Autism as a Linguistically Created Disorder

Global Autism Data Reflects the Colonial Speech of Diagnosis and Pathology

Edited on 12/30/2025:
This piece has been expanded and elaborated on in two additional essays, Fascia to Fascism and its companion piece, From Fascia to Fascism, Behavior Is Communication

Abstract

Recent genomic research suggests that autism-related genes played a central role in the evolution of human intelligence. Building on findings by Starr and Fraser (2025), which identify accelerated human neuron types linked to autistic traits, this essay coherently bridges evolutionary genetics, linguistics, and social environment into a single explanatory model of neurodiversity, and argues that autism is not a disorder but a foundational evolutionary specialization and a neurobiological architecture that enabled advanced cognition, language, and relational awareness. However, the same genetic traits that once enhanced adaptability now interact with modern linguistic and social environments in ways that dysregulate their expression. Integrating insights from linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology, this paper proposes a model of linguistic activation, suggesting that the structure and pragmatics of the English language create social and sensory conditions that “turn on” or amplify autistic gene expression. Within this framework, autism is reframed as an environmentally modulated neurotype whose visibility increases under industrial, English-dominant conditions that overstimulate the nervous system and undermine relational safety. The argument situates autism at the intersection of biology and culture, revealing it as both the source of human intelligence and a mirror of societal imbalance. Rather than a pathology, autism represents a living record of human evolution’s most creative capacities, illuminating how language and environment together shape the expression of mind. This essay reframes autism as the mirror through which humanity can see how language and culture either sustain or sabotage evolution itself.

Connecting Evolution to Environment

A groundbreaking study led by Stanford neuroscientist Alexander Starr has revealed that autism may lie at the very root of what makes humans intelligent. The researchers found that the same genes responsible for higher reasoning, language, and creativity also increase the likelihood of autistic traits (Starr & Fraser, 2025). These findings suggest that autism is not a defect but a crucial part of our species’ evolution, and the very genetic trade-off that gave rise to human cognition itself (Koumoundouros, 2025). In other words, humans would not exist in our current form without autism. What we call a “disorder” may, in fact, be the evolutionary mechanism that made complex thought and language possible, an adaptive variation that became pathologized only within modern industrial cultures.

If Starr and Fraser’s (2025) findings are correct and autism emerged as an adaptive neurological specialization fueling language and higher reasoning, then the modern environment has become the very force that overactivates these same genes. The genetic foundation that once enhanced our ancestors’ relational and cognitive intelligence now interacts with an industrialized, hyperverbal culture that overstimulates the nervous system. Within the English-speaking world, where communication prioritizes self, competition and hyper individualism, these adaptive traits become dysregulated expressions of sensitivity rather than balanced capacities for pattern recognition and empathy (Snow, 2025). This supports the broader hypothesis that autism is not caused by language, but shaped and amplified by it: English, through its emphasis on the individual “I,” rigid syntax, and analytic abstraction, creates social and sensory conditions that “turn on” the neurobiological circuits originally evolved for deep perception and social attunement. In this sense, the same genetic architecture that once enabled human intelligence now signals environmental distress in cultures that have lost relational coherence.

A post made on Facebook social media site by user Desert 64 in the group Autism Comedy on October 6, 2025 titled “RFK was wrong: English causes autism” included the below image, a cropped post from Dave Asprey remarking that autism may not be genetic. The post by Asprey shows the image of a map with North America disproportionately colored dark red as a presumed indication of autism prevalence:

Further inspection on Dave Asprey’s X (formerly Twitter) account found the original post, where Dave Asprey advocates for autism as an environmental disorder and challenges assumptions about the neurodiversity framework being purely genetic:

The source of the map Asprey shared with his post was not made clear either in his post or his comments, but a reverse Google image search showed that this data and supporting graphic belongs to a paper published in 2022 by Marco Solmi and colleagues, one of the most comprehensive analyses of autism prevalence to date.

Using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study, they mapped Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) rates across 204 countries (Solmi et al., 2022). The resulting visualization was striking: deep-red zones in North America and Western Europe signaled rates exceeding 600 per 100,000 people, while much of Africa and Southeast Asia appeared cool blue, indicating fewer than 300 cases per 100,000. To most epidemiologists, this gradient illustrated uneven diagnostic infrastructure and cultural awareness. To me, as both an autistic scholar and theorist of language and social power, it illustrated something far more profound, a map showing the effects of linguistic colonization. “The true history of any oppressed people is impossible to find in history books,” Assata Shakur said, but this history can be seen visually on Solmi’s map, and the data used proves the effects of colonization on humanity’s collective nervous system.

