Peterson for example is a "Jungian" trained psychologist even though that's not science, and he was fired when his college discovered he was leaning more on that unscientific worldview than actual hard science in his college courses.
>I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc.
The food allergies is real because a bunch of doctors were "nervous" about babies with peanut butter allergies, and without any scientific study or consideration, spent over a decade recommending parents not expose kids to peanuts.
Now that we have actually done the science, we know that was dead wrong, completely irresponsible, unscientific, and directly responsible for something like 8 million fully preventable peanut allergies. That's what happens when you let even medical professionals use their "intuition" rather than hard data. This is why medical studies blind those professionals. Doctors are not usually scientists.
There is no education that removes human biases and cognitive missteps, and it is impossible to cure yourself of the standard human fallacies. Statisticians can still become gambling addicts, and can still suffer from gambling fallacies when not being rigorous.
>I would guess that it's some combination of more people waiting to have kids until they are older, environmental factors, mania about cleanliness and sanitizing everything, maybe social factors such as putting more kids in daycare at a very young age, IDK.
The only one of these with any real evidence is that Geriatric Pregnancy is a known risk factor for autism. Everything else is nonsense.
Don't feed into the rampant misinformation and malicious refusal to learn what is already known by throwing out baseless guesses and letting them carry any weight. How often has one of your customers correctly guessed what caused a bug without understanding, access, and rigor? You are doing the same.
> In the 1970s it was still easy to just abandon the school system. Kids who didn't obviously thrive were usually treated as family burdens, and still mostly removed from society.
> They also usually died young.
> People with ADHD for example, are more prone to abusing drugs and alcohol. How many people died from alcoholism who were untreated ADHD cases?
Or suicide. Look at the suicide rate amongst those with autism even now. And when people take themselves out of society with drugs or alcohol we don't put much into figuring out why they chose that path. I recall a bit in a book by an ER doctor--one of the frequent fliers, brought in because they were found unconscious. When asked if he knew what brought him to the ER, responded alcohol. And one time he admitted why: he had been a sniper in the Serbian war and it was the only way he could keep from killing himself.
I believe that to a large degree the "drug" problem is a manifestation of other issues.
> This is objectively true, do you know why? We changed the name of really poorly functioning people in some cases from "Mentally retarded" to "Autistic".
> That's it.
> Look at a graph of generic "mental retardation" diagnosis and it's fall coincides with the "rise" of autism diagnosis. Those people were always actually autistic,
Exactly. There is no epidemic of autism, there is an "epidemic" of better diagnoses.
It could be, but the Wikipedia article notes that she may have also suffered a birth injury from hypoxia.
Rosemary's story is so tragic and heartbreaking. Her life was filled with what would today be considered multiple instances of medical malpractice, and heartless, unethical behavior on the part of the Kennedy family. Her father didn't even tell her mother about the lobotomy until after it was done.
Incredible that she lived to the age of 86. The nuns taking care of her might have actually cared, which could hardly be said of the Kennedy family.
Those are not unrelated. Both from my family and from looking at the research, there's a strong correlation between long/difficult births (sometimes explicitly hypoxia) and autism.
Would you mind pointing me at the research you found? I've been looking for studies that correlated hypoxia and autism (and related interventions that might help) but I haven't been successful.
Not that long ago (in the last decade) I spoke to a researcher working to identify autism in the womb. Seems odd thing to chase if it’s caused by birth difficulties.
JFK was great in some ways, but that political dynasty had serious problems even before RFK Jr.
The Wikipedia article paints this as partly driven by the political aspirations of the patriarch. I suspect this is yet another example of we'd be in much better shape if the US didn't have quasi-royalty, nor families aspiring to that.
The only reason JFK was JFK is because his older brother was killed in an aircraft mishap in WWII. Joe Kennedy, Jr. would have gotten the big political push if he'd lived.
I'd note that RFK Jr.'s very own aunt was lobotomized then hidden away for something that sounds a lot like autism if diagnosed today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy