Dr. Donald Trump Declares That Autism Doesn’t ‘Occur Naturally’
from the from-the-head-down dept
As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they’re doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we think the data coming out of the CDC these days is accurate. Given the staff and budget cuts HHS has implemented, I think that is very much an open question.
In the meantime, Kennedy also committed about a month ago to “knowing the cause of autism” by September of this year. The claim would be absurd coming from anyone, given the research and science indicating that there are a number of factors likely at play rather than a single “cause,” but from noted anti-vaccine advocate Kennedy the claim takes on a more sinister tone. Kennedy has already walked back the ETA for his eureka on autism moment, but it seems overwhelmingly obvious where this is going.
Making matters worse, because the fish rots from the head down, Donald Trump recently remarked that the cause of autism must be from an external source. He, to the shock of exactly nobody, provided zero reasoning or evidence for this claim.
President Trump said Thursday that autism must not occur naturally, citing figures inflating the spike in autism and suggesting the administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission could provide answers.
“When you hear 10,000, it was 1 in 10,000, and now it’s 1 in 31 for autism, I think that’s just a terrible thing. It has to be something on the outside, has to be artificially induced, has to be,” Trump said at a MAHA Commission event. “And we will not allow our public health system to be captured by the very industries it’s supposed to oversee. So we’re demanding the answers, the public is demanding the answers and that’s why we’re here.”
Because this is Donald Trump, even his cited numbers are wrong. Autism spectrum diagnoses 25 years ago were in the 1 in 150 children range. Today they are 1 in 36. That is still a sizable jump and if you can’t be bothered to have a nuanced thought about it, it might freak you out. But medicine on new diseases changes, as does how we classify certain conditions. A ton of awareness and outreach has been done both with doctors and among the public when it comes to autism. With that education comes more diagnosed incidents as doctors and the public begin to recognize the symptoms for what they are.
But most medical professionals seem to agree that genetics and family history play a role in autism prevalence that ranges somewhere between being very important to being the primary cause. That would be directly contradictory to Trump’s claim that the disorder must be externally caused.
The main question now appears to be whether Kennedy is influencing Trump’s views on autism, or the other way around.
Ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation vote in the Senate, Trump also shared figures questioning the autism rate.
“20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT’S 1 in 34. WOW! Something’s really wrong. We need BOBBY!!! Thank You! DJT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
This isn’t some conversation happening in a vacuum. Policy decisions will be made based Trump’s and Kennedy’s misguided views on autism spectrum disorder. Neither of these men are doctors. One of them insisted that the American people shouldn’t take medical advice from him, despite his holding the highest office in the land when it comes to American health and healthcare.
Already HHS is paring back authorization for some vaccines, such as the COVID vaccine. Kennedy is implementing secretive changes to how vaccines get approved in the future as well.
All of this happening on Donald Trump’s watch and the damage that is likely to be done will take decades to unwind.
Filed Under: autism, donald trump, maha, rfk jr.
Comments on “Dr. Donald Trump Declares That Autism Doesn’t ‘Occur Naturally’”
Holy blatant hypocrisy, Batman!
Regulatory capture is the entire point of the Trump Administration. You can’t let the wealthiest government-enriched billionaire in the world have the freedom to delete anything he wants from the government and pretend that you are concerned with regulatory capture. The call isn’t just coming from within the house. The house is completely empty except for the killer and the phone he’s calling from and you couldn’t possibly miss seeing him!
What Trump is actually saying here to the health care companies is “offer me a bribe” and “make me look good by kissing my ass.”
You can look forward to Trump Medical NFT coins available on your favorite crypto meme store, redeemable for guaranteed access to the possibility of a potentially useful “health care professional” or right wing militia member posing as one for the purposes of this bit!
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IMHO, crypto currency got totally devalued the moment Trump changed his mind on it and bought in. Good job I never did.
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The entire purpose of this government is to turn the US into an empire belonging and serving the orange baboon emperor and the minions that kiss his ass with passion.
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The concept of hypocrisy doesn’t really make sense in reference to a person who talks out of their ass, with no apparent beliefs or principles and no regard for reality.
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“Accuse your enemies of what you are guilty of.” That’s Goebbels, but Trump learned it from Roy Cohn.
