In an eerie preview of the autism “epidemic” to come four decades later, the prevalence of childhood schizophrenia started spiking in the midtwentieth century. By 1954, Bender saw 850 young patients with that diagnosis at Bellevue alone, including 250 cases added to her files in the previous three years. Bellevue was not unique in this respect: from 1946 to 1961, one in seven children admitted to the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco were diagnosed as “psychotic,” with most having a reported onset before three years of age.
