Neurodivergent Adult's Unnamed Newsletter Issue 10, April 22 2024

The last full week of Autism Acceptance Month

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Neurodivergent Adult
April 22, 2024

Hi there! Can you believe that April is almost done already? This is the last full week of Autism Acceptance Month 2024, though there is still one more newsletter due to come out before it’s over. This week we’re looking at autism rates, autism news from the UK, and more.

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Are Autism Rates Increasing?

“We didn’t have all of this autism back in my day.” 
“Autism is made up by big pharma to sell pills.” 
“Ya’ll are just big babies with your made up diseases like autism.”

Chances are you’ve probably heard these exact words before, or something like them coming from older generations who believe that autism is some new thing that got made up in the 80s.

Of course, we know that autism is actually something that has been with humanity since our days of living in caves, but from the point of view of most older people it seemed as though it didn’t exist, and if it did then it was extremely rare.

Are autism rates increasing? Rates of diagnosis are increasing, but that doesn’t actually mean that there are more autistic people than there used to be. It means that we’re better at identifying autism in people and that people are going to doctors for it more frequently. But there were still autistic people even before diagnosis was as widespread as it is now, and even today you can be autistic without a formal diagnosis. How many people in the past were given the label “weird” or “a bit unusual” or … (I’m not actually going to use the word) the R-word. How often was it just said of people, “Oh that’s just Timmy, that’s how he is.” Dismissing autism as “that’s just how they are” because they didn’t know about autism yet. My husband didn’t find out he was autistic until he was nearly 40 because a lot of his quirks were shrugged off his entire life as, “That’s just Michael.”

Another factor that most people don’t take into consideration is population. In 1965 there were only 3.3 billion people on the earth. Fewer people means that statistically there were fewer autistic people. Today we’ve just broken the 8 billion threshold, more than double the amount of people quite simply means that statistically speaking there are more than double the autistic people too. Size isn’t the only thing that has to be taken into consideration though. There has also been a steady transition from rural living to living in cities. What difference does that make? Well, aside from having more access to people you also have to consider the differences in rural and urban living.

Life in the city is loud, some cities never stop being loud. That loudness adds to your day to day stress, even if you don’t realize it. Even if it isn’t what we would normally consider loud there are still constant noises that you can’t get away from. You can hear electricity, lights, the sound of the fridge never stops, there’s always someone mowing a lawn or doing laundry or blasting their TV far too loudly. If it’s not sounds then its bright lights or the horrible stench of an alley. There are so many more things creating stress in the world today that are making it difficult for autistic people to blend in with everyone else. It’s harder to mask and harder to get real rest from the stresses of the world. Which means that autistic people who might have previously been able to “pass” as a “normal” person can’t as easily as they once did. 

Modern western diets may also have a big role to play. There is some evidence that what you eat can impact how your autism displays. In the past diets were mainly minimally processed foods made at home using ingredients that were locally sourced and used fewer pesticides. Today in the west our diets are highly processed and heavily covered in pesticides, which has an impact on our gut microbiome, which, we’re learning, has a big role to play in your body, including how autistic you appear. Let me make this clear, the science has NOT proven that the modern western diet CAUSES autism. The evidence has shown that our diets may be making our autism symptoms more pronounced, which then in turn again makes it LOOK like there are more autistic people than there used to be.

Finally, it cannot be ignored that it is POSSIBLE that there are factors that we don’t know about yet that are causing autism to appear in families with no previous history of it. The world has changed a lot in the last 60 years and we still don’t fully understand the impact of all those changes, nor do we fully understand autism yet. It will take more time and more studies before we will know for certain. For most autistic people though it seems to run in the family, though it might skip generations, or appear in aunts and uncles rather than your parents. 

So are autism rates increasing? It’s impossible to know for sure. But one thing we know for certain is that it has always been with us.

Autism Memes

Undiagnosed Neurodivergence

Many of us who are neurodiverse don’t find out until we’re already well into adulthood and we have decades of struggling for unknown reasons under our belts. For me personally, I would constantly see people doing things that seemed so simple but then I couldn’t do it myself. Forming a new habit? They say it only takes 66 days to do it. It has never been that easy for me. If I manage to form a habit, and that’s a big if…we’re looking at a minimum of 90 days, though typically it’s much longer. I could never understand why forming habits was so hard for me…until I found out I have ADHD.

Of course learning that I have ADHD didn’t magically cure my inability to form habits. I don’t take any medication for my ADHD. Instead I prefer to design my life in a way that works with my ADHD. But discovering I have ADHD allows me to plan and have strategies to help me cope with the areas where I have difficulties. It was also a big confidence booster. My whole life I had been told I was lazy and that I could do great things if I just applied myself and I really took that to heart in all the worst ways. But it turns out…I’m not lazy and with a good strategy, I can get things done. 

The video game analogy is the perfect way to explain to people why you need diagnosis, be it in a formal setting or self-diagnosis. The more you know about yourself the more you can do to make the world a little bit easier for you to live in. 

A picture from my garden

The tulips are in full bloom on my balcony right now. I’ve only been gardening a couple of years now and all I have is my apartment balcony, but it has quickly become one of my favorite special interests.

Bogus Autism Cure and a Dating App - Autism News from the UK

This week there were two very different stories from the UK that caught my eye, so I’ve decided to cover them both. At the end of this segment there will also be several other links to news stories that I thought you might be interested in knowing about, so be sure to check them out too.

A rogue doctor from overseas may be performing unsanctioned and potentially dangerous experiments on autistic children claiming that the procedure will cure their autism. The Metropolitan Police in England are investigating reports of this rogue doctor who is offering “miracle autism cures” illegally, but so far no arrests have been made. For now, they are warning all parents to avoid this doctor and report any advertisements for these services that are seen. So far there is no evidence that anyone in the UK has actually been given this “cure” but the potential for it happening is being taken extremely seriously. This is currently centered around London, but has the potential to expand anywhere in the UK.

The second story from the UK also centers around London but it is a much happier story. There is a new dating app in London to help neurodivergent people find love. The dating app is called Mattr and available on both iphone and android. The app is inclusive of different needs and allows people to reply via video and voice activated text reading. Equally, to combat the overwhelm that a lot of autistic dating app users have, you can only have a maximum of seven connections a day. There are currently more than 1,000 users on the app just inside of London. The app’s developer hopes to open the app up to users across the UK. Though there is the potential for a much bigger expansion in my opinion. Only 32% of autistic adults are in romantic relationships and only 9% are married according to the Neurodiversity Foundation. 

More Autism News Stories:

That’s all for this week! I hope you have a fantastic week. Don’t forget to drink water!