In 1943, Donald Triplett was the first-ever person to be formally diagnosed with autism. He died last week at the age of 89.
While these controversies were still raging in Britain, Leo Kanner from Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore claimed that he had identified a unique psychological disorder in children characterized by 'extreme autism, obsessiveness, stereotypy, and echolalia'.
Born in 1933 in Forest, Mississippi, to Beamon and Mary Triplett, a lawyer and a school teacher, Donald was a profoundly withdrawn child, who never met his mother's smile, or answered to her voice, but appeared at all times tuned into a separate world with its own logic, and its own way of using the English language.
The earliest research that focused on children who would today be considered autistic was conducted by Grunya Sukhareva starting in the 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner described two related syndromes, later termed infantile autism and Asperger syndrome respectively.
But it's actually been on the books for more than 70 years--and our thinking about the condition has changed dramatically during that time. Here are the key events in autism history. 1908: The word autism is used to describe a subset of schizophrenic patients who were especially withdrawn and self-absorbed.
1 in 100 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as of 2021. Autism prevalence has increased 178% since 2000. The country with the highest rate of diagnosed autism in the world is Qatar, and the country with the lowest rate is France.
A growing understanding of autism
In 1989, the first children in South Australia to be recognised as having Asperger syndrome were diagnosed by Autism SA.
Autism was originally described as a form of childhood schizophrenia and the result of cold parenting, then as a set of related developmental disorders, and finally as a spectrum condition with wide-ranging degrees of impairment. Along with these shifting views, its diagnostic criteria have changed as well.
Donald Gray Triplett (September 8, 1933 – June 15, 2023) was an American man known for being the first person diagnosed as autistic.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, may have been autistic. Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist and astronomer.
So, why are the rates of autism increasing? Greater awareness. The primary reason that the rates of autism have increased is greater awareness of autism.
Clinicians who encountered autism in the 1950s and 1960s called it by many names. Among them were Kanner's syndrome (named after Leo Kanner), early infantile autism, hyperkinetic disease, and Heller's disease (based on 1908 description by Austrian educator Theodor Heller), also known as dementia infantilis.
1980s and 1990s
In 1980, "infantile autism" was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and separated from childhood schizophrenia. By the late 1980s, the term in the DSM was changed to autism disorder and included a checklist of symptoms for diagnosing autism.
Autism Prevalence
Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls. Most children were still being diagnosed after age 4, though autism can be reliably diagnosed as early as age 2.
Autism is very distinct from ADHD, but the core symptoms of ADHD-Combined type, i.e., attention deficit, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, would appear to also be features of autism. ASD and ADHD are neurobiological disorders characterized by similar underlying neuropsychological “deficits”.
Nikolas Tesla - Tesla was another genius who displayed characteristics of autism, having several extreme phobias, severe sensitivity to light and sound, and an obsession with the number 3. His work also created the modern world as we know it, hugely creative and inventive.
Someone who is considered a savant may be especially skilled in art, math, music, memory recall, or another subject. Savant syndrome is commonly associated with autism but can occur alongside other conditions.
Two years after she drew criticism for her depiction of autism in the film Music, Sia has announced that she is on the autism spectrum.
As a result, mothers of autistic children suffered blame and stigmatization, while people with autism were institutionalized and given experimental behavioural treatments such as electric shocks and anti-psychotic drugs.
Early interventions for autism began in the 1920s with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). This treatment involved passing electrical currents through the brain and was used to treat a variety of mental illnesses.
There is not just one cause of ASD. There are many different factors that have been identified that may make a child more likely to have ASD, including environmental, biologic, and genetic factors.