Correlation?

In 2019, my life has been officially split into two. This is because I have lived exactly 8 years of my life in Sacramento and 8 years of my life in Antioch. While they may only be an hour and a half away from each other, the experiences I have of both are very different.
My family moved to Sacramento because my brother was diagnosed with five different mental disabilities since the age of two. He was five to six at this time. This was the time most neurotypical kids start school, but for him, it was a different story. Especially between 2000 and 2010, Antioch was purely a commuting city where people left home for their jobs in the San Francisco at 6am and returned home at 7pm everyday. Their doors weren't open besides those hours of the day. This then leaves a lack of services specifically the ones my brother was starting to need.
We then got a fresh start, and now my brother is receiving the services that he needs. But life still wasn't all sunshine and butterflies. My family stuck out like a sore thumb having been one of the only special needs families I knew at the time.
However, something I have gotten to see more of is special needs families. To me, this was a normalized reality. It was easy to spot the similarities of the people around you especially when we crowd source the people we put around ourselves. This idea that more and more special needs children and adults were coming out in the world is something that I hadn't consciously reflect upon till reading the three article set about the correlation of mental disabilities and media (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/05/18/how-heavy-use-of-social-media-is-linked-to-mental-illness)
One of the large concepts being the cause of this correlation was how people were becoming more aware of mental disabilities and thereby being able to better identify and diagnose people who have them (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198586/). Personally, I am very thankful for the progression of time with the greater awareness, but with all things, there is a negative aspect of this.  With sensitivity, there is also the lack of it. People have created laugh stocks out of serious issues that people live with on a day-to-day basis. And as much as media is used as a platform to spread information, the hate is passed around to the same degree as the good. Calling people bipolar for quickly getting mad or autistic for losing a train of thought as some examples that I see frequently.

When looking back to when my family came to Sacramento and the pool of families in the same situation as we were, there are many reasons for why that may have been the turning point. It could go along with the human nature of seeking those similar to us. But, it could have also been that seeing others was the way my family opened up about fully engaging with my brother and his needs. So as the media has shown correlation to the increasing number of mental disability diagnoses, there is a greater difference from reading about it in class and living through it with my brother.