Fifteen years ago, when Steve Silberman broke the story of Silicon Valley’s autism ‘epidemic’, he saw it as a problem. Now he’s changed his mind and has published a book about understanding and accepting autism spectrum disorders

Fifteen years ago, Steve Silberman was working as a journalist for Wired magazine in San Francisco, as the digital revolution was really taking off. He was sitting in a cafe, telling a friend how he’d recently met two Silicon Valley power couples, each with a profoundly autistic child, when a teacher at the next table overheard and butted in: “There’s an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.” Silberman’s story on the topic, The Geek Syndrome, was published by Wired in 2001.

Back then, it was not uncommon to hear autism spoken about in this way. But understanding and acceptance have since progressed in leaps and bounds. Silberman’s new book, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, tells the story of how this transformation happened – the research, the parents and therapists, and above all, the information networks that allowed everybody interested to share what they were finding out.

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There’s nothing remotely surprising, as Silberman points out, about a Wired journalist writing about the neurodiversity movement. Autism-spectrum people are frequently seen to have an affinity for computing, and spectrum traits have been noticed in Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and so on. “In the past 40 years,” Silberman writes, “some members of this tribe have migrated from the margins of society to the mainstream … The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have become the architects of our future.”

“Before we start, can I ask you a couple of questions?” Silberman says when I Skype him at his home in San Francisco. Do I consider myself autistic? Do I have a child with autism? No, I answer to both questions, then fire the same ones back at him. Silberman doesn’t have autism in his family, either. “When people ask if I’m on the spectrum, I sometimes say no, I’m hyper-neurotypical. I’m kind of an extrovert, very social, very chatty.” But he’s always been drawn, he says, to “loners, programmers, science geeks, maths geeks”. His husband, Keith Karraker, a high-school chemistry teacher, has more spectrum traits than he does. “So I approached the subject from an unusual angle.”

Is, or was there, an “epidemic of autism” in Silicon Valley? It’s widely known, as Silberman says, that autism spectrum traits are “not exactly under-represented” among computer geeks. It’s also well established that autism is genetically inheritable, though not in any straightforward way. And it’s true that more people today have autism diagnoses than used to be the case. For decades, the estimated prevalence was four or five in every 10,000. Now, it’s about one in 68.

In The Geek Syndrome, Silberman explored several potential explanations for the shift. One theory was that autism really was increasing because of assortative mating: geeks like other geeks, so they get together and have children. Another was that autism only appeared to be increasing, because autistic behaviour was now better recognised and understood. A third was that autism was new, and caused by a poison in the environment, with infant vaccines candidate-in-chief. Reaction to Silberman’s article got caught up in the panic around the measles vaccine, in particular. This theory is now discredited, though you’ll still hear a lot about it, especially in the US.

“But most of the letters parents were writing to me weren’t about vaccines. They were saying, my child is about to grow out of the services available to support him – what are we going to do? Or people would say, I’m very good at this or that, but I’ve never been able to find a job that keeps me on for more than a couple of months, because I’m not good at socialising. I felt that society was looking in the wrong direction by focusing so much on cures and causes, and not at all on what we do for these thousands of people who’re already here.”

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In Silberman’s book, autism is not a simple either-or condition, but a multidimensional spectrum encompassing a huge variety of traits. “People with autism are even more diverse than neurotypicals. Some are chatty, others are easily overwhelmed; others love intense sensation. Really there’s more of a range within the spectrum than there is in ‘normality’.”

The science now seems clear that the main reason more people are being diagnosed is because the diagnostic criteria have been broadened: but crank theories still have traction, especially in the US. In Silberman’s opinion, this is largely because of what he calls “a massive failure of storytelling”, a failure his book attempts to rectify by seeking out the people behind the statistics.

He meets Leo Rosa, 11 in the book, now 14, who is “classically autistic and mostly non-verbal” and likes to “stim” (the name given to self-calming rituals by people with autism) with green drinking straws from Starbucks. Leo’s mother, Shannon, used to be an anti-vaccination “mommy warrior”, but now focuses her energy on “supporting her son just as he is”. He visits Jim Sinclair, founder of the Autreat movement, autism-friendly festivals with colour-coded “interaction signal badges” and quiet spaces for people who need to “shut down for a while”. He profiles and retro-diagnoses likely autists from history, such as Henry Cavendish, who discovered hydrogen, and the quantum physicist Paul Dirac.

Silberman digs deep into the history of medicine to find out why so much confusion has surrounded the diagnosis of autism for so long. He starts with a little boy called Donald Triplett, in a clinic attached to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in 1938: “He wandered about smiling, making stereotyped movements with his fingers, crossing them about in the air. He shook his head from side to side, whispering or humming the same three-note tune. He spun with great pleasure anything he could seize upon to spin. He kept throwing things on the floor, seeming to delight in the sounds he made …” Nowadays, most people would guess that Donald was autistic, or to use the medical terminology, presenting with autism spectrum disorder; the repetitions they’d see as examples of stimming. In 1938, though, hardly anybody had a clue.

