Apples and Automobiles

“Comparing apples and automobiles”: That is how one scientist describes what it is like to compare current prevalence rates for autism (1 in 150) to past, older rates. In an interview in the March 20th Bloomberg News, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker notes that comparing past and present rates of autism is also like “comparing apples and oranges” due to “different methods to study autism, different methods to count it, different definitions.” Grinker, author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, speaks about why the higher rates do not “necessarily mean there’s a true rise”; about “autisms”; about his response to his daughter Isabel being diagnosed with autism in 1994 (”getting the diagnosis of autism gave us a road map”); about extended families as offering much-needed “community support” for families; about Isabel’s “huge weaknesses” and “huge strengths.”

In response to the question “is there an autism epidemic in the world right now?”, Grinker notes how our better understanding of autism and more precise diagnostic criteria have led to more cases of autism being documented and thus accounted for: Far from being an epidemic, autism is, so to speak, pre-existing, and autistic persons have always been with us. It is only recently that we have been able to gather together all that we know about autism and identify as “autistic” people who may have had other diagnoses, or no diagnosis, before.

I have often heard people say “I did not know one person with autism before my child was diagnosed and now I see autism everywhere.” Can it be that we see more autism because we know more about it, and—as if remembering something which we had not even realized we had forgotten—we are only now, in the light of this new knowledge, able to see what has always been there and here?