In the telling of President Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., autism in the U.S. has exploded in the past decades with seemingly no explanation.

These claims skip over a mountain of data and touch on the country's dark history around treating people with neurological and developmental differences, including within Kennedy's own illustrious family.

“We are indeed diagnosing autism more than ever before in history. I mean, that's just a fact,” Andy Shih, chief science officer at the nonprofit Autism Speaks, told The Hill.

While Kennedy insists external factors like vaccines must be to blame, experts instead believe the trend is a reflection of an improved understanding of neurodivergence within the medical community.

“We think that the increases are due to the fact that there’s greater awareness that there are tools now that allow us to screen systematically with children at certain ages, certain stages of development,” Shih said.

Autism, like many diagnoses, does not exist in a vacuum. Its perception and detection have changed drastically within the last century, with much of that change occurring throughout Kennedy’s lifetime.

The exact cause of autism is unknown, but the current scientific consensus is that it’s a complex amalgamation of genetic predispositions and environmental factors.

“We used to compare autism to what we call complex disorders or complex diseases like heart disease and lung disease, where there's certainly a genetic predisposition, but environment influences certainly affect outcome,” Shih said.

“Now we look at autism not as a medical condition, but part of the richness of human variation.”

History of shaky theories

Kennedy vowed to find the cause of autism by September of this year, suggesting that “environmental toxins” in food and medicine are the likely culprits.

Since autism was first diagnosed, numerous causes have been suggested, several of which have been discredited.

In the mid-20th century, Austrian American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim proposed that emotionally distant parenting by so-called refrigerator mothers was the cause of autism, and he called for removing diagnosed children from their parents.

Kennedy has long put his support behind the theory that vaccines could cause autism, but analyses, including those conducted by the

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