Why is an increase in diagnosis an increase in awareness? All they have literally done is make diagnostic standards more lax and decided to up the amount of diagnosis. The diagnosis is extremely relativistic and you can draw the line between autistic and not autistic wherever you please. Diagnosis is done on an overwhelmingly subjective and culturally bias way (E.G. lack of eye contact being seen as socially incompetent rather than respectful)
We just decided to call more people autistic, we didn’t become more aware. I’m still awaiting any research, at all, to suggest that diagnosis with autism actually helps the people diagnosed at all. Never mind helping them enough to outweigh the various costs of medical treatment and various entitlements received post-diagnosis. I just hear if we call more people autistic that means we’re more aware and that’s fantastic!
The CONSTANT diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless (because it might have been conducted when 5x less people were considered autistic). I’d very much argue diagnostic instability is actually SABOTAGING autism awareness not helping with it.
> Why is an increase in diagnosis an increase in awareness?
Other way around, I would argue increased awareness -> increased diagnoses. Why? Because a lot more people know what the words "autism" and "aspergers" mean today than 30 years ago.
A feedback loop where diagnosis -> incr. awareness -> diagnosis seems plausible and has a nice simple mechanism. So I guess increased diagnoses would lead to increased awareness too.
> you can draw the line between autistic and not autistic wherever you please.
Agree, this is what makes psych evaluations so tricky. It's hard to have rigour for human mental complexity. My prefered view on this is that autism is defined by a series of correlated traits which are all continous variables, we define autism as someone who has 1 or more of those traits in the tail of that trait's distribution. e.g. very low social ability or very high impact sensory disorders.
You can whinge all you like about where the line is drawn, but the fact is the line has to be drawn through six dimensions and none of those dimensions is easy to measure.
> various entitlements received post-diagnosis
Most people with an autism diagnosis (level 1) do not have access to any entitlements. This is a common argument against self-diagnosis which holds no water.
> diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless
Clinical researchers routinely sub-divide groups with a diagnosis based on severity. You can do this with autism in much the same way we do it with cancer. So broadening the diagnostic criteria doesn't impact statistical effect size and thus your argument is incorrect.
Regardless the last point, while theoretically you’re correct, in practice trying to rank autistics by severity seems both difficult to do objectively and it’s politically controversial as ranking autistics in such ways has been used to justify taking away benefits OR autonomy.
In any case you raise a good point insofar that research on what is called “level 2 autism” and “level 3 autism” is more constant over time but it’s the research on “level 1 autism” I would take with a serious grain of salt especially the more pessimistic research. Because it was usually done on people who were on average more impaired than the people being diagnosed today, and that can result in people making bad conclusions about how life is for most people that we call Autistic.
I don’t know, this whole phenomenon is quite troublesome I reckon and bound to cause particularly unwarranted and inaccurate prejudices. I’ve already witnessed this happen many many times.
We just decided to call more people autistic, we didn’t become more aware. I’m still awaiting any research, at all, to suggest that diagnosis with autism actually helps the people diagnosed at all. Never mind helping them enough to outweigh the various costs of medical treatment and various entitlements received post-diagnosis. I just hear if we call more people autistic that means we’re more aware and that’s fantastic!
The CONSTANT diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless (because it might have been conducted when 5x less people were considered autistic). I’d very much argue diagnostic instability is actually SABOTAGING autism awareness not helping with it.