Stupid shit. I’m autistic, albeit not formally diagnosed by any of my doctors (long story). My grandmother was never diagnosed, and my father probably never will be, but there’s no doubt that I inherited many of my mental eccentricities/disorders (hello, anxiety) from them. Just because it ain’t recorded, doesn’t mean it ain’t there.
Re: Same here
Get my father (born in 1945) into an argument and you’ll see the autist in him staring right back.
It’s somewhat toned down in me (born by 1970) .. I’m the one that got all the vaccines available throughout my childhood, so clearly vaccines also prevent autism.
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Since anxiety is less heritable than schizophrenia (for example), I think it’s more likely that your anxiety was caused by being an autistic person living in a world created to exclude all but neurotypical people, and the same is likely true for your forebears. Just my 2¢.
Damn, guess I’m an UNnatural then.
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Isn’t that true of all of us, though? We’re all made by human activity, which, by our (human-centric) definition, makes us “artificial”.
Look in the mirror, Don. Something is seriously wrong with you. On the spectrum? Might be part of it.
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He on some spectrum, but autism ain’t it.
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Nah, that’s just ignorance and narcissism.
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Wow, fuck all the way off.
But medicine on new diseases changes
It does, but it also changes on all disease and conditions, like the non-new condition known as autism.
Another thing affecting the numbers for autism diagnoses, other than more and better diagnostics, is that the category of “autism” covers a hell of a lot more ground than it once did.
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You said:
The article said:
If you’re going to skim read articles, the least you can do is fully read the bits that catch your interest before engaging in criticism. You’ll be surprised how often something you perceive to be a problem has already been addressed.
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Did not skim, but ok, half fair enough.
Autism
Wow, the devotion to the genetic cause for everything including autism, runs deep almost religious in its fervor.
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Nobody thinks everything is genetic. Your stupidity is obviously self-imposed, for example.
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What the fuck are you on about, brainworm?
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It’s almost as if genetics play a huge role in a lot of things! :O
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“Science is more dogmatic than religion,” says dogmatic religious apologist.
Film at 11.
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Genetics is likely a lot more responsible for any occurence of autism than is whatever RFK and his crack team of paid-off crackheads will say causes autism. But it’s cute that you want to conflate science with religion so you can act like science—i.e., the furtherance of knowledge and the finding of factual information—is an “incorrect” religion. We’ve replaced a lot of religious explanations for natural phenomena with scientific explanations, but tell me: When has the reverse ever happened? And yes, RFK’s slavish devotion to the fact-free explanation of “autism must be unnatural and man-made” (with the underlying implication that God would never allow God’s creation to be so fucked up as to be “lazy eaters”) is basically a religious belief.
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Claiming that an environmental cause for autism is fact-free, is just an unwillingness to look at the science that has been developed. So I will just bring up two points and you can do the heavy lifting of actually reading the science. Autism rates have continued to escalate in the last couple decades when diagnostic criteria have not changed; genes dont evolve so quickly so there must be an environmental factor. Prof Exley did autopsies of many autistic and Alzheimers brains and found exceptional levels of aluminum
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The aluminum thing is old, and has been shown to be not the big risk.
Not that we shouldn’t be concerned about man-made environmental pollutants. But the whole party denying these things are any problem, and keep killing all industry and environmental regulation, sure as hell are not going to listen to Kennedy’s bullshit either for their own stupid reasons rather than any good ones. So you’d better get over it.
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claiming anything you’re talking about is science is a wildy inaccurate. You’re speculating at best.
Access to good medicine, better training, better diagnostic approaches, does accelerate rapidly.
Genes don’t need to change one but for them to spread and increase their presence.
One doc doing a study or two is so fat away from evidence.
You’re confusing correlation with causation.
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They have been trying to shoehorn autism into a genetic disease for maybe 75 years? Keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results…. If the CDC had wanted to they could have done a vaxed vs unvaxed study easily in all that time. Seems they have no incentive, while they are marketing and selling 4 billion $s of vacs every year. Finally RFKjr is providing the incentive to actually research the issue whatever the cause, instead of just pushing more vacs on the public and ignoring this sick elephant in the room. And people are losing their sh!t.
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Why are you saying it’s a “genetic disease”? It’s not a disease, at best it can be referred to as a genetic disorder and the preponderance of evidence points to it being genetic since autism tend to run in families.
