One of the things that frightens parents—and leads them to avoid vaccines that have protected against potentially deadly or life-changing diseases such as measles or polio—is the alleged connection between autism and some of the vaccinations. Parents know that autism diagnoses have skyrocketed over the past few years, and, given how today’s little children are vaccine pincushions, they’re rightly worried. However, I’d like to suggest some alternative reasons for the increased number of diagnoses. My ideas are not based on studies or a medical degree (I don’t have one) but on a little bit of common sense.

Autism diagnoses are rising like crazy, increasing by 175% in the last decade. The prevalence of diagnoses is highest in children aged 5-8, but the rate of diagnoses in adults between 26 and 34 went up by 450%. No wonder that RFK Jr. is promising to study the phenomenon. Currently, he’s refusing to confirm or deny vaccines’ role in autism, implying (correctly) that it needs a reputable, broad-based study before we have an answer.

Image by Pixlr AI.

I actually know a little bit about autism because I have the pleasure of knowing Ido Kedar, the brilliant author of In Two Worlds (a book I helped edit, although it needed almost no editing). Ido is autistic in the way that everyone understood that diagnosis up until just a few years ago: That is, he’s non-verbal, has limited impulse control, and struggles badly with the various stimuli around him. Although Ido hasn’t blogged in a few years, you can get a sense of how his syndrome affects him by checking out the videos on his site.

People like Ido are very rare. In my many years, I’ve only known one other person with true non-verbal autism.

What’s changed a lot is that children are being diagnosed as autistic even though they are nothing like Ido. If you go to the National Institute of Mental Health, you learn that autism is now a spectrum. The manifestations no longer require the full disconnect from the world that Ido and the few others like him display. Instead, autism can now be diagnosed based upon things such as avoiding eye contact, being anti-social or not responding to social cues, being OCD with toys and objects, having obsessive interests, being hyperactive, having constipation, being very anxious, etc. (Mixed in with those behaviors are the more serious and obvious ones such as being non-verbal, flapping hands or doing other self-comforting physical routines, becoming overwhelmed by external stimuli, etc.)

Looking back on my life, I knew a ton of kids who didn’t look you in the eyes, were anti-social or socially clueless, were OCD, had obsessive interests, were hyperactive or anxious, etc. We called those kids geeks, nerds, and, eventually, dot.com billionaires who were geeky and nerdy. They weren’t victims of syndromes with names; they were just part of the vast bell curve of humanity.

In other words, part of the increase in diagnoses is that those who were once “strange” now have autism. I don’t know whether they benefit from having a diagnosis or not (on the one hand, you know you’re not just weird but, on the other hand, you now have a disease label), but there’s no doubt that this is part of the increase in diagnoses, including in older people.

But there are two other factors I haven’t seen discussed, both of which are tied to the failure to make eye contact, the inability to socialize correctly, and the anxiety. No one is talking about the effect of the lockdown on the little kids, the ones in the 5-8-year-old cohort who were locked up and masked when they should have been laying down the foundations for socialization.

Also, no one is talking about the effect of screens on children and young people. If your social life is texting (as is true for so many) and your activities are computer games (which is especially true for young men who spent hours in darkened rooms frantically flicking their thumbs while talking to disembodied voices)...well, yeah, you won’t understand eye contact, you won’t pick up on social cues, you’ll lack empathy, and you’ll probably have high anxiety in most social situations. This could describe many of the people in the age 24-36 cohort who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum issues. 

In other words, between COVID and our computerized society, our young people have become de-socialized. It’s entirely possible that they don’t have autism as it was traditionally understood, where their brains are so sensitive and absorptive that every noise is a thunderclap, every voice a scream, and every light a laser beam to the eyes.

Instead, I suspect that many of those more recently given the “autism spectrum diagnosis” have been raised without proper contact with the human race. This is something that can and should be reversed. Man is a social animal, and part of him becomes stunted and dies if that sociability is denied.

(A friend also suggests that the uptick in diagnoses is tied to the pharmaceutical industry, which is a different kind of societal problem. That effect can occur in two ways. The drugs given to children for ADHD and all sorts of other things that once were not chemically treated may cause the manifestations that lead to diagnoses. Alternatively, the diagnoses may be driven by the promise that the drugs can make a shy, antisocial, or eccentric child “normal.”)