Y'all ever notice that when people say “There were never that many X people before!!!” X people almost always seem to be Housebound due to Lack of Accessibility or Chance of Severe Illness, Unrepresented because no one Put A Name to the Demographic, Oppressed with Physical Violence and Societal Ostracization, or straight up fucking Dead?? Just me?
This oversight is called Survivorship Bias, wherein one looks at a dataset comparing two numbers and doesn’t think about the other end of the numbers. In this case, they compare the number of people with allergies today vs the 1800s, and they find that there are more people with allergies today. Does this mean that we’re doing something wrong now? Are we ‘softer’ now? Absolutely not- it just means that they’re living past childhood.
It is a well-known fact that, when motorcyclists wear helmets, they end up in the hospital more often. Why? Are helmets more dangerous? Absolutely not! They’re ending up in the hospital instead of the morgue.
This also applies to mental illness, or things that used to be considered mental illness (homosexuality, gender dysphoria, being female and having opinions) - those people were institutionalized, hidden away. Those places were underfunded, brutal, inhumane, and often deadly.