You are also very confused about other things, the CDC doesn’t market and sell vaccines.
And if you think no one is actually researching autism, I can only conclude that you are very uninformed. I have to ask, do you also think the only country who has ever researched autism is the US??
The only people loosing their shit is the uninformed masses that is being lied to. I can guess which group you belong to.
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It’s the same reason RFK refers to autism as a disease: a belief in eugenics and thus a belief that people with autism become “lazy eaters” from the moment they’re diagnosed.
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It’s a phenotypic variation arising from genetic sources.
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They have done an Vax vs. Unvaxed study, you insufferable colostomy bag.
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How dare you! Colostomy bags, insufferable or otherwise, are at least useful.
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What has changed is the willingness to diagnose people because there’s more knowledge and less stigma around the spectrum. When I was a kid (80s and 90s), you didn’t get diagnosed unless you were non-verbal or had significant behavioral issues, and sometimes not even then. I had friends whose parents declined to get their kids diagnosed even though they suspected they were on the spectrum because a diagnosis was a negative label and might lead to being treated differently. So I was 30 when I got diagnosed with ADHD and 40 when I got diagnosed as autistic. The increase in diagnosis is just catching up with reality. But uneducated “skeptics” will just come up with their own magical explanations.
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People would get diagnosed if they needed to be—like if they’d be unable to function as independent adults, and parents wanted to get them help from “the system”.
The whole point of a diagnosis is so one can be treated differently. For example, we don’t want to operate on people for cancer until we diagnose them as having it. 40 years ago, “autistic but not significantly disabled” wasn’t a diagnosis that came with any benefit.
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You get diagnosed so you can match the tools to the condition. Even 40 years ago, and without social benefits, it has value to people and families.
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What tools, though? I don’t think there were many then. Someone diagnosed as autistic would’ve been put on the “short bus”, moved to the class with the “slow” kids, etc.; it was seen as nothing but a mental handicap.
Unless that were self-evidently necessary, why would parents do it to a kid? The evidence suggests they mostly didn’t.
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I only figured out I’d been diagnosed as a kid when in my 20s when I did all the research and dug into the shcool I was moved to after visiting what I then figured out was a centre that did the diagnosis where they put me through a bunch of tests. MY parents came clean when I confronted them with the evidence I had found, and I had to explain how not explaining it to me and keeping it a secret from the world, did far more harm to me as a child and in the decades from then until me working it out myself, than letting me understand it and have more support than I was provided with would have done.
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I went through tests too, and was put on medication, and don’t know the details of any of that stuff. Maybe there was some such diagnosis, but any benefit of knowing feels pretty abstract.
A lot of the “having to work stuff out yourself” seems like general educational shittiness, of the kind that everyone goes through. Multiple teachers complained that I and my fellow students didn’t know how to take notes, but neither they nor anyone else ever tried to teach us; they just told us we were doing it wrong, that we didn’t need verbatim copies of the blackboard. A foreign language teacher was shocked that we didn’t know the difference (in English) between “perfect” and other tenses, but of course they also didn’t really explain. That lack of knowledge was probably because our English lessons jumped from “circle the nouns and underline the verbs in these sentences” into “analyze this Shakespeare play—which is, by the way, in archaic language you’ve never learned and we’re not gonna explain”.
It seems to be just kind of expected that school is stressful and traumatizing. I was out for a decade before the nightmares stopped, but, apparently, that’s common and “totally healthy” (I have my doubts, given that they describe school as a shared trauma and the dreams as, basically, “light” post-traumatic stress disorder).
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You clearly don’t know fucking much, do you?
Tools include behavior modification techniques that individuals can use as an alternative to other behaviours that are often interruptive to others.
That’s just fucking one. Maybe you should read more and type less.
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That’s a present-tense statement. We’re talking about 30-40 years ago, and we’re talking about why people wouldn’t have gotten themselves or their kids diagnosed at the time. That’s more about perception than reality—what did they expect to gain (or lose) from such a diagnosis. There was no “spectrum”, no ability to google “should I have my kind tested for autism”; the ability to “read more” depended on the quality of one’s local libraries, and one’s skill at using them. But maybe someone had seen “Rain Man” and didn’t want that for their kid, so testing didn’t happen.
