dollsahoy:

thatnanda:

a-dash-of-salt:

I just saw a gross post claiming that autism is exclusively due to vaccines and that’s why “you’ll never meet a person over twenty that has autism”.

And, hey, just for fun feel free to reblog if you happen to know someone over twenty diagnosed with autism. Which means all my followers are officially allowed to reblog. 

What?! Almost everyone I know on the spectrum is over 20! Most of them are over 30/pushing 40.

Furthermore, is that implying that people weren’t getting vaccinated more than 20 years ago?  because…we definitely were…  The whole reason Wakefield faked his “vaccinations cause autism (and bowel problems, but no-one ever talks about that these days)” study about 20 years ago was so he could sell his own version of vaccination protocols, not because vaccinations were some terrible new danger.  So it’s really hard to justify “Vaccines cause autism!!!!!!” by directly linking it to some weird idea that people didn’t start getting vaccinated until 20 years ago.

Aaaaannnd, as many people are pointing out, the only reason more people are getting diagnosed as autistic is because the definition of autism has changed to encompass more things. (When I was a kid, back in the 1980s, kids we’d now absolutely call ‘autistic’–and a few years ago would have said has Asperger’s–were just considered…really really weird.  Like me!)

I reblogged this before with some commentary about the weirdness of that “20 years” vaccination time frame. Besides personally being at least the 5th autistic-looking generation I know of in a family full of “eccentric” people, where one of my same-age cousins and I were the first to ever get any official labels applied.

But yeah, besides the number of just plain weirdos when I was growing up? Some of us also got diagnosed with MBD/“hyperactivity” instead. Because that was on the radar then. And it covered a lot of ground, which did not map directly to the more recent ADHD label.

(Not that also having some other official label would necessarily take you out of the “really really weird ” category, much less get you any useful accommodations pre-ADA. But, that was also a thing nobody much talks about now.)