Desertuser 64 might have been joking, but they were right: the English language does in fact “cause” autism, a colonial disorder, and this fact is heavily discussed in my book with numerous references and credible sources. And Dave Asprey is correct, what we do in our environment is the biggest factor, but Western materialism generally neglects to account for what is invisible to the eye and is therefore ignoring the biggest environmental factor influencing our social lives according to Sapir-Whorf and Noam Chomsky, our language. Autism In America: One Woman’s Search For Healing uses my own biographical journey to trace the effects of language and social belonging on our mental, emotional and behavioral health. The book argues that autism is an evolutionarily adaptive neurotype whose expression becomes pathologized within the English-speaking, industrialized environment of America, a culture whose hyper-individualistic language, coercive social systems, and emotional disconnection disrupt the relational and ecological attunement that autistic cognition and neurology, as a naturally occurring genetic variant, was designed to sustain.

The Solmi map inadvertently reveals how speech itself constructs autism and confirms the underlying thesis in Autism In America: that language is not merely descriptive but is primarily generative, and shapes our neurological expression, social belonging, and even the boundaries of what we call disorder. Where English and its diagnostic descendants dominate public health, autism becomes visible, countable, and pathologized. What appears as under-diagnosis may in fact reflect epistemic resistance: societies whose communication and social norms remain relational rather than performative and collaborative rather than competitive.

When Marco Solmi and colleagues (2022) mapped global autism prevalence across 204 countries, they uncovered a striking linguistic and cultural pattern: the highest rates of diagnosis cluster almost exclusively in English-dominant, industrialized nations. This reflects how the English language’s structural emphasis on individualism, self-reference, and categorical abstraction shapes cognition, communication norms, and, ultimately, diagnostic classification itself.

In linguistic anthropology, this is well-documented: languages that prioritize the individual “I,” such as English, encourage egocentric speech patterns and cognitive framing, while relational languages (e.g., many Indigenous, Asian, and African tongues) embed identity within social and ecological context (Wierzbicka, 1997). When viewed through this lens, the Solmi data confirm that autism’s apparent prevalence is linguistically mediated, its expression and recognition arise where social communication is filtered through rigid grammatical hierarchies and atomized subjectivity.

In short, the Solmi map functions as a global mirror of linguistic worldviews, revealing that the way we speak shapes the way we see minds. It demonstrates that autism, far from being a purely genetic anomaly, is a socially and linguistically constructed expression of evolutionary neurodiversity and is one that emerges in tension with environments that valorize separation over connection.

From Map to Mirror

Solmi’s global data present autism as an objective medical reality distributed unevenly across space. Yet maps, like languages, are never neutral; they encode the worldview of their makers. Epidemiological mapping presumes that autism exists as a discrete, universally measurable entity, that diagnostic terms translate cleanly across tongues, and that prevalence can be compared independent of cultural meaning. These assumptions rest upon the linguistic hegemony of Americanized English, the global language of psychiatry, biomedicine, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

In Autism in America: One Woman’s Search for Healing, I argue that English is not merely a medium through which we describe mental states; it is a structural apparatus that shapes what can be seen, felt, and believed (Snow, 2025). Words such as functioning, deficit, and disorder do not arise from nature, they are cultural artifacts reflecting an industrial logic that values productivity, speed, and rational control. When Solmi’s map identifies the “highest prevalence” in the very regions that speak this language most fluently, it is not capturing an epidemic of neurology but an epidemic of interpretation.

The Linguistic Machinery of Diagnosis

Americanized English operates through grammatical binaries such as normal/abnormal, functional/dysfunctional, and rational/emotional that mirror the dualisms of Western thought itself. Psychiatry, written and practiced in that grammar, converts difference into deviation. The DSM-5’s criteria for autism includes deficits in social communication, restricted interests, repetitive behaviors which are linguistic judgments as much as behavioral ones (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). They presume that healthy communication is direct, reciprocal, and verbally mediated, privileging Anglo-American norms of eye contact, turn-taking, and explicit speech.

When these norms are exported globally through diagnostic manuals, academic training, and international aid programs, they do more than mislabel difference, they impose a linguistic hierarchy that mirrors systems of power and domination. The very grammar of English encodes coercive relations: subjects act upon objects, verbs enforce agency, and pronouns center the autonomous self. This structure reproduces a “power-over” dynamic in speech itself, conditioning speakers to value assertion over attunement and control over reciprocity.

