Was Autism prevalent in the past? Ancient to modern.

by kentksu97

Does anyone have ant insight on what an Autistic person would have been treated like or lived in the past? Do we have examples of ancient Autistic people, or is it fairly recent? I’m curious about the difference between high functioning and low functioning in past society as well.

J-Force

It is not generally possible to diagnose the mental health of dead people. That hasn't stopped people taking guesses, but that has a lot of problems with it. This subreddit's most commonly asked question (for some strange reason) is 'Did people in [pre-modern time period] get PTSD?', and when that gets asked we like to refer people to this post about why that's not something we can truly know. Similar things apply to autism, as both are conditions discovered in the 20th century and have an unhelpfully nebulous load of symptoms that vary in severity.