That a perception was wrong doesn’t mean it wasn’t someone’s actual motivation. And, to me, that’s kind of a summary of this entire Presidency, which would be utterly baffling to anyone who doesn’t understand that.
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Fucking Christ. You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Literally everything you’re saying. Is wrong. You’re fractally wrong. Each sentence is just as wrong as the whole paragraph.
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And ABA was invented 65 years ago. Your point?
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I’m saying they often wouldn’t. People who could have been helped with the knowledge or official accommodations didn’t always get diagnosed because of the stigma.
By differently, I meant being treated poorly. Parents were afraid of their kids getting labeled as the R-word or placed in special classes that would lead to other kids making fun of them or teachers treating them as a waste of effort.
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I think we’re basically agreeing. Yeah, if modern supports were available, more people would have “needed” a diagnosis. But since they mostly weren’t, and people would have been perceived as “mentally challenged” or whatever term was politically correct at the time, it wasn’t going to happen unless it was unavoidable—like if someone was several years behind their grade level, or had severe behavioral problems. People who could (mostly) get by without the label didn’t seek diagnosis, and were probably seen as just “weird”, maybe as “loners” or such.
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As Casey Means points out the diagnostic criteria for autism have not changed in a couple decades but the rate of diagnosis for autism continues to skyrocket. 1 in 12.5 boys in California now.
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So you want us to believe in someone who dropped out of her residency and started practicing “functional medicine” (aka alternative medicine)?
It’s quite easy to look at the revision of the DSM to see that she and you are full of shit. DSM-5 (released in 2014) had changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism, DSM-5TR (released in 2022) had more changes. There are other changes too but at this point I have clearly established enough facts to show how wrong you and the people you listen to are.
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[citations needed]. If you’re bringing the claims, it’s your responsibility to bring the evidence.
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I did. Get outside your bubble and start reading science that doesnt confirm your bias.
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You made a claim with zero citations.
If I claim I fart colorful rainbows would you believe it without evidence?
TL;DR: You did nothing.
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Science does that all the time, you puddle of anal pustule leakage.
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I’m not going to comment on the truth of that statement, but it’s a rather interesting claim for people to be making while dismantling environmental regulations.
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The criteria have changed, though. And that’s how science actually works: More knowledge means more to change about how we see the world. Autism rates have “escalated” partly because the diagnostic criteria have changed based on more information about autism and partly because people have better language for talking about autistic kids beyond a well-known ableist slur. It’s a lot like how the number of queer people in the world keeps rising, in that it’s not that more people are “choosing” to be queer or that something is making people queer, but rather that they’re less afraid to be openly queer. Queerness, like autism, was always there—it’s the increasing lack of social stigma around being queer/autistic and our progressive understanding of queerness/autism that is making those things more visible.
Did he do those autopsies with the expectation of a specific result?
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This is pure, blatant ignorance. The diagnostic criteria have changed dramatically, as have diagnostic practices (i.e. the interpretation of the written criteria by diagnosticians).
A couple of decades ago, it was near impossible to get a diagnosis if you were female or an adult. The diagnosis of “autism spectrum disorder” has only existed since 2013, when the DSM-5 was published.
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Exley did not find “exceptional levels of aluminum”, he found elevated levels in a small sample, he further didn’t have a control group to compare the levels to which makes any finding mostly irrelevant.
I have to ask, why did you use the word “exceptional” when even the report didn’t use that word? I also have to ask, do you actually believe the lie that diagnostic criteria hasn’t changed the last couple of decades?
It’s always interesting to see people waving around these results from poor research as a gotcha for why autism has risen while ignoring how the understanding and diagnosing of it has grown rapidly the last 4 decades.
There’s no denying that environmental factors have a play in autism but no one has of yet actually proved that environmental factor X causes autism in any credible way, the leading cause of autism is and has always been that its hereditary, ie genetics. What has a correlation though, is the mother’s health and age and what environmental factors she have been exposed to which can affect her unborn child’s epigenetics.
TL;DR: Anyone who ignore genetics when talking about autism while pointing to dubious research about environmental factors as a cause should stop talking and start educating themselves.
