The History of Autism

In 1943, the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner described a small group of children with a pattern he called 'early infantile autism'. He noticed they shared difficulties connecting with other people and a strong preference for sameness and routine.

The following year, in 1944, Hans Asperger independently wrote about children who had similar social differences but who spoke fluently and had average or above-average ability. For decades people debated whether Kanner and Asperger were describing the same thing or two related profiles. Both pointed to differences in social interaction, communication, and imagination, alongside repetitive interests and behaviours.

Early on, autism was thought to be very uncommon. The first attempt to measure how often it appeared came in 1966, when Victor Lotter studied children in Middlesex and found a rate of around 4.5 in every 10,000.

A turning point came in 1979. Lorna Wing and Judith Gould studied a wider group of children and described a 'triad' of differences in social interaction, communication, and imagination. Crucially, they found many children who did not fit Kanner's narrow definition but clearly belonged to the same family of experiences. This is where the idea of an autism spectrum really began.

Through the 1990s, research kept broadening the picture. Studies in ordinary classrooms found that social and communication differences were far more common than the early figures suggested. Sula Wolff followed children of average and high ability over many years and described people at the more subtle end of the spectrum, many of whom built independent adult lives.

As awareness grew, so did the recorded numbers. By the mid-2000s, UK studies were reporting roughly 1 in 100 children, and in 2007 a national survey included autistic adults for the first time, estimating around 1 percent of the population. Higher figures over time reflect wider diagnostic criteria, better awareness, and more services, rather than autism itself becoming more common.

The names have shifted many times. Terms such as Asperger syndrome and pervasive developmental disorder were used for years, then in 2013 the main diagnostic manuals brought these labels together under a single heading, 'autism spectrum disorder'. The aim was to recognise that autistic people share core traits while differing enormously from one another.

Older descriptions leaned heavily on the language of deficit and impairment, treating autism as a list of things a person could not do. That framing is now widely questioned.

In recent decades, autistic people and their families have led a shift in thinking known as the neurodiversity movement. It sees autism as a natural variation in how human minds work, not a fault to be fixed. Differences in attention, communication, and sensory experience are understood as part of who a person is.

This does not deny that autistic people may face real challenges or need support. It simply changes the starting point, from correction to recognition, understanding, and acceptance. For families, that shift matters, because it makes room for an autistic person to be valued as they are.