“Everyone’s autistic now.” But why?

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Friends —

Today, one in 31 kids is now diagnosed with autism. For boys, it’s now one out of 20.

Twenty-five years ago it was closer to one in 150 kids. Before that, it was even rarer.

Chicago’s public schools spend nearly $2 billion a year on special ed, almost double what they spent in 2019, and officials point straight to autism.

Numbers like that demand an explanation, and depending on who you ask, you’ll get one of three. Something in the environment is harming kids’ brains. Or it’s the same kids as always, and we just changed the definition. Or it’s become a racket, a label that scores your kid extra time on the SAT.

I didn’t really understand this debate until I dug into it.

Part of what pulled me in is how political it’s gotten. The Health Secretary is openly at war with the CDC over this. To a lot of parents with an autistic child, that makes him a hero, not a crank, and I get it.

I’ve watched medical scientists let politics override their judgment, and I’m convinced plenty of top experts flat-out lied during COVID. But that leaves us all in a bind. It’s true that sometimes the experts are wrong. But most of the time they aren’t. I’m still going to weigh a researcher who’s spent a career on a disease over some guy on a podcast.

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The thing I hadn’t appreciated going in was the autism infrastructure. Every institution that touches an autism diagnosis, from schools to insurers to researchers to the people who literally write the diagnostic manual, has a reason to hold the door open, and not one has a reason to close it. The man who chaired the 1994 manual revision now says he helped set off a “false epidemic.”

What stuck with me is who gets hurt in all this. It’s not the kids at the mild end. It’s the mother trying to get an aide for her nonverbal son, making her case to a system worn out by a decade of milder claims.

I just posted the full video here. I’d love to know what you think.

– Ken