If you’ve never heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, think of when you or one of your friends bought a particular type of car, say, a bright blue RAV4. Suddenly, you start to notice bright blue RAV4s everywhere. There aren’t actually that many more on the road than there were before, but you’re just noticing them more.
Given you’re a Good Oil reader, I’ll take a plunge and guess that you’re convinced a lot more young people are ‘dying suddenly’ than they used to.
Is this true, though? Or is it just that media are reporting it more? Or that they’re not reporting certain other critical information: for instance, media are heavily constrained from reporting suicide. So, if a young person commits suicide, media will rarely say so, instead reporting that they ‘died suddenly’.
But what you’re looking is ‘young people dying suddenly’ – and suddenly, it seems to be everywhere.
This is also known as the ‘frequency illusion’, and it has tremendous power to skew our perceptions of the world. If you’re of one particular ideological bent, it might appear to you that violence always seems to come from white males. Someone with an opposite inclination would notice that all the violent crimes seem to be committed by black males.
This is why we have things like statistics. Done properly, statistics can cut through the bullshit of our personal biases with cold, hard data. Done properly. Because statistics can be heavily dependent on initial assumptions and data collection methods. How survey questions are worded, for instance. Or how the samples are selected.
Most especially, though, definitions.
Definitions are critical. Consider a survey which finds that X per cent of teenagers ‘self harm’. But what do they mean by ‘self harm’? I suspect that most of you will think of ‘cutting’. In fact, the definition of ‘self-harm’ in the survey included things as mild as pinching. This is an extremely common gambit from media and activists: presenting the exception as if it were the rule.
Which brings us to the so-called ‘autism explosion’.
Let’s start with one unambiguous fact: More children are diagnosed with autism today than in the early 1990s.
According to a sweeping 2000 analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a range of 2–7 per 1,000, or roughly 0.5 percent of US children, were diagnosed with autism in the 1990s. That figure has risen to 1 in 35 kids, or roughly 3 percent.
For people such as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, this is proof positive of an ‘epidemic’. Worse, for Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer hammer, all things look like vaccine-induced nails. For Kennedy, who clings to the thoroughly debunked claim that ‘vaccines cause autism’, there can only be one answer.
Like all hammers bashing away at ideological nails, Kennedy is smashing at chimaeras. Mostly in ignorance.
Autism is a complex disorder with a range of manifestations that has long defied simple explanations, and it’s unlikely that we will ever identify a single “cause” of autism.
But scientists have learned a lot in the past 50 years, including identifying some of the most important risk factors. They are not, as Kennedy suggests, out in our environment. They are written into our genetics. What appeared to be a massive increase in autism was actually a byproduct of better screening and more awareness.
This is the crucial point.
Just like all those bright blue RAV4s you didn’t notice until your mate Dave got one, the ‘autism epidemic’ has likely always been there. It’s just that no one was looking as hard as they are now.
And, just like any other survey, definitions are critical.
For a long time, the criteria for diagnosing a person with autism was strictly based on speech development. But clinicians were increasingly observing children who could acquire basic language skills but still struggled with social communication – things like misunderstanding nonverbal cues or taking figurative language literally. Psychologists gradually broadened their definition of autism from a strict and narrow focus on language, culminating in a 2013 criteria that included a wide range of social and emotional symptoms with three subtypes – the autism spectrum disorder we’re familiar with today.
There’s the other key: autism spectrum disorder. Autism, unlike other fashionable causes, really is a spectrum. It ranges from a crippling disability to what most of us would otherwise dismiss as mere personality quirks.
Unfortunately, thanks to popular media, most people are conditioned to think of autism spectrum disorder in terms of Hollywood movies like Rain Man. But, like the teenage self-harm survey, those are the rare exceptions. Far more common is the milder, high-functioning end of the spectrum, including Asperger’s Syndrome. A great many people with mild ASD such as Asperger’s are able to function well enough that, outwardly, they appear simply a little eccentric.
So, we’re finding ‘more’ autism these days simply because doctors now know better what to look for.
It makes sense then, that as the broad criteria for autism expanded, more and more children would meet it, and autism rates would rise. That’s precisely what happened. And it means that the “epidemic” that Kennedy and other activists have been fixated on is mostly a diagnostic mirage.
Then there is the sad fact that, especially in places like Australia with its National Disability Insurance Scheme, there is a strong motivation for unscrupulous individuals to fish for an autism diagnosis. Indeed, some doctors tacitly advertise that a $5,000 fee will guarantee an autism diagnosis – and a lifetime of unquestioned welfare.
Kennedy’s zeal to improve the health of Americans is not a bad thing. The bad thing is that, like most zealots, he’s a hammer bashing away at the wrong nails.
