1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
You know how there's the old schoolhouse stereotype that there's always a "weird kid" in every class? There's a good chance that kid was an undiagnosed autist.
The current estimates for autism rates is around 1 in 30. Which means every classroom is expected to have 1 autistic kid. Matches perfectly with the "weird kid in class" stereotype. People recognized autism since forever. That's why the stereotype exists. It's just that they didn't have an actual word for it yet.
Yeah even when I was in my school days there was always "that kid" anyway I feel like in recent days there is a lot more of that cases like it was something external what is causing it but anyway it's just a feeling I guess.
I get what you mean. I've suspected it's a combination of factors:
People have a name for it now. You can't announce or be prideful about something that you don't have a name for
People are more accepting of autism now. You'd be more incentivized to hide autism if people thought it was a bad thing
Autistic people tend to attract other autistic people. If you know one autistic person, you probably know a whole bunch of other autistic people too
But also, I just think that a lot of people underestimated how many people were autistic back then. A lot of high-functioning autistic people can pass for normal until you really get to know them. For instance, I'm like 99% sure that both of my parents are high-functioning autistic, and nobody ever suspected they might be. I brought up the possibility to them and their response was just, "yeah, I figured."
I think it's old. I heard reference to it in old Yoga books. They called it "habitually one-pointed". They considered it desirable.
Also in a book about shamens. They called it the teaching disease. Because it teaches you some otherwise difficult to grasp stuff about reality.
"been developed"? *facepalm
Sorry about my shitty English, no es mi idioma principal pero podemos hablar perfectamente en español si gustas 😉😉
No hablo español. Perdona que me molestara el problema gramatical. No era mi intención ser ofensivo de ninguna manera.
The thing is that "been developed" strongly implies that there was an active and intentional developing (inventing) of it. Sadly there are many people that do pose such questions, purposely framed in that manner. So I suppose i reacted based on a misunderstanding of that meaning. Cheers and be well :)
Oh, now I understand — it was my fault, sorry. I’ve never been in any English-speaking country directly, so I don’t really know how words are used when you’re a native English speaker. In Spanish, we say “desarrollar” (“to develop”) not only when there’s an intentional action, but also, for example, when people get sick or have a condition — we say they “developed” the illness. In the case of autism, I understand that generally people are, let’s say, “normal” until a certain age, and it’s then that autism “develops,” so to speak.You don’t have to apologize at all.
I’m not bothered or anything. It’s just that my English is really bad sometimes, for that reason.
Others have answered but I feel obliged to add this.
Autism as a diagnosis is relatively new, but people would have always had traits that would be thought of as nowadays as autistic. As an example, Rube Waddell was a professional baseballer in 1897 who was so fascinated by firetrucks that he would run off the field mid-game to chase them.
Until the early 1900s, "mild" mental illness such as autism just didn't exist in a medical sense. People were "odd", "eccentric" etc and even after autism was formally recognised and studied in the 1940s it was virtually unheard of. Again, people were odd, a bit weird or eccentric.
There are no records of diagnosed cases of autism or similar before the 1900s because nobody recognised them for what they were.
Serious mental health issues have been recognised for thousands of years. Records of diagnoses of "lunacy" and "insanity" go back to the 1400s in the UK. Back then the cure was imprisonment in a cage and with regular blood letting and being plunged in cold water.
My only correction would be that autism isn't a mental illness. It's a difference in brain structure - synaptic density seems to play a significant role (https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/a-key-brain-difference-linked-to-autism-is-found-for-the-first-time-in-living-people/).
"Eccentric" would indeed have been the word, even as late as the 80s. And that's just men; women often present symptoms differently, or different symptoms entirely and even today ASD can go unnoticed for much longer in young women.
Back then the cure was imprisonment in a cage and with regular blood letting and being plunged in cold water.
And by drilling holes in the skull. Plus probably various other horrible 'treatments' that just created extra problems without fixing the original (and very vaguely understood) issue.
Is gravity something new or did it exist before Newton described it?
Here's a metaphor. With technological advancement we're discovering new stars every day. Does that mean they just appeared?
The old joke “what was the tallest mountain before Mt. Everest was discovered?”
“Mt. Everest”
Olympus Mons
The word is fairly new. But so is a shitton of other medical diagnosis like "cardiomyopathy", "congenital heart disease", " carditis", "aortic aneurysm", "peripheral artery disease", and on and on
I know you’re not supposed to diagnose historical figures, but Kant is like the textbook definition of autistic. He made the rule that he would smoke one pipeful of tobacco a day, and lamented for years that he couldn’t find a bigger pipe. His moral philosophy also demonstrates the kind of rigid thinking that is characteristic of autism.
I never correlated this but it sticks. Another notable probably autistic figure was Isaac Newton
I choose to believe that autism appeared only after the invention of railway, and you can't convince me otherwise.
I can't find it right now but if I could I'd post the one about the ancient greek or roman dude with a interest in ships that would watch them enter and leave port and knew each one by name
I think it was more specifically the creation of Thomas the Train engine.
Even as recently as 30 or 40 years ago, "problem" children would be hidden away, either in the home or sent to some sort of facility. Neuro divergence was a hidden issue.
I was "easily distracted" and "underperformed" and "could do better" at school. Always the "weird" kid. Only diagnosed when I was an adult because "autism" just wasn't really a thing*. This was 40+ years ago. The general treatment approach was getting The Belt haha or sent to my room, or sent to my gran's, or sent "out to play".
*edit: when I was a kid
And before that, we were doppelgangers that had stolen people's children away: https://youtube.com/shorts/WH5zYErWmAQ
We used to mark all sorts of neurodivergent people as "crazy" or "witches". But I'd also be interested in a historical source if someone has one.
Just because it's diagnosed easier now doesn't mean it didn't exist.
JFK invented it so he could destroy it
Some quick extra bullet points as I'm short on time and much of what I want to say has already been said in this thread:
(Autists perspective)
It's not new at all, the term has been around decades and itself has been around literally forever. It's a different brain development. There are many historical persons which are thought or know to have been autists (e. G. Einstein, Lewis Carroll, Dan Akroyd to just name a few over a longer timespan.)
It's also not having autism (as an optional trait) but rather being Autist (as a defining foundation).
Just like, say, mutations that also always happened to certain degrees.
Feel free to ask. Also, of course, that is my personal opinion where it is not scientifically proven.
"Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues." -Schopie complaining about overstimulation
It has been around as long as humans have.
I get the vibe that Gregor Mendal probably was autistic. Likewise, Da Vinci probably was ADHD.
we're a kind of people that's been around probably since forever. categorizing us the way modern psychology does is of course a more recent phenomenon. every culture since the dawn of time has had their own ways of handling and understanding variation in the species, but the variations have probably existed for as long as humans have, if not longer.
