Searching for autism and ADHD
What are the trends from 2015-2035 in Web searches for these manifestations of neurodiversity?
As noted in the Special Education Today post of 6 December 2025 reporting Tom Bennett’s concerns about the usefulness of the term “neurodiversity,” the history of Web searches recorded by Google showed a substantial increase in people searching for the term. What might have happened with searches for some other terms, especially ones such as autism and ADHD that people might closely associate with neurodiversity? I used Google’s trends data to examine changes in searches for all three terms over the years 2015 through 2025.
Here is the graph generated by Google Trend for “neurodiversity,” “autism,” and “ADHD” for searches from all around Earth during the period November 2015 until December 2025. The searches for autism are shown in yellow, those for ADHD in red, and those for neurodiversity in blue.
One should be cautious about the data shown in these graphs. First, the scale on the ordinate or “y axis” is kinda funky; the numbers are not counts or even 1000s of counts.1 For instance, the data are only part of what someone may have searched; a search may have been much more nuanced than just a search for the word “autism.” In addition, we don’t really know much above who searched.2 Also, note that Google reported it changed its counting methods twice (the dates when those changes occurred are marked by the work “notes” written vertically on the chart.
It’s easy for us to mislead ourselves. Because the contents of SET are nominally about special education, we might look at these data with certain lenses. We night think that they apply to children, but maybe they actually apply to infants, toddlers, children, youth, young adults, and middle-aged adults. We shouldn’t assume that the data are relevant to all aspects represented by the terms; perhaps they are primarily about characteristics (as opposed to assessment or intervention).
With all those caveats, I’ll venture a couple of interpretations. My first statistics professor, M. Stephen Sheldon, said that the first rule of research is to “stare at the data.”3 My top-level look at these data reveals a couple of interesting things:
In comparison to “autism” and “ADHD,” “neurodiversity has not been searched nearly as often. The graph in the earlier post showed that searches were increasing, but the increases are not as great in the context of searches for the terms “ADHD” and “autism.”4
If one compares the curves for ADHD and autism in this graph, it appears that ADHD has surged ahead of autism in the last 5 years. (I italicized “appears” because we’d be wise to conduct some more formal trend analyses—sadistics!—to test the eyeball analysis from staring at these curves.And that goes double for possible explanations of why any trends occurred.5
I see some periodicity in the data for searches about autism. If I follow along the yellow data path, I see peaks every so often. Those peaks occur pretty much regularly around April. Again, we’d need more formal analyses (a lag-12 auto-correlation, perhaps?) to confirm the periodicity…and we’d need lots of other data to begin to explain why the peaks occur.
For those who are wondering about the relationships among these measures, yes they are correlated. The Google numbers for autism and ADHD correlate at 0.83. The numbers for autism and neurodiversity correlate at 0.56. The numbers for ADHD and neurodiversity correlate at 0.43. Each of these simple linear regression coefficients is based on n = 122 pairs of months.
As I’ve indicated (see footnotes), these data are a bit quirky. Importantly they only provide a limited view of autism, ADHD, and neurodiversity. Savvy readers of SET will have many other questions about these data. Why, in the world are the searches increasing? Why re some seemingly increasing more rapidly than others? What’s with the repeated bounces in the search rates for autism?
These data only allow limited conclusions; they provide no answers for those important questions. There are, of course, people writing their answers for these questions. Indeed, as we’ve seen in 2025, some government officials are providing explanations—and some folks are hesitant about accepting those explanations.
Footnote
The ordinate scale for this graph is a tad tricky. Values on it are not simple numbers such as the number of actual searches. They are values on a relative scale for each term; they are normalized on the most frequent search for the term during the period shown. The scale is set so that the highest value on the graph has a value of 100, and the other values shown are a ratio of the counts for that term in relation to that highest value. That is they are a bit like ratios of the searches at one time in comparison to the searches at the most popular time. To illustrate: The highest point for “autism” is near the right side of the graph and it has a value of 100; all the other points on the data path for “autism” are proportions of the number at that highest point. Here is Google’s explanation of the metric: “Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.”
Google probably knows a lot about each individual who searched (type of computer from which each search originated, whether the person most often search in the AM or PM, shoe sales searched recently, political issues searched, eligibility for discounts on insurance, what email message the searcher read just before searching….).
Steve distributed a delightful mimeographed article (yes, the 1960s-era, pre-”Xerox” means of copying frequently) he had written. It was called “Preliminary Catechism for the Religion of Education Research” (as I recall). It’s a very simple and clear (and sometimes irreverent) introduction to some big ideas in research statistics. If readers would like to read a copy, let me know.
Please note, however, that the search rates for “neurodiversity” shown here and in the earlier post are not comparable. I used slightly different parameters in the two searches. Viewer beware!
I hasten to note, also, that even if statistical analyses confirmed that searches for one of the terms had increased more rapidly that searches for the other term over the time, that would not tell us why there had been such a change. I bet people will make interpretations (“well, that’s because of covid…parents got to see their children struggling to sustain their work…and kids just got more anxious and worried…the expectations changed….”), but these data do not show whether such explanations are true. Caution in interpreting data is important.