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I think that like a lot of other things, our current environment makes people much more likely to notice and seek help for ever more mild symptoms of mental illness.
First of all, the demand on the human brain in the twenty-first century are much much higher than in the twentieth let alone the 19th. We didn’t rely on our brains as much, most people did less skilled work, and so if something was wrong with your brain, you might never have noticed. It’s hard to catch on to dyslexia if nobody around you reads above a third grade level because you’re not that much off of the perceived baseline. In the twenty-first century, any such problem would be noticed and fixed if possible because almost all liveable wage jobs are at least skilled trades or reading screens as a primary task. If you’re struggling in school, people are alert to it because they don’t want you suffering for it. Autism, at least in the milder forms may not have mattered as much in the early days of humanity. You’d just be kinda weird or eccentric and so on. People learned to live with your symptoms. That’s Jim, the weirdo who knows the names of thousands of birds and only eats white pasta. He’s mostly harmless.
The other thing is that medical care and especially mental health care is much more available (I’ve said before that I think therapeutic ideas don’t work for normal people and may make them worse) so if you’re having specific symptoms of something or your child is acting weird, you go see a doctor and if it’s autism, it’s diagnosed and treated as well as can be managed.
Both together would clearly make almost any mental illness more prevalent in the 21st century than the 19th. Not because there’s actually more mental illness but because there’s more medical care available and people are using it more. I expect a big increase now that therapy can be done over texts.
I think people are mistaking “a little odd” with autism. Autistic kids frequently are non verbal etc.
The reason Asperger Syndrome was rolled into Autism Spectrum Disorder was because careful review of the diagnostic criteria found the only difference: autism had early mutism, Asperger didn’t. Both had high and low functioning people, often with sensory issues.
Both also have subclinical expressions, people who clearly have it but aren’t impaired enough by it to need treatment or medication.
Yeah I guess I’m being unclear. I see most of these traits as following the typical bell curve in which you can have everything from the very high end (in this case highly sensitive, with severe communication problems, and repetitive behaviors) to the very low end where you end up with something a bit like Sheldon Cooper who’s awkward, has very specific needs for an unchanging environment and has special interests. The thing changing in my view, not just on autism but adhd and the like is the threshold at which a parent might seek help, or at which a teacher might suggest a problem and thus the symptoms are diagnosed. In 1900, a kid with adhd was just ditzy or a wild child or something like that. In 1900, Sheldon is weird, especially if he memorizes the train schedules or something. But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease. And even if they did sort of understand it as a disease, they didn’t seek help as often as we do today, in part because medicine in 1900 was harder to access and in part because it was not able to do nearly as much as it can today. By 2024, we’ve gotten much better at medicine and medical care is generally more available. Add in awareness and concern about neurological disorders especially as we move to a knowledge based economy, and you have a society that’s more likely to seek medical intervention for perceived mental illness or deficiencies.
Another thought:
Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.
(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)
It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.
For some it’s definitely a benefit. But my biggest concern is that a lot of these diagnoses are not only not true, but believing them can take a normal person and turn them into almost a basket-case simply because the therapies designed for serious mental illnesses don’t work, but can make things worse.
Having a depressed person focus on the depression and focus on healing might help, but if you take a person with a case of tge blues and make them focus on their feelings and think about it as part of them, you create a worsening depression. The person had problems that could have been solved easily, but it got medicalized. Or someone with poor discipline and organization skills gets diagnosed ADHD and has an excuse for not doing what they actually could have done all along, but chose not to. Too much focus on feelings over getting things done just seems to take minor problems and turn them into something serious and long lasting.
The other problem in FdB’s “gentrification of mental illness.” Especially when an illness is deemed a part of ADA protections, Theres often a push for people with extremely mild versions of the symptoms (and I’m wording it this way because I’m not convinced that the vast majority of new cases are actually that disease) to get their diagnosis and use the ADA protection to get ahead in life. Or Autism. The people who really actually suffer from these disorders often end up falling further behind because the stuff intended to make it possible for them to live a normal life are handed to people with no such disorders who then use that help to get ahead of their peers, let alone the kids who have actual mental illness. Worse, those with the real thing often end up facing the stigma of being told that they’re not trying because some normal kid they know got diagnosed with ADHD and got a phd in something and so the reason you can’t keep an office job and remember to answer the emails isn’t the ADHD, it’s that you’re lazy or stupid or incompetent or whatever. No, the guy who got his phd wasn’t really ADHD, and the guy who can’t keep an office job is, and now he has to try to explain that to a boss. Or the actually autistic kid who can’t have normal conversations gets compared to a kid with “autism” who’s actually is just slightly shy. I know people with ADHD, real honest-to-God adhd, not the gentrified version, and they can’t keep a job easily even with medication because they have a serious disability.
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Ironic for all the talk of postmodernity that we’re coming into our best scientific (modern) understandings yet of these neural modalities and structural differences at the same time people are primed to believe them a coincidental set of symptoms overhyped by the sellers of snake oil.
On a side note, there are still battles over the reputation of Doctor Asperger: in 2015, it was believed he heroically kept the Gestapo from taking his clinic’s young patients, but as of 2023 it’s believed he himself sent low-functioning kids to extermination.
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