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True, the criteria for autism didn’t change at all in 2013, just 12 years ago. 🤦🏻♂️
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These people (Trump, Kennedy et.al.) are intellectually deficient and they’re pandering to an audience that’s also intellectually deficient. Neither has any capability to appreciate or understand complexity, and as a result of this severely limited worldview, they are completely incapable of understanding the problem — let alone its possible solutions. I would suggest that they READ but Trump can’t and Kennedy won’t.
In the specific instance we’re discussing here — autism — researchers have been working very hard for decades to unravel the causes and effects. As someone with autism, I’ve followed this closely, and the bottom line: we know a lot, we don’t know a lot. Examples of the first category: (1) we know there’s a genetic component, (2) we know that vaccines have nothing to do with it. Example of the second category: (1) we don’t know exactly how much of an impact known neurotoxins like lead, mercury, cadmium, etc., have. (See Does Lead Have a Connection to Autism? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis for an analysis specific to lead which also cites papers dealing with other neurotoxins.)
I used the word “exactly” in that last paragraph because we know there is an impact and it’s bad. There is easily sufficient evidence to drive public policy like “get rid of lead pipes” and “don’t let industries dump mercury into water supplies”. We don’t need an exact answer to know that we should be implementing those policies yesterday.
But the people who can’t grasp complexity and nuance will seize on this partial knowledge and instead of recognizing that the correct approach to dealing with it is to fund the hell out of research that will gradually fill in the missing pieces, fill it in for themselves — today — with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
They — Trump, Kennedy, et.al. — are going to kill tens of millions of people with this approach. Not that they care, not they’ll ever take responsibility, but their hands are already dripping with blood and the slaughter has only just begun.
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That’s why they make eugenics talking points about autistic people not contributing to society. Scapegoat categories are loosely parallel throughout the cycles of history: The nazis went after the handicapped and lgbtqia+ first also.
RFK jr’s plan to use wearables data to be correlated with existing research data is an attempt to de anonymize who is autistic.
They’re prepping to attack that group next. When you say a portion of the population doesn’t contribute to society you are arguing for their removal.
They make religious-like statements about autism to draw in dupes for cover. Preaching is how you build fervor. They’re going to start talking sterilization and containment next.
They believe in eugenics and they use the language of those that believe in eugenics. They don’t care that you see through their lies, they’re base building for horrible things.
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(second try)
These people (Trump, Kennedy et.al.) are intellectually deficient and they’re pandering to an audience that’s also intellectually deficient. Neither has any capability to appreciate or understand complexity, and as a result of this severely limited worldview, they are completely incapable of understanding the problem — let alone its possible solutions. I would suggest that they READ but Trump can’t and Kennedy won’t.
In the specific instance we’re discussing here — autism — researchers have been working very hard for decades to unravel the causes and effects. As someone with autism, I’ve followed this closely, and the bottom line: we know a lot, we don’t know a lot. Examples of the first category: (1) we know there’s a genetic component, (2) we know that vaccines have nothing to do with it. Example of the second category: (1) we don’t know exactly how much of an impact known neurotoxins like lead, mercury, cadmium, etc., have. (See Does Lead Have a Connection to Autism? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis for an analysis specific to lead which also cites papers dealing with other neurotoxins.)
I used the word “exactly” in that last paragraph because we know there is an impact and it’s bad. There is easily sufficient evidence to drive public policy like “get rid of lead pipes” and “don’t let industries dump mercury into water supplies”. We don’t need an exact answer to know that we should be implementing those policies yesterday.
But the people who can’t grasp complexity and nuance will seize on this partial knowledge and instead of recognizing that the correct approach to dealing with it is to fund the hell out of research that will gradually fill in the missing pieces, fill it in for themselves — today — with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
They — Trump, Kennedy, et.al. — are going to kill tens of millions of people with this approach. Not that they care, not they’ll ever take responsibility, but their hands are already dripping with blood and the slaughter has only just begun.
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It’s been long established that genetics play a part. That’s not even up for debate. Trying to deny facts certainly seem to come with a religious like fervor though. You dunce.
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And your devotion is to what, magic causes? We’re just dealing with the evidence.
Denial is not a river in Africa
So autism does not occur naturally, just like homosexuality, gender dysphoria, racism, voting against Trump (stolen election anybody?), constitutional violations in letter and spirit by Trumpists, police violence and whatnot.