As these grammatical assumptions spread through psychiatry, education, and global health discourse, they redefine local forms of communication not as alternative but as defective. A child in Tokyo who communicates through gesture, or a community in rural India that values silence and collective harmony, may appear “less autistic” precisely because their linguistic ecology sustains mutual regulation rather than dominance. Conversely, a child in Los Angeles who fails to match the command-oriented pragmatics of American small talk is instantly flagged. Thus, the high prevalence of autism in the Global North is not evidence of genetic concentration but of a culture whose language itself enacts micro-hierarchies of domination, manufacturing pathology through its very syntax (Snow, 2025).

As Foucault (1972) argued, power operates through discourse and defines what can be said, who may speak, and whose forms of expression are rendered deviant. Likewise, Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of linguistic capital reveals how certain speech patterns are socially rewarded while others are silenced, reinforcing class, cultural, and cognitive hierarchies. English, in this light, is not a neutral medium of communication but a disciplinary technology: a system that organizes thought, enforces hierarchy, and pathologizes relational modes of being that resist its grammar of control.

Speech as a Colonial Instrument

This is why the red zones on Solmi’s map align almost perfectly with the historical reach of Anglo-European empire. The same languages that once justified conquest through the “civilizing mission” now universalize diagnostic categories through the “humanitarian mission” of mental health. In both cases, power speaks English.

As I wrote in Autism in America, “Linguist Anna Wierzbicka (1997) has written about languages that do not privilege the individualistic ‘I’ of English, especially in Indigenous, Asian, and African contexts, and notes that English is one of the most egocentric languages globally” (Snow, 2025). This structural narcissism, embedded in syntax itself, teaches speakers to experience reality through domination and distinction: subject before verb, self before relation. The global exportation of such a language ensures that any deviation from its grammar such as collective identity, relational speech, or emotional nuance appears deficient.

This dynamic echoes Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity, which holds that “the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Whorf, 1956, p. 213). The spread of diagnostic English imposes a worldview where relational modes of knowing are rendered invisible. Likewise, Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar (Chomsky, 1965) reminds us that while humans share innate linguistic capacity, the specific structures we use channel thought in particular directions. The colonial export of English narrows that universal potential into a single grammatical ideology, one that prizes categorical clarity over contextual empathy.

Culture-Bound Syndromes and Linguistic Pathogenesis

Anthropological and medical literature has long demonstrated that language does not merely reflect illness, it produces it. The field of anthropiatry documents “culture-bound syndromes” such as koro in Southeast Asia or ataque de nervios in Latin America, where socially shared idioms of distress organize bodily experience. The words, metaphors, and media scripts through which communities interpret anxiety or fear can precipitate real physiological symptoms, a phenomenon linked to nocebo effects and mass psychogenic illness (Hewlett, 2022). As Bonnie Hewlett explains, culture provides “categories and scripts that channel distress,” and while biology matters, there is strong evidence that clinical wording, media narratives, labels, and culturally shared explanations can amplify and pattern symptoms across populations (Hewlett, 2022, p. 94).

In this light, autism in the English-speaking world operates as a modern culture-bound syndrome: a diagnostic discourse that channels relational distress into neurological narrative. Just as koro localizes fear in the body, Western psychiatry localizes alienation in the brain. The Solmi map’s geographic gradient thus visualizes not only the reach of diagnostic systems but the spread of linguistic contagion, the way English medical speech scripts experience and gives shape to suffering.

The same mechanisms that generate psychogenic outbreaks through rumor and repetition now operate globally through social media, where clinical language circulates at algorithmic speed. The epidemiological “rise” of autism parallels the viral spread of explanatory scripts that invite people to interpret sensory overload, trauma, or social exhaustion through the idiom of disorder. In this sense, English-language psychiatry functions as both narrator and vector of mental illness.

The Double Empathy Problem as a Linguistic Collision

Autism research increasingly recognizes the double empathy problem: the mutual misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic communicators (Milton, 2012). I extend this principle globally: the double empathy problem also exists between languages. Americanized English expects speech to perform transparency; many other languages encode emotion and respect through ambiguity, pacing, and silence. When global psychiatry, operating in English, encounters these divergent pragmatics, it misreads them as deficits. The issue is not that autistic people fail to communicate but that English fails to listen.

Solmi’s data, viewed through this lens, becomes a map of linguistic friction. The “red” nations are those where the dominant language demands high-speed verbal reciprocity and individual expression, conditions that amplify autistic visibility. The “blue” nations are those where meaning circulates through context, kinship, or collective rhythm; there, the same traits blend seamlessly into the social fabric. What epidemiology interprets as absence may actually be attunement (Snow, 2025).

Industrialization, Speech Compression, and the Nervous System

Solmi et al. (2022) note that autism prevalence correlates with industrialization. But industrialization also reshapes language. The efficiency imperative of capitalist production migrates into speech: short sentences, clipped tones, rapid feedback loops, and algorithmic communication. The linguistic body mirrors the factory floor.

