alt Hacker News> Robert F. Kennedy junior, America’s health secretary, thinks that autism has become an “epidemic” in his country. His concern stems from figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which shows that the condition now affects 32 per 1,000 eight-year-old children in America (see chart). That is in contrast, he says, with the near-absence of the condition in his childhood. Mr Kennedy was born in the 1950s, and studies estimate a prevalence of autism to around two to four per 10,000 in the 1960s.
I'd note that RFK Jr.'s very own aunt was lobotomized then hidden away for something that sounds a lot like autism if diagnosed today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
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It could be, but the Wikipedia article notes that she may have also suffered a birth injury from hypoxia.
Rosemary's story is so tragic and heartbreaking. Her life was filled with what would today be considered multiple instances of medical malpractice, and heartless, unethical behavior on the part of the Kennedy family. Her father didn't even tell her mother about the lobotomy until after it was done.
Incredible that she lived to the age of 86. The nuns taking care of her might have actually cared, which could hardly be said of the Kennedy family.
The Rosemary Kennedy story is tragic.
JFK was great in some ways, but that political dynasty had serious problems even before RFK Jr.
The Wikipedia article paints this as partly driven by the political aspirations of the patriarch. I suspect this is yet another example of we'd be in much better shape if the US didn't have quasi-royalty, nor families aspiring to that.
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Read any old book (like from the 1800s), or look into anyone's family history. There is always some version of "Larry never leaves the farm". Nobody every diagnosed "Larry" so we don't know what he had and often we only have a small fraction of the symptoms recorded, but what we have sounds suspiciously like Autism (and one of a dozen other things we now have names for)