If they could read or do comparisonal analysis or could formulate higher-functional abstraction in their frontal lobes, this would really make them think.

Remember Covid, don't report on things = they stop existing.

Well, get out of here with your logic and reason...

If I remember correctly, it fits the same overall curve of the number of reported left handed people over time after society stopped forcibly making people use their right hand. Shockingly, actually making an attempt at diagnosing people and tracking those diagnoses makes numbers go up.

Imagine the sexist fascist racist homophobe convicted Cheeto puff is also ablest, please keep adding adjectives that describe the 47th president of the Confederated States

It is the same story as gay infecting children's minds.

They are selling awareness as something to be afraid of. Which is yet another layer od evil.

I'm convinced my mom is on the spectrum and my grandparents

Instances of autism have skyrocketed since the discovery of autism and effective testing for it.

Clearly these tests are causing the autism. It's a conspiracy by Big Autist to make the world a quieter and more curious place. The railway companies are in on it too.

Sorry, it's actually a "best fits our narrative" line. I can see how you might have been confused.

I think it's just a trendline, not a line of best fit.

I'm a woman in my 40s who is probably autistic, but back then I was the wrong demographic and "too well behaved" to even consider diagnosis. I'm a typical example people think of when thinking about under diagnosis.

On the other hand, I work with people who have severe learning disabilities who also evaded diagnosis, or were diagnosed well into adulthood as diagnosis is difficult in someone so impaired. In another time, they would have been labelled with a grossly offensive term and just left. Better treatment of disabled people is probably another reason we see rising rates of diagnosis.

They're basically banking on people still thinking, autism is "intellectual disability, but quirkier and more difficult", while I have met "more severe" cases who did not had the ID part, they just were lucky to avoid the diagnosis for long, and thus people didn't pretend they're "too dumb to even learn to count to 10".

spectrum

Our species broadly doesn't think in terms of spectrums or nuance.

I burned years of my life trying to make arguments from reason and explain how there can be simultaneous truths or that issues are not black-and-white. It has NEVER stuck, not with friends, not with family, not with strangers on the internet.

People's minds largely do not work that way. We all HAVE to digest this and mourn it and let it pass through us so we can stop trying to argue with these blockheads in ways they can't even grasp. We can change them if we tell them stories about feelings, if we make them feel validated or heard, we can change them with careful, patient one-on-one care like a parent telling a child bedtime stories... but this takes a level of energy, empathy and patience that few of us have. Some do, I give massive respect to those who have dedicated their lives to this kind of outreach. I wish we had more.

Im confused, it's got both axis labeled and seems pretty easy to read.

Maybe points off for having the labels on the outside rim of the graphic.

Doesn't change the fact that classification of autism also changed over those years, but the graph itself is okay.

Yes. This is an artifact of a destigmatization coupled with better diagnostics for evaluating ASD. More people aren't autistic, more people are being diagnosed and receiving counseling for coping with the neurldivergence in a cold and uncaring neurotypical world.

That's the era they want to drag us back into, even if it costs us suicide and/or substance abuse.

What do you bet it's not even based on real data and it's just some random rectangles that they drew.

if you look at it for 1s it looks scary (if you're afraid of autism ig). if you look at it for 2s it doesn't make any fucking sense like, at all

Main problem is that its not really an axis at all.

When they collected the data in 2000, about seven 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 1992.

When they collected the data in 2002, about six 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 1994. This information was not labelled on the x axis.

When they collected the data in 2004, about eight 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 1996.

When they collected the data in 2006, about nine 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 1998. This information was not labelled on the x axis.

When they collected the data in 2008, about eleven 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 2000.

... I'm too lazy to continue but ...

When they collected the data in 2020, about twenty seven 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 2012.

When they collected the data in 2022, about thirty two 8 year olds out of 1000 had autism. Those children were born in 2014. This information was not labelled on the x axis.

I'm not positive i'm reading it right, but that's what I think they were trying to convey with this (terribly labeled) graph.

eta: yeah, rereading the subtitle, those numbers and years make sense