this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Isn't it strange how we discovered a lot more stars after inventing telescopes?
Obviously there was an unrelated increase in stars born at that exact time.
This is actually the most apt analogy for the whole "sudden increase in diagnosis" bullshit line that anti-vaxxers and anti-science people continually vomit out.
A culture where people believe ignoring your mental health issues makes you more strong, more independent, more of a role model… They think people have been fine for generations, and all of a sudden “fine” people are now being diagnosed with all kinds of problems.
I can understand their logic when I first understand their mistakes.
I'm in no way an anti-vaxxer or anti-science (I'm a researcher myself). I still think it can be justified to look closely at the large increase in, and volume of, various mental disorders. First of all: There's no doubt that a lot more people are being diagnosed due to better diagnosis tools.
However, a major difference between psychological and somatic illness is that the divide between sick and healthy is (typically) a lot sharper in the latter case. Either you have an injury or infection, or you don't, and we can measure that. In the case of e.g. depression or ADHD, there's a much wider gray zone from e.g. "healthy person having a bad day" to "clinically depressed".
The point I'm getting at is this: When a certain percentage of the population is diagnosed with a disorder, you have to ask whether we've started diagnosing ordinary human existence as a disease. Alternatively, you have to start looking at a systematic level for why an enormous portion of the population has a certain disorder. Where that limit should be is an open question, but I would argue that when something like 10-20 % of the population has a specific disorder, we're no longer just looking at individual cases of disease but rather at (a) the possibility that the criteria for diagnosis are two wide, so we're catching "healthy" people with it, or (b) we have a society-level problem (e.g. an epidemic).
I know of areas with ADHD-rates around 20 %. For a somatic illness, we would never let that kind of infection rate pass without taking a closer look at what's going on at the societal level.
You cannot equate ADHD and spectrum mental conditions with disease. For one they are not a disease, you cannot catch them and you cannot give them to other people. They are the way people's brains work. People are just born that way, same way people are born gay or trans, smart or dumb, handsome or ugly. You can't have an outbreak of ADHD or autism the same way you have an outbreak of the flu or covid.
People have been searching for environmental factors for autism, ADHD, depression, and all kinds of mental conditions for years. Other than crackpot anti-vaxxers and people like RFK Jr who try to throw life saving vaccines and common medications like Tylenol under the bus with literally no literature whatsoever to back it up, there has been no links discovered. Genetics and fetal gestation is weird and people just get born different sometimes. We as a society need to accept that and stop thinking these are diseases that need to be "fixed".
To try to explain the increase of stars in the universe without it's correlation with vaccine rates is just disingenuous. \s
Everyone knows that if the nebula takes paracetamol during pregnancy it increases the chance of K-type star creation.
The nebula: "Cut me sing some slack, i had an astronomical headache"