It is part of the Orwellian playbook for a simplified unified world view that we love Big Brother for.
The way to deal with confirmation bias is to declare everybody else wrong and/or evil. Which is the general working principle of any religion. So of course it is a natural part of the “Mein Führer!” cult around Trump.
The jury is still out on whether autistic individuals in the long run are to be interned, sterilized, punished, or put down.
Trump’s grandfather was expatriated from the German Kaiserreich for draft dodging (a proud family tradition by now) before WWI, so the family wasn’t around for the post-WWII detox in Germany. That may explain some of the current Trump’s eagerness to reenact history.
Naybe he relies on Bismarck’s famous saying “God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America.” not running out. But he may be overplaying his hand, like is his wont.
Timothy, I think you missed what Trump was saying (Which is not only OK, but a good sign you don’t have maximal brain damage!).
Since “autism = bad”, Trump was trying to take credit for it (since he’s an external factor).
Same for cancer, a century ago, nobody was dying from it but now it has been hundreds thousands deaths since we discovered it.
So yes, there must be something fishy “on the outside”…
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Wikipedia says “Cancer has existed for all of human history. The earliest written record regarding cancer is from c. 1600 BC in the Egyptian Edwin Smith Papyrus and describes breast cancer. Hippocrates (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) described several kinds of cancer, referring to them with the Greek word καρκίνος karkinos (crab or crayfish).” It also notes, a couple of paragraphs down, that is wasn’t till about 3,000 years later that “it became acceptable for doctors to dissect bodies to discover the cause of death”.
“The physician John Hill described tobacco sniffing as the cause of nose cancer in 1761. This was followed by the report in 1775 by British surgeon Percivall Pott that chimney sweeps’ carcinoma, a cancer of the scrotum, was a common disease among chimney sweeps.”
You’re way off with “hundreds thousands deaths”. The number since discovery (3,600 years ago) would be well upward of a billion by now. The rate has gone up over time, but a lot of that can be attributed to longer lifespan and more medical knowledge.
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whooooooooooosh!
Sorry, DJT. “Bobby” is his father. He’s “Booby.” (Didn’t we used to just call them “hyper” and blame it on sugar?)
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People also used to refer to autistic people with a specific ableist slur. One of the reasons autism rates are rising is because people stopped doing that as medical professionals learned more about autism.
While he's at it..
… 120 years ago only 1 in 30 people were left-handed. Now the number is about 1 in 8. Clearly vaccines cause left-handedness.
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No, it’s organic foods that causes autism. Haven’t you seen the graph that shows the rise in diagnoses of autism almost exactly matches the graph of the rise in sales of organic foods?
https://www.ithinkwell.org/autism-correlation-does-not-equal-correlation/?print=print
One day Trump will remove the mask to reveal that he’s actually a lizard man from another planet, and all of this will make complete sense.
Wow. Even Autism Speaks, the past master of statistical obfuscation as scare tactics, recognizes that the prevalence (diagnosed cases) of autism was 1 in 166 20 years ago. This only goes to prove that Trump is as good at medical science as he is at successfully running a business.
When I was young I recall that autism was a ‘male only’ issue… It seems they were incorrect and that actual science and testing makes a difference
E
The globalist scissors industry done it to them!
I mean yep it’s leveled off now, but you gotta see this spike in left-handedness what happened years ago and ain’t nobody talking about it.
My brother in Christ that shit ain’t natural.
Autism: as old as human history
There have always been stories of children “raised by wolves” or bears, or whatever animal.
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And your suggestion is… what? That these children were actually raised by humans, but nobody would admit that when the children turned out to be autistic? Or that parents were abandoning autistic children, who then raised themselves among animals?
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No, the suggestion is that autism wasn’t always called that when people showed signs of being autistic. They were said to be “raised by wolves” or “taken by the fey people” or somesuch. Society in general didn’t know how to talk about autism because society in general didn’t know what autism was. Now that it does know, it’s able to say “my little Timmy is autistic” instead of “my little Timmy is r⸺d”.
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Is there evidence for this? I’ve heard people talk about others acting as if they were raised by wolves (such as by being impolite), but presumed that stories about children actually being raised by wolves were based on children having been found living in wolf packs. And I’d expect “taken by the fey” to just mean a child disappeared and was never found; or, if found, nobody wanted to talk about the kidnapping.
