‘The term is becoming unrecognisable’: have the experts who believed in a single autism spectrum changed their minds?

In the UK, there was a 787% increase between 1998 and 2018, with the rise greater for women than men, and the single biggest jump among adults; credible American stats have shown an increase across the whole population of 175% between 2011 and 2022, with the largest rise occurring among 26- to 34 year-olds (in both countries, childhood rates have also leapt up).
“Some of them, I think, are being wrongly influenced by social media to believe that they’re autistic, because it’s a possible way to explain your difficulties,” she tells me. “And then we have a subgroup of people who used to be called neurotic, who have all sorts of mental issues, including anxiety. And a kind of hypersensitivity.”

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I speak to Baron-Cohen – who is in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge – via Zoom. “The term ‘autism’ is too much of a sledgehammer,” he says. “It’s being used to cover too many things. So … I want to see subgroups.