Human beings are funny. We waltz around, prisoners in our own heads, absolutely certain that everything we think and perceive is “real,” and not just a concoction of chemicals swirling in our skulls.

Take the classic “white Toyota” example: You spend your waking hours cruising along the roads, noticing other cars in a “I could tell you I saw them, but not what make or model” kind of way. Then you shell out $15 grand for a shiny white Prius and head back on the highway, pleased with your economically and ecologically sound purchase. All of a sudden, the world is a sea of white Toyotas. They lurk at every intersection, in every parking garage, in line at every toll booth. Your consciousness can barely handle the onslaught of white Toyota-ness that’s besieging your senses.

So is it all a cruel joke played on you by the universe? Did everyone in the Tri-State area miraculously head to the Toyota dealership on the same day? Did some marketing mastermind implant subliminal Toyota-buying messages in the morning news? Hardly. Your brain is suddenly switched on to a certain object, your awareness is shifted, so now the plethora of white Toyotas that was always swirling in your peripheral consciousness is now smacking the center of your brain. In other words: They were always there, dumass — you just didn’t see them.

With this in mind, I can’t help but wonder if the same can be true for mental disorders. If a somewhat rare mental disorder is all of a sudden ballooning into an epidemic, is it really that so many more people have it? Or are we all suddenly just paying more attention? Particularly since, at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a “mental disorder” unless we make it up in a book. Ebola or bubonic plague — they exist. Just ask the boils and destroyed lungs. But “autism”? Really its just a set of behaviors that we put on a list. Who’s to say that autistic people are really “disordered,” unless we label them as such?

Anyway that’s my theorizing for the day. Read my latest piece on the autism epidemic, and an innovative new potential treatment, here.