What’s the basis for claiming these things were sometimes (or always?) stealth references to autism?
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Don’t do this obtuse bullshit with me, dude. It doesn’t make you look smart or funny in any way. You know the point I was making, and it wasn’t “people literally believed autistic people were kidnapped and raised by feral wolves”. JFC, the media literacy in this country these days…
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I think you misread the message. It’s not meant as a joke. The question is about whether “raised by wolves” is known to have anything at all to do with autism, or whether that’s just being hypothesized by the initial poster.
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There’s this, which is most useful.
Come on, Trump is an expert on everything! Just look at his social media posts and you’ll see he is never in doubt about his brilliance. If he says it, it’s true! Even his contradictions, there’s the real 5D chess.
I know exactly what’s responsible for the increase in childhood autism in the past 25 years:
Better definitions of autism and better screening.
So obviously, in the Trump admin’s mind, the cure for autism is to defund psychiatrists and ban the DSM! At that point, Autism vanishes, as nobody will be diagnosed.
Remember that Autism used to be a “you’ve got it or you don’t” thing, and Aspberger’s syndrome was counted completely separately.
From https://autism.org/what-is-autism/ :
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So obviously, in the Trump admin’s mind, the cure for autism is to defund psychiatrists and ban the DSM! At that point, Autism vanishes, as nobody will be diagnosed.
I mean, it ‘worked’ for covid cases/deaths…
GOD DID IT
IS NEVER THE ANSWER
Naturally Autistic
Hahaha I’m going to start referring to myself as a “natural” autistic. Not all of us experience a huge declines in skills that people love to use to point to environmental factors and vaccines as a cause. It’s true that there is some evidence for environmental factors, but we don’t know the whole story. We do know it’s not vaccines, though, and even if it were: autism won’t kill ya outright. Measles will. Alive and autistic should always be better than not autistic but dead from preventable illnesses.
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It should be, but unfortunately we are talking about the beliefs being put into action of those who have made overt eugenicist statements on a great many occasions.
When I was a kid, there was “you’re autistic” (meaning the barely functioning, incessant top-spinning, Rainman-esque view of autism — no judgement here, just stating how it was) and there was “you’re a weird kid”. There was no spectrum.
As science investigated this more, we’ve become better able to diagnose people (hence the spectrum and cross-connections to other conditions, etc.) .. it’s almost as if SCIENCE ACTUALLY WORKS!
But I suppose it’s not surprising that the anti-science party doesn’t get that.
(and, for what it’s worth, his name is Bobby Brainworm and no one will ever convince me otherwise)
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Among other things, the diagnosis that used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome is now classified as autism.
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Probably an unpopular opinion, but I have autism 1. Back in the day, I would have absolutely been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. That they put Asperger Syndrome in that same category as autism, in my mind, was a mistake. Not because Asperger’s and Autism 1 aren’t legitimate disabilities (they absolutely are), but because the differences in support needs between Autism 1, 2, and 3 are so vast it just looks like a completely different set of disabilities. I work with autistic people a lot more impacted than myself, for perspective, and I feel like saying we have similar disabilities is inappropriate. This is not because people with autism 1 are in any way better or have more of a right to exist than people with 2 and 3. Without a starker delineation, people forget that autism isn’t just autism. It’s a variety or spectrum of conditions that differs vastly in presentation from person to person. Autistic activists without intellectual disabilities should not be driving conversations around support needs for the general autistic population unless they have actual expertise beyond themselves in caring for someone with autism 2 or 3.
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Fuck you, you disablist blowhard. The fact is that Level 1 autistic people like Ari Ne’eman aren’t attempting to speak for (read: over) Level 2 autistic people like myself and my youngest brother or Level 3 autistic people like Amy Sequenzia and Ido Kedar the way neurotypical parent “advocates” like Jil Escher and Amy S.F. Lutz do, they’re speaking with us with our full consent and help us in saying the things we often struggle to (even if a Level 2 autistic person seems typically “verbal”, we still struggle with actual communication), and engaging in any attempt to get them shut up speaking with us as you have is tantamount to harming our ability to self advocate. Now fuck all the way off.
