All things neurodivergent and relating to the broader neurodivergent community (and communities).
See also this community's sister subs Feminism, LGBTQ+, Disability, and POC
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If I were to research this, I would get conflicting answers likely being between Yes there are, or No, more people are just being diagnosed neurodivergent.
Personally, I am kinda starting to believe everyone is somewhere on some kind of spectrum. The brain is horrendously complex and less well known and proven disorders, it seems kinda silly to try and classify what "normal" should be.
There are as many Autistic people as there have always been. The only thing is that we have become better at screening and categorizing them.
There has always been that person who was all about trains, and could tell you anything about any train from memory. There have always been "Lennys" who have been caught up in the prison system or worse. Now we just know that they are/were autistic.
My spouse's father was a train guy. When he passed, she inherited a dozen or so photo albums of just trains. Very "normal" hobby.
I'm not sure about my dad. He was an anti-intellectual functioning alcoholic. But I'm pretty sure my grandfather was autistic. His special interest was in historical military equipment, which is "normal" so he got a pass.
Both of these people fell in love, had kids, paid taxes, hell, probably even played baseball. You know, all those things Secretary Brainworm said would never happen.
So i can only tell my experience. I didn't know i was autistic for the longest time. I've always been odd but i was masking most of the time and could suppress my sensory issues and had a lot of coping mechanisms to deal with them. Then my cat died and my world got destroyed. My mask was shattered and i can no longer keep it up for long whereas i had it up like 50% of the time before that. I stopped trying to mask at work. Noise has gotten real bad for me where before i was kinda dissociated enough to not have it that present.
Considering the world is getting more and more stressful in general, i imagine a lot of people that masked before are cracking. Also the obvious point of more information being available so a lot more people seek out a diagnosis. I'm also like 70 percent sure my mom is neuro spicy in some way and she developed OCD to keep order in her life out of necessity. Everything that gets untidy has to be cleaned asap, the latest at the end of the day. Her work desk however is chaos. She gets really anxious when i for example leave the living room blanket on the couch she immediately goes and folds it up.