2 posts tagged with "autism"

Most autistic people I know have a mental list of things that would make work survivable, and a second list of things they'd never ask for because they sound ridiculous. The second list is usually the more useful one. It's where you find the requests that would actually change your week, filed under "they'd think I'm difficult" and left there for years.

I'm autistic. I've asked for some of these and lost sleep over asking. I've also spent a lot of my career on the other side of the table, watching people who needed something obvious never say a word about it. So here's the longer list, including the parts that feel too small or too strange to bring up.

Every few days, I see another panicked headline about "skyrocketing autism rates" or well-meaning friends sharing concerns about an "autism epidemic." As someone who is autistic, and who has an autistic child, and has spent considerable time studying how systems evolve and improve diagnostics, I want to break down why this framing is both inaccurate and potentially harmful.

The increase in autism diagnoses isn't evidence of an epidemic—it's evidence of progress. Here's why.