A Timeline of Autism

In the last one hundred years, awareness of neurodivergence has taken great strides. The following is a condensed timeline of some of the major scientific discoveries that made this awareness possible.

1911: German psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler coins the term “autism” 

1925: Child psychiatrist Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva publishes the first clinical description of autistic traits.

1943: Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner publishes a paper describing and defining a condition called early infantile autism, whose name he coined.

1944: Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger identifies a milder form of autism that was later named “Asperger’s Syndrome.”

1949: Leo Kanner introduces his now long discredited theory that autism is caused by “refrigerator mothers.”

1956: American child psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg publishes his paper called “The Autistic Child in Adolescence,” which follows 63 autistic children for nine years and then again at age fifteen.

1964: American psychologist Bernard Rimland challenges the “refrigerator mother” theory and discusses autism’s neurological factor in his book Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior.

1967: Bruno Bettleheim reinforces the “refrigerator mother” theory when he publishes The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self.

1979: Doctors Lorna Wing and Judith Gould examine the prevalence of autism, suggesting that autism is more prevalent than previously believed and introducing the concept of a “triad of impairments,” which includes social interaction, communication, and imagination.

1980: DSM-III (third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) establishes criteria for the diagnosis of infantile autism and defines it as a disorder separate from schizophrenia.

1994: DSM-IV (fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) classifies autism as a spectrum disorder.

2013: DSM-5 combines autism, Asperger’s, and childhood disintegrative disorder into autism spectrum disorder.

2020: CDC determines that one in fifty-four children have been identified to have autism spectrum disorder.

The search to understand more about the human brain and neurodivergence is ongoing. Hopefully, with time and research, we can better understand each other and work to create a more inclusive and knowledgeable world.