{"id":178224,"date":"2025-09-24T09:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T09:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/178224\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T09:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T09:14:07","slug":"are-screens-to-blame-for-spike-in-autism-diagnoses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/178224\/","title":{"rendered":"Are screens to blame for spike in autism diagnoses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou have certain groups \u2014 the Amish, for example \u2014 that have essentially no autism,\u201d declared<\/a> President Donald Trump with trademark certainty yesterday. Stood next to his Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he suggested that Amish people have low levels of autism because Amish women don\u2019t take paracetamol (sold as Tylenol in the US) during pregnancy. Famously, they also don\u2019t spend their days glued to screens; they\u2019re too busy churning butter, raising barns and producing dozens of children. But Trump chose to point the finger at painkillers.<\/p>\n

Clinicians across the world scrambled to rebut him. In Britain, Health Secretary Wes Streeting replied, \u201cI trust doctors over President Trump.\u201d It\u2019s easy to be smug, but whatever the driver, Trump is right about one thing: autism figures are rocketing. A generation ago, the condition was rare. By 2000, one in 150 eight-year-olds<\/a> in the US had a diagnosis; by 2022, it was one in 31<\/a>. The UK is following the same pattern. Diagnoses rose 787% between 1998 and 2018,<\/a> and the BMA now estimates one in 100 British children has an ASD label.<\/a><\/p>\n

Once a narrow category, \u201cautism spectrum disorder\u201d has metastasised into a fashionable identity. The label now stretches from children who will never speak or live independently to tech titans like Elon Musk. Now that the stigma has ebbed away, pushy middle-class parents angle for diagnoses to give their offspring an educational edge, while students at elite universities self-identify<\/a> as autistic for both extra exam time and the warm glow of victimhood. Meanwhile, those with the most profound needs \u2014 whose families are exhausted by round-the-clock care \u2014 are increasingly drowned out.<\/p>\n

Academics have begun to notice. Professor Ginny Russell of Exeter University warns<\/a> that ever-wider criteria, often based on self-description rather than clinical observation, risk a situation where \u201cmaybe everyone is categorised as neurodiverse\u201d. \u201cAs awareness and diagnoses increase, those with less severe symptoms come forward with their own stories of how autism affects them,\u201d Russell says. \u201cThe diagnostic criteria is widened to take these accounts on board, which loops back again to another increase in diagnoses.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not simply a medical question but a cultural one: a disorder once marked by silence and incapacity has become a lazy shorthand for genius. Yet diagnostic creep can only explain part of the phenomenon. Something else is happening to children. As evolutionary biologist Heather Heying writes in A Hunter-Gatherer\u2019s Guide to the 21st Century, the \u201cuptick in diagnoses on the autism spectrum\u201d may be \u201crelated to the number of children who were raised staring into screens.\u201d \u201cDo not let inanimate objects babysit your children,\u201d Heying commands, \u201cThose seemingly alive creatures, which cannot and therefore will not respond to a child\u2019s looks or gestures or questions, send the message to the developing brain that the world is not an emotionally responsive place.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, toddlers pacified by Peppa Pig on repeat learn that the world does not answer back. Reduced eye contact, poor reciprocity, repetitive behaviours: the classic signifiers of autism can also be the hallmarks of children\u2019s behaviour when raised on screens. If we wanted to manufacture a generation displaying autistic-like traits, we could hardly have done better than to outsource parenting to iPads.<\/p>\n

Author and psychotherapist Joe Burgo, who works with teenagers who identify as trans, sees the same detachment. Patients who \u201cspend countless hours online in virtual interactions, playing video games, and social media scrolling,\u201d he tells me, become unmoored. \u201cThis leads to a dissociated experience of being in your head rather than down in your body where you might notice your feeling states. This dissociation is what we\u2019re seeing rather than true ASD.\u201d<\/p>\n

The surge in diagnoses, then, is likely twofold: ever-expanding criteria and an environment that fosters autistic mimicry. Tackling it will require more than scolding expectant mothers for taking paracetamol. It means resisting the pathologisation of every quirk, and it means putting down our phones \u2014 parents as well as children.<\/p>\n

Yet Trump may have been half-right. For all their butter-churning and barn-raising, the Amish really might be on to something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYou have certain groups \u2014 the Amish, for example \u2014 that have essentially no autism,\u201d declared President Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[24159,23803,1490,12,97,11351,61045,16348,1247,12834],"class_list":["post-178224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-amish","tag-asd","tag-autism","tag-donald-trump","tag-health","tag-none","tag-optional","tag-rfk-jr","tag-society","tag-tylenol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}