When Roy Richard Grinker’s daughter Isabel was diagnosed with autism in 1994, the condition was considered rare. It was thought to affect three in every 10,000 children. Now, the rate is closer to one in 100. Many see this rise as evidence of a catastrophic epidemic. Grinker, controversially, sees it as a cause for optimism.
Grinker is an American anthropologist. Unstrange Minds is both a memoir of life with Isabel and a survey of the way autism is interpreted worldwide. His view is that autism has always existed in every society and that the numbers have probably been fairly constant. We in the West perceive an epidemic because knowledge and awareness of autism has improved so vastly in the last 15 years that it is now spotted in cases which in the past would have been misdiagnosed or ignored.
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