Azeen Ghorayshi

Yeah, so autism diagnoses among children in the United States have been rising pretty consistently for decades.

In the year 2000, which is the first year that the CDC started collecting data on this question, they found that one in 158-year-olds in the United States had an autism diagnosis.

That number has risen consistently every year that they have published their report.

And the most recent data that they published, which came out this year,

found that one in 31 eight-year-olds has an autism diagnosis.

Yeah, and I mean, that's a huge increase, right?

And RFK really frames this as an epidemic.

He says, you know, there's something in our environment that is causing autism to spread like wildfire.

But that's misleading.

You know, from all the experts that I've spoken to, they've acknowledged that there are environmental factors that likely interact with our genetics that are contributing to the rise in autism.

You know, there's things like pollution, for example, that

people choosing to have children later in life.

But those are ultimately a really small part of the explanation for this rise.

And the biggest reason that we know of that is driving this increase actually has to do with how we define what autism is.

And that definition has been expanding over the last several decades.

Yes, but there has been a growing fight over whether this tent has grown too large.

These are fights over resources.

There are fights over research priorities.

Parents, activists, doctors, scientists who are researching this are starting to really grapple with whether everyone in the community is getting what they need, given that the needs of people under this very broad tent can be very different.

And one of the people I've been talking to for a while about these rising tensions is this psychologist named Kathy Lord.