Leo Kanner, former head of child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, published his paper on “Donald T” among others in 1943: autism, in Kanner’s view, was a form of childhood schizophrenia, caused, he believed, by bad parenting. Unfortunately, this was not the only example of what Silberman calls Kanner’s “funny ideas”. He also thought autism was “vanishingly rare”, and affected only children – “he didn’t even consider the existence of autistic adults”. And because Kanner thought toxic parents caused autism, he recommended institutionalisation as the main treatment, causing untold damage and heartbreak. “You know, he was wrong in so many ways, but because he was right in some ways and got his name out there, he has very rarely been challenged.”

Meanwhile, at almost exactly the same time, Hans Asperger at the University of Vienna was observing children with similar behavioural traits and coming to quite a different conclusion: his Asperger’s paper on the children he called his “little professors” was published in 1944. For Asperger, “autistic psychopathy” was an umbrella diagnosis, covering profoundly disabled children and others who, in spite of their difficulties, came across as very bright. His work, however, got lost in the chaos of the second world war and wasn’t translated into English until 1990, meaning that, until comparatively recently, Kanner’s view prevailed. It has long been assumed that Kanner and Asperger knew nothing of what the other was doing. But Silberman believes Kanner knew all along about Asperger’s more inclusive view and “deliberately suppressed” it, – who knows why. “Asperger’s chief diagnostician, George Frankl, was one of the clinicians that Kanner heroically saved from the Holocaust by bringing him to America … Kanner was getting the benefit of all the work Frankl and Asperger had done in Vienna.”

Asperger’s ideas remained overshadowed until the early 1980s, when they were rediscovered by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in Camberwell, south-east London. Lorna Wing, author of the first classic papers on full-spectrum autism, was herself the mother of an autistic daughter, Susie: “Parents … tend to overlook or reject the idea of autism for their socially gauche, naive, talkative, clumsy child,” she wrote. “The suggestion that their child may have an interesting condition called Asperger’s syndrome is more acceptable.”

Wing went on to co-found the British National Autistic Society, which in Silberman’s view is still “decades ahead” of its US counterpart, Autism Speaks. “The NAS understands that autistic children grow up to become autistic adults and we have to care for them all across the lifespan, whereas AS has focused almost exclusively on children.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Silberman (right) with Leo Rosa, and Leo’s mother, Shannon. Photograph: Carlos Chaverría for the Guardian

Asperger syndrome made it into the influential DSM psychiatric manual in 1994, but was dropped in 2013, when it was absorbed into the wider autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. The NAS welcomed the change, as did Wing, who died last year.

(Donald Triplett, by the way, was profiled in the Atlantic in 2010, when he was 77. He was living in his own house, surrounded by friendly neighbours, driving daily to the golf course and embarking regularly on longer expeditions, “including Egypt three times, Istanbul five times and Hawaii 17”.)

Two further developments, thinks Silberman, make life much brighter for people with autism today. One is social media: “In face-to-face, real-time interactions, people on the spectrum are often overloaded. Conversation, eye contact, body language, all the little social signals – that can get too much. Whereas, on the computer, at their own pace, it’s often much more natural to them. There are now more social possibilities for people on the spectrum than there were before.”

The second is the general awakening across society to human diversity of all sorts. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the major writers of books on autism and neurodiversity are both gay.” As well as himself, Silberman is thinking about Andrew Solomon, the author of Far From the Tree (2012), about unusual or exceptional children. “I think we both understand what it’s like to grow up on the outside of society.” Oliver Sacks, I suggest, might also fit into this pattern. It turns out that Silberman has interviewed Sacks many times, and now counts him as a dear friend.

Autism services are, however, still gappy and uneven. Women who have autism, for example, are underdiagnosed, partly because, as Silberman says, women are under more pressure to pass as neurotypical, “to blend into the background and not challenge men”. Also, no one is sure yet whether autism really is more prevalent in highly educated, techy families, or whether it just appears so because such parents have the confidence to come forward. “One has to remember, first and foremost, that autism does not discriminate. Cases among people of colour and in impoverished communities are vastly underestimated, under-represented and under-supported.”

Above all, society needs to listen to the views of people with autism. As Silberman says, that’s how the really big shifts for other minorities came about: “Gay people,” for example, “coming forward with the full range of human emotions and passions and love.” Silberman has signed the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network’s pledge always to invite at least one speaker with autism along whenever he’s speaking about autism in public – though it’s not always possible, he admits, “for example I don’t have an autistic person present while I’m talking to you. But I will advise you to talk as much as you can to autistic adults to inform your perspective, because they’re the ones who really know what they’re talking about.” He did this, he says, as much as he could in his book, talking to people, reading their writing, spending several days “in autistic space” at Autreat.

“Autistic people were invisible in the past and they are made invisible in the present if you write an article in which autistic adults are not represented … In media coverage in general, a lot of it is talking behind the backs of autistic people as though autistic people don’t exist.”

• Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman, with a foreword by Oliver Sacks is published by Allen & Unwin, £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, including free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846