Post #2984392

>none of these ideas existed in day to day life or conversation. nobody had depression, anxiety, or any of that. I think the important distinction is that nobody *knew* they had depression, anxiety, etc… The whole point of this graph is that people had it and were simply undiagnosed. So the people who had those various neurodivergences were likely unsupported and struggled in their daily lives much more than they would have if they had proper support. Look at the graph of left handedness over time:  When we stopped trying to beat the demons out of kids and forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, they were suddenly able to exist openly. And that graph shows that as they were able to exist openly, the rates of left handedness steadily increased until it reached its natural levels. It doesn’t mean more kids were suddenly left handed. It means previous kids (now adults) had been forced to struggle more than their right handed peers, because they got beat if they used their dominant hand. And there were 100% adults at the time (mostly entrenched teachers who still wanted to enforce right handedness in writing classes) who would have been decrying the sudden increase in left handedness as unnatural, simply because it wasn’t being unnaturally suppressed anymore. To be clear, I agree that many of the natural rates likely aren’t a flat line over time. Depression and anxiety diagnosis rates both seem to be particularly dependent on external/environmental factors. So as the world becomes more and more depressing, people are naturally diagnosed more. But it’s not really accurate to say “nobody had it” before, because it definitely existed. It’s simply that nobody was *diagnosed* before.