In the Autism In America book chapters titled “The Colonization of Connection” and “Linguistic Exclusion and the Broken Social Contract,” I describe how this compression of language compresses the nervous system itself (Snow, 2025). Autistic people whose sensory and emotional processing are often slower, deeper, or more integrative collide with this distorted, coercive and disconnected linguistic environment like biological canaries in an industrial coal mine. Essentially, their nervous systems are allergic to American English grammar and pragmatics and the social norms attached. Their struggle signals the human nervous system protesting the speed and superficiality of a civilization that extracts and exploits individuals. The epidemiological “rise” in autism thus parallels the rise of a speech economy that prizes output over resonance. Language becomes not only a reflection of industrialization but its neurological enforcement.

Translation and the Myth of Universality

Epidemiological English assumes its categories are translatable. Yet many languages lack equivalents for self, mind, or disorder. When the World Health Organization renders “autism” into Arabic, Hindi, or Yoruba, it imports metaphysical assumptions those cultures never held: that personhood is individual, that communication must be explicit, that difference is disease. The map’s blue zones are, in part, zones of untranslatability: regions where local cosmologies and relationalities resist being folded into Western linguistic grids.

Rather than viewing these areas as data gaps, we might see them as linguistic refuges and places where collective conceptions of mind have not yet been privatized into brains and diagnoses. Their low prevalence may testify to resilience and a refusal to reduce relationship to pathology.

Toward a Linguistic Healing

If Solmi’s study charts autism’s statistical geography, my analysis charts its semantic geography. The former counts where autism is spoken of; the latter studies how speech itself defines what counts as autism. Together they reveal that the “global burden” of ASD is not simply neurological, it is linguistic. A world that speaks primarily in colonial English will continue to reproduce autistic distress because it enforces a grammar of disconnection: subject–object, self–other, mind–body.

To heal, we must decolonize language as well as medicine. This means expanding the world’s lexicon of relationship and creating words as well as reclaiming Indigenous and relational languages. In such linguistic ecologies, autism might cease to be a “spectrum disorder” and reappear as a spectrum of human communication, part of the planet’s biodiversity of consciousness.

Conclusion: Reading the Map Anew

@thewildlightwithin from threads on instagram wrote “white people culture is founded on disenchantment, and vulnerability is coded as threatening. So we’re all jaded, scared, and distanced from real intimacy with ourselves and others. That turns into a personality, and then we pass it down to our kids.” Viewed through this relational and linguistic lens, Solmi’s map becomes less a chart of disease than a mirror of speech domination. The red zones do not show where autism is most prevalent; they show where the language of pathology is most entrenched. The blue zones are not immune, they are still being targeted by translation projects, policy imports, and humanitarian narratives such as Christian missionaries that export alienation through language and forced cultural assimilation.

If we reread the map as a map of language, we see a global nervous system caught between dialects of domination and dialects of relation. The question is no longer where autism is, but how we are speaking it into being. When we change the way we speak and when we loosen the grammar of control by learning a syntax of empathy, we may find that what we called a disorder was, all along, a different kind of fluency, one wired for relational attunement. As Dr. Mona Delahooke stated, “when we understand that self-regulation is built through attuned relationships, we also realize that positive behavior programs are now obsolete.”

Afterthought: Does the Way We Speak Really Change How Our Brains Work?

English, the main language in the U.S. and other Western countries, teaches people to think of themselves as “I” first instead of “we.” It’s a very individual-focused language that makes people talk and think in ways that separate them from others. Some other languages, like many spoken in Indigenous or African communities, focus more on relationships and community. The English language shapes how people think, feel, and relate because it emphasizes individuality, speed, control, and separation rather than connection. For people with autistic genetics, this kind of linguistic and social environment overstimulates the nervous system and suppresses relational safety, which can “activate” autistic traits that would otherwise remain balanced, turning an adaptive evolutionary neurotype into an expression of distress in a disconnected culture.

What “activated by the environment” means:
Think of your genes like a dimmer switch. The social environment, like how people talk, teach, and treat each other, can turn autistic traits up or down.

Big idea: Autism is an evolutionary, genetic part of humanity. Our social environment, including language, parenting practices, social norms, and school/work rules can activate how strongly it shows up. When we build kinder environments, autistic people (and everyone else) will have a better quality of life.

What helps autistic people thrive:

• clear, kind communication

• consideration and understanding

• predictable routines and choices

• quieter, sensory-friendly spaces

• time to think, not rushing

• genuine belonging and being included instead of pushed to conform, “act normal” (forced to make the other people around them feel comfortable at their own comfort’s expense) or being judged by others

References

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