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It’s like trying to argue that bilingual people are “speaking for/over” the people they act as interpreters for. No, they’re just overcoming a language barrier by being able to converse with two people who do not share a language, and thus enable and relay a dialogue.
Mental health conditions don’t HAVE a single cause. The DSM is a way of grouping people based upon their behaviors, not based upon etiology.
If you gave 10,000 people the Phineas Gage, you would have a range of different psychiatric diagnoses. Likewise, if you looked at 10,000 people with depression caused directly by cranial trauma, you would see a wide range of different types and locations of trauma despite the similar outcomes.
These are the claims of people who do not understand psychiatry at even the most basic level. Given how bad it is, it calls into question all medical advice either gives… as if they weren’t already suspect.
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Except in Autism, we can observe consistent, matching patterns of developmental characteristics among the brain’s biological structure and chemistry, with the same transcriptomic signatures showing up across the board. The reliably observed patterns of upregulation and downregulation in specific systems can be traced to specific sets of genes, and again, pretty reliably cause and effect can be observed. Clearly this particular set of genotypes which underlie this specific grouping of phenotypic expressions shows up repeatedly in one form or another across global human populations and therefore has origins a long way back, and is fairly conserved, so one could speculate it has provided some degree of benefit to the populations it’s found within. But what we can say for sure is that what we classify as “Autism” is basically dependent upon how many of the associated genes one inherited from each parent. Maybe one or both might have been considered “A bit odd”.
I can certainly say several of the men of my paternal grandfather’s generation in the family seem to fit the bill for what had they spent their childhood on the other side during WWII, have been recognised by Hans Asperger. And while we’re talking about the fascinations of nazi scientists, one must also take into account the abundance of twin studies on autism spectrum diagnoses, where the rates are extremely statistically significant, even in cases of the pair having been separated early and experiencing very dissimilar environmental and/or social factors to their upbringing.
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Nonsense – while heredity may play a role, we do not have an identified “autism gene” with the specificity you suggest. Autism also occurs in those without genomic features believed to be linked to autism.
What we classify as autism is anyone who follows a specific set of behavioral patterns. That may be more common among people with certain features in their genome, but it is demonstrated that it occurs in those without them as well.
Because autism is defined behaviorally, a hard genetic link would require that people ONLY act that way when possessed of those genetic traits, and NEVER act that way absent those traits. Humans are complex beings, and our behavior is determined by more than our genetic composition.
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Of course we have not identified a “single autism gene”, because as I said, there is no such thing.
We have identified many clusters of genes, the presence of enough of which together contribute to the neurodevelopmental phenotype found in the brains of those with a diagnosis by large scale studies, and which the various combinations of result in the wide variation of degrees of phenotypic expression which are associated with it (Thankfully also something which nicely scuppers the efforts of eugenicists seeking to “eradicate” it, since as I said, there are so many that they’re common enough that most people will likely have one or two of the variants, so eradiccating all of them from the population would be an insurmountable task while retaining a viable human population.)
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It’s very true that mental health conditions like depression are complex, in their causes and in their expression. I doubt you intended to misinform.
But regrettably you did make a bad supporting argument, which appears to strongly imply that the brain doesn’t have specialized regions. Which is simply false.
We have far more data than just one infamous, poorly-performed mid-1800s case study to understand what specific regions (like the prefrontal cortex) do, and what impairments are most likely if they are damaged.
Look, I don’t want to sound pedantic. But I have to listen to enough misinformation from the pseudoscience and anti-science crowds, so the last thing I want is to see even more, from well-intentioned but sloppy allies.
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Sadly, the aphorism “When all you have is a hammer” is very much alive and well in certain circles of psychiatry. I have personally encountered at least three qualified, practicing professionals in the field who were utterly convinced cancer is psychosomatic and the correct treatment is CBT, one of whom would insist until the cows come home that chemotherapy is a “big pharma” conspiracy.
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The main problem is that all such disciplines are unfortunately prone to a certain degree of inertia and ossification where a bunch of “givens” are established early on in their history, and it can take generations before those preconceptions that are taught as truisms while being no such thing, are overcome. And even then, you get revanchist movements, be they modern day eugenicists within biological sciences, or those seeking to resurrect Freudian beliefs among psychological fields.