It’s like they used to say: Rich people are eccentric, poor people are crazy.
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@manybellsdown @peemlives
Additionally, Steve Silberman puts the start of the uptick to the point in the 70s when the DSM switched from Kanner’s diagnostic criteria, to Asperger’s ones.
Kanner, for his own reasons used a very restrictive set of criteria, whereas Asperger had earlier got pretty close to the ‘spectrum’ idea and realised that this was a ranged condition. So you (the US initially) went from a narrow diagnosis to a much wider one, and the number of people who satisfied the widened criteria also immediately jumped.
And then, absolutely, it slowly snowballed - as you rightly say, we continue to learn more, and also as more professionals gained knowledge (combined with increased public awareness) more people are being found and diagnosed.
The point that ‘we changed the criteria to a wider, but more correct set, in the 70s - which was followed by better detection due to more awareness’ should answer the question of why we started to see more cases, reasonably.
Especially with a side helping of ‘these people were always there, living miserably and unsupported and now we can help them’.
Of course, the person has to be open to new information. Frightened people often aren’t.
(If that happens, blow their minds by reminding them that autistic children grow into autistic adults, and statistically they walk past several every day without noticing. That’ll learn 'em. Wait for the ‘kaboom’)
[Edit: Sorry if this is a bit long. To be clear, I agreed with your posts, and wanted to add info that’s relevant -It’s kinda a special interest of mine. 
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In the US, we weren’t aware Asperger’s was a thing until the mid 1990s, and even then only in the communities with enough resources to be able to deal with it. We still have a ways to go in how we look at autism.
I recommend NeuroTribes for anyone who’s interested in the history of autism and its societal implications. It’s definitely a good jumping off point.
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I too add my recommendation for NeuroTribes.
It’s a wonderful layman’s history that puts the story together in a way that simply hadn’t been done before.
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Great Ghu Stefan, now you’ve done it – if the Orange Julius sees this he’ll start banning anyone from countries that export…cotton!
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Just for the record:
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All people opposed to vaccination I spoke to are “concerned”, not “opposed”.
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They all let doctors apply some vaccinations, but were concerned about “superfluous” ones, and, especially, combined vaccinations. Also, they didn’t like their kids to be vaccinated “so often, in such short intervals”. (That’s babies, mind!)
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All of them had had higher education, and were generally amiable and intelligent. Some of them were pursuing or already holding a PhD in a life science.
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None of them would change their mind and admit they were not thinking this through when I showed my disdain and tried to argue with then.
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When confronted with people critical towards vaccination more often, I started to think about my own approach. Since I worked in parts of the world where vaccinations against, e.g., typhoid fever are recommended (and already saved my life, most likely), I thought my doctors would have checked and I would have all the “normal” stuff refreshed.
I realised only last year that my own vaccinations are not complete, and that I never received vaccinations for mumps, measels, and rubella. Actually, I am going to a doctor TODAY to change that. That’s part of my motivation to write in this thread. My idea is to start with myself. And continue the discussion, but informed and with little to no presumptuousness. (sighs)
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Then they should go to the CDC website or the WHO’s and read up on them.
So they think they’re smarter on this specific subject than someone who spent about a decade learning about this, and has done it literally thousands of times. They also think they’re smarter than the medical literature. They should try out some humility.
Life science isn’t epidemiology or virology or medicine. Mayim Bialik has a PhD in neuroscience. That doesn’t make her qualified to give advice on people’s vaccines. She was wrong.
That’s normal. Smart people are good at rationalizing.
Your friends should stop hypothesizing and actually read the medical literature. “Too many too soon” has already been addressed by the scientific community, and the research shows there’s nothing to it.
Read the literature. It’s widely accessible for free online if you have a library card.
Thank you for contributing.
I have very dear friends of the family in Idaho who refuse to vaccinate their children, and who won’t let me talk to them about it because, and I quote: “you’re smarter than me, and you might change my mind.” The sweet, stupid morons.
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I used to be critical of people citing Idiocracy to make their point, but shit, we’re about 2/3 of the way there by now, how can I blame them anymore?
