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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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