A short history

Knowing this history is practical, not academic. Most of the bad advice families still receive — and a fair amount of the good — is a leftover from one of these moments.

• 1911

  The word is coined for something else

  Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler uses "autism" to describe withdrawal in schizophrenia. The label will take decades to come loose from that association.

• 1943–44

  Kanner and Asperger describe children

  Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna independently describe children with distinctive social and communication patterns. Asperger's wartime work has since been shown to have involved cooperation with Nazi child-euthanasia programmes.

• 1950s–60s

  The "refrigerator mother" era

  Autism is blamed on cold, unaffectionate mothers — a theory promoted most loudly by Bruno Bettelheim. Families are sent to psychoanalysis; children are institutionalised. The theory is false, and it did decades of harm that still shapes how some parents expect to be judged.

• 1964

  Bernard Rimland pushes back

  A psychologist and father of an autistic son publishes work arguing autism is neurological, not caused by parenting. Parent-led organisations begin forming.

• 1975

  Every child gains a right to school

  US federal law (later renamed IDEA) guarantees a free appropriate public education to children with disabilities. Before this, schools could and did simply refuse to enrol them.

• 1980

  Autism becomes its own diagnosis

  "Infantile autism" enters the DSM-III, formally separated from schizophrenia for the first time.

• 1990s

  Broader criteria, and a wave of diagnoses

  Asperger's syndrome and PDD-NOS are added in 1994. Diagnosis rates climb sharply — driven largely by wider criteria, better awareness and services attached to the label.

• 1998

  A fraudulent paper

  Andrew Wakefield publishes a study of twelve children linking MMR vaccine to autism. It is retracted in 2010; he loses his medical licence for dishonesty and ethics violations. Many large studies since — including ones following more than a million children — find no link. Measles outbreaks caused by the resulting drop in vaccination continue today.

• 1990s–2000s

  Neurodiversity and self-advocacy

  Autistic adults begin organising and writing. Sociologist Judy Singer's term "neurodiversity" spreads; the Autistic Self Advocacy Network forms in 2006 under the principle "nothing about us without us." The centre of the conversation starts shifting from curing autistic people to supporting them.

• 2013

  One spectrum

  DSM-5 merges the separate diagnoses into autism spectrum disorder with support levels, and adds sensory differences to the criteria for the first time.

• 2010s–2020s

  Adults, girls and genetics

  Research attention widens to adult outcomes, under-diagnosed girls and women, and the genetics of autism. Large-scale genomic studies identify hundreds of contributing genes. Measured prevalence keeps rising as identification improves, reaching 1 in 31 eight-year-olds in the CDC's 2022 data.