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As a child, I had all of the ‘usual’ childhood diseases: mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox. The vaccines didn’t exist at the time (I’m sorta old). I had these things all before 1st grade and I yet remember each and every one of them. Mainly because they were so horrible. But I do remember getting the polio vaccine. Don’t know if I’m remembering correctly, but I didn’t like this one at first. Shots. But I DO remember that later, perhaps follow-up versions were perfectly OK with me. Dosed sugar cubes! I liked sugar cubes!! But now, in my later years, the one I regret the most not having is the one for chicken pox or herpes zoster, which you are never rid of. It merely goes dormant for a long time. But then, the sucker can came back as shingles, with more and more likelihood the older you are. Some of you might not be familiar with shingles. Pray, pray that you never ever are. One part or another of your nervous system (leg, arm, chest, even head; just one at a time I think) will develop a rash with possible blistering to the point of scarring. This isn’t the main problem. That part of your nervous system (in my case it was my left leg) will register pain. Just pure fucking pain. If you get it in your chest, it will mimic a heart attack (the name ‘shingles’ seems to come from garbled Latin for girdle). Get it in your head and you can go blind. I’ve had shingles twice now in the left leg and it has just left me begging to be hospitalized.
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You can get a vaccine against shingles now!
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One thing that bothers me, at least partly because it never seems to come up, is that if they’re really so concerned about babies and children getting so many vaccinations, we could all work together to guarantee that no future generation has to have so many of them. All we have to do is what was done for smallpox: a concerted effort for a number of years to get everyone in the world vaccinated so that the disease no longer has a host and GOES AWAY FOREVER. That’s the real solution, not banking on your special snowflake never coming near the disease in their life, and/or getting only the mildest version of it before recovering completely without any ongoing issues. Talk about magical thinking.
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Thanks for sharing that perspective.
I get it on the right side of my face and in my right eye. I think I’m up to 3, maybe 4 bouts of shingles now, but it’s hard to tell because I apparently do not develop a rash with varicella or herpes zoster. I spent 35 years of my life believing I was just naturally immune to chicken pox, having gone through multiple exposures with no visible sign of it. Then I got shingles!
My husband was honestly afraid I was going to harm myself I was in so much pain. And my insurance won’t pay for the vaccine yet, because I’m too young. I’m just going to bite the bullet and pay it out of pocket at this point.
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But if diseases are eradicated, how will they be able to look down on the vaccinated ones as being Less Pure than they are?
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(I can’t bring myself to actually ‘like’ this, but thank you.)
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On top of a vaccine, there’s a wonderful WONDERFUL drug if you catch it fast enough. It saved my mother from having to go through a bunch of the pain. if you think you are developing shingles, get into the doctor immediately. The drug is pretty cheap (at least up here in Canada it is), and it basically stops the virus from multiplying. Interestingly enough, it’s the same drug used to treat herpes and… some other disease I can’t remember. Acyclovir is the family of drugs.
However, getting in quick is suuuuuuuuper important, because it doesn’t stop anything that’s already happened, just stops it from getting worse.
ETA:
It’s also one of the safest drugs you can take, from my understanding. Safe enough that when my mother went in, they didn’t actually know if it was shingles she was developing, and when she asked if there was any harm from taking it, the doctor actually said it was probably better to be safe than sorry. We’re 99% certain what she was developing was shingles, however, because a week or so later she ended up with some nerve pain for a few days… which is something known to happen from shingles.
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If you can feel it coming, the drug to stop it from getting worse is probably worth looking into. First sign of it coming back, get into the doctor. Not as good as preventing it entirely, but definitely better than going through the excruciating pain i understand full-blown shingles to be…
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See, the problem is, if I can’t get into my doctor immediately, I have to go to an urgent care and try to convince a random doctor that I really do have shingles with no rash. Some of them get rather rude about it.
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I wonder if you could get a prescription from your doctor that you can pick up whenever you need it from your pharmacist? If this is known to be an issue, maybe they’d be okay with it. Then whenever it starts up, you can just go pick up the drug.
Sounds like a really crappy situation to be in though 
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