Demand for autism care is soaring | Hacker News Reader

Demand for autism care is soaring

economist.com

23 pointsandsoitis40 comments

This UK government posted a report recently, which I guess prompted this article.

Review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism: interim report (gov.uk). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-revie...

This is just for England not the whole UK. Just saying. In Scotland, there has been a move to have an autism commissioner as if that's going to benefit the lives of most autistic people. Don't know about Wales and Northern Ireland.

Earlier this week, the NYT also published this (to me, very moving) account of a nonverbal autistic man going to graduate school and publishing a novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/books/review/woody-brown-...

It's amazing how much we continue to learn about these conditions.

I have SchizoAffective Disorder, I also have a Major Mood disorder, and depression. When I was 5, they thought I had autism, but I did an IQ test and had the mental age of 12, and said autism didn't apply to me because I have a high IQ. They didn't know about high-functioning autism back then. So I think I was misdiagnosed. I think I am on the spectrum somewhere on the high end. I learn fast, but sometimes forget what I learned. I am 57 now.

There is a huge amount of overlap between the genes associated with schizophrenia and the genes associated with autism. This is part of what makes it tricky to diagnose yourself, because anyone who has the genes for schizophrenia is also going to have a lot of autism symptoms even if they don't have autism.

I’m 42 but British. I was a weird kid, but over in Blighty autism wasn’t something that was even considered back then - just “how much more do we need to cane him until he’s normal?!”.

It turns out, no amount. Now I’m just a weird adult with an ironclad distrust of all authority.

I was similar - primary school teacher wrote home to my parents asking their permission to slipper me (it was a no).

Diagnosed with adhd last year at 45, scored ridiculously high on self test aspie but no incentive to get an autism diagnosis atm (my wife is worried the far right will get in and they’ll go after the autistics).

Would have been nice to have had a diagnosis as a kid though - my life would have been quite different (maybe more hugs less drugs)

My parents weren’t consulted - public school allowed it up until 2001, I believe.

Anyway, I just got really good at masking, and learning to understand systems such that I might subvert them. Sociality and conformance just didn’t really matter to me, they didn’t have intrinsic value - so I learned to act the part, and figured out the least effort methods to hack people into approving of me, whereby I could gain personal agency. They trained a sociopath.

It’s gonna be interesting to see what the future will be like, when today’s kids who’ve actually had support and nurture rather than an endless cycle of punishment are really running the show - fewer crazy fucks like me out there ruining shit for the rest of humanity, that’s for sure.

I am a bit older and i grew up in New Jersey, and it wasn't much different. My teacher once told me she was going to cut my finger off because i always counted with them . Punk rock saved my life .

> Once diagnosed, many children receive Applied Behaviour Analysis (aba)

Shameless plug but to see ABA data better, I built a site with the Observable Framework[1] that analyzes sessions at: https://behavior.today

[1] https://github.com/observablehq/framework

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't behavioural therapy considered abuse by many autistics?

Yes. It's essentially conversation therapy.

I assume you made a typo and meant "conversion therapy". :)

Thanks for confirming! Do you have any good resources about this?

nice, that's genius. great idea!

Thank you

Wasn't autism care also one of the avenues for fraud recently highlighted in Minnesota et al?

I'm seeing the opposite happening.

The ability to focus to the point of obsession or find joy in boring repetitive tasks associated with autism helped before the rise of AI and automation. Now, interpersonal communication and creativity (not in the sense of art but a lack of rigidity in one's thinking) are far more valuable - the things people with autism famously lack.

Are the soaring diagnosis because the frequency of autism in the general population is increasing? Or just increasing education and diagnosis

It is primarily driven by the expansion of the diagnosis itself. DSM-3 Autism (1980) is quite different from DSM-5 Autism (today). We use the same word to describe two different things. Today's autism includes things that used to have totally different names. It also "allows" for a diagnosis much later in life. Autism used to be something very specific and discreet. From another perspective, the rate may not be soaring. That is, many more people in the 1980s and 1990s would be autistic by today's new standard.

That's just because today we understand it better. What "autism" used to mean is a certain set of comorbidities that appear to be caused by autism combined with external factors, but that's just because we didn't know how things were connecting to each other back then (and there appears to still be a lot to learn about that).

This is almost not even up for debate anymore. At this point there is myriad evidence of it being the latter. For example, autism in women was all but ignored until recently, and is still under-diagnosed. Remember Grandma and her lifelong fixation on china saucers or whatever?

Yes, I do remember. That was a latent effect of the great depression mixed with grandma not having to work so that was her hobby. Pretty tired of having a hobby or specific domain knowledge being labeled as "lol autism".

Autism as a contemporary identity and autism as a DSM-V diagnosis seem to have diverged in the past few years.

It's because people have discovered that (1) motte and bailey fallacies [0] and equivocation of language (between, e.g. identity and diagnosis) are highly effective rhetorical tools; (2) merely identifying as something ontologically changes the metaphysical structure of reality [1] which confers certain societal benefits.

There is a matrix of is-diagnosed, is-not-diagnosed, identifies-as, does-not-identify-as, which is open to exploitation by those who "identify as" something they are not diagnosed with. Who gets fucked? The people who are diagnosed but do not identify as their diagnosis.

God help me once we start adding another dimension of people who have a condition, but are also not diagnosed and do not identify with it either...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165

More diagnosis for sure

An autist, properly managed, is a wonderful employee. Way better than "normies". Great for science and engineering. Strong motive for creating more autists.

“An autist”—get off of 4chan.

Autism is a varied condition and the stereotype that you are referring to does not apply to a very, very sizeable portion of people with autism.

Well then some significant proportion of "persons of autismness" are really good at that stuff.

They really know how to concentrate. It's next level, unknown by the normies. You want a guy who can give his full obsessive waking attention to a riddle for days or years, that's where you look. And that makes them valuable. Which brings us to my actual point.

I don't really understand the extremity of the "autism is a spectrum" thing. Yes, of course it is. Nothing in the parent comment is disrespectful of that or 4chan-y. I see this mysterious interaction a lot.

It’s now viewed as levels depending on the amount of support needed. Level 1 may be able to mask compared to level 2 or 3, allowing them to be more part of society, but we still need accommodations otherwise we will burn out.

There is a popular narrative about autism. Damaged, deficient, etc.

Digression from this narrative is often met with hostility. That's popular, emotionally-charged narratives for you.

In your unpopular but assuredly more accurate narrative are all people diagnosed with autism misunderstood STEM high performers ?

If not all, what percentage?

That isn't my narrative.

And this is just more of that darn hostility to which I referred. It blots out rational conversation.

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