And that’s even the ones who don’t need surgery (a lot do, particularly with the more severe versions) get that kind of thing.

I saw a case study recently, where there was a kid with this, above-normal IQ (which even normal IQ is supposedly quite rare for this), and had trouble socializing and with self-care skills, and was a “perfectionist” academically and in other areas of life. The explanation given, was that he was small for his age, so people did things for him that he could undoubtedly do for himself, and the social trouble was because he was small for his age, and the perfectionism academically must be to compensate for the social trouble. As in, a complicated, convoluted explanation for the kid probably being autistic.

And I see a lot of that kind of explaining away, and a lot of very autistic-seeming descriptions, being given in more medical-seeming ways rather than the psychiatric ways that autism is described by the psych profession. And I think a lot of people who have the things that look more medical, if they’re caught early enough (which depends on both severity and well-known-ness of the condition), it doesn’t come to people’s attention they could possibly be autistic.

(A bit of that’s a tangent off of what you wrote, but my attention span is still not what it could be.)

What I think makes it even more pertinent to the current “epidemic” nonsense is that doctors are only *now* gradually not doing that. As recently as 1998/1999 I was emailing with parents of disabled kids that in retrospect were clearly autistic, without *ever* hearing the term used. I had started seeing spectrum-related terms in the rare-disability forums the last few years, but there were still plenty of firm “it’s just his personality” or “it’s just because of the trauma” adherents there the last time I looked. Obviously, though, as more of them are converted to the right terminology, more are going to be included in official counts.

Another reason not having to do with that myth… Parents of kids with rare disabilities often relocate the whole family (temporarily or permanently) to be near a good surgical center. Those kids, if diagnosed autistic, then suddenly show up as if they’d been *born* in the state when they start school. Diagnosed or not, when they start going to school, they end up getting many of the same services. (25 years ago, also, I believe the kids like me were mainstreamed with our *developmental* services/accommodations under a physical category because of the “it’s part of the disability” myth.)

I am not jeffrey smith, but I can repeat this statement for myself in nearly every detail. And I can think of people I have known who in retrospect were almost certainly autistic, but had been described as being “odd”, “retarded”, or even (when I was hanging out with Christian fundamentalists) “demon-possessed”

One further point: in _Autism_ Ute Frith pointed out that during the period autism rates supposedly increased because of vaccines, diagnoses for generalized mental retardation decreased at a corresponding rate. Her conclusion, of course, was that this simply represented a change in diagnosic practices: that some children who would have previously been diagnosed with an undifferentiated lable of MR are now precisely labeled as autistic.

Until within a few years, it was generally assumed, even by those who were not given to easy assumptions, that because an idiot was, either wholly or in part, deficient in certain senses and instincts necessary, in combination with others, to the due performance of the ordinary functions of life- and because those senses and instincts could not be supplied- therefore nothing could be done for him, and he must always remain an object of pitiable isolation. But, a closer study of this subject has now demonstrated that the cultivation of such sense and instincts as the idiot is seen to possess, will besides frequently developing others that are latent within him but obscured, so brighten those glimmering lights, as immensely to improve his condition, both with reference to himself and to society. Consequently there is no greater justification for abandoning him, in his degree, than for abandoning any other human creature.

A few pages later, the article concludes with the hope that- if humane and decent treatment of “idiots” continues- someday Shakespeare will be annotated to say “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound instruction, signifying something.”

There are also, of course, a great number of traits and behaviours which once considered pathological are now considered healthy and “okay”. The same will undoubtedly be the case in the future.