Thinking About Autism
By
Leonard Zwelling
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. believes that autism is a preventable disease. He also seems to believe that autistic people cannot hold down jobs or have happy family lives. It’s really a shame that a man like this is the head health official in a country so in need of drastic healthcare reform. He’s not only misinformed, he seems untrainable.
Let’s break down a few things I have learned about autism from first-hand experience.
First, autism is not one disease but a spectrum of clinical presentations from severely disabled and intellectually challenged people to the great majority of people on the autism spectrum who get along in the world their own way—like the rest of us do. They hold down jobs. They do remarkable things in music and science. They marry. They have kids. They are people who just think differently than you do. Differently, not inferiorly. In fact, in some ways they think better. And that’s the point. Autism is just another human variant. Calling it a disease is not completely accurate and trying to change autistic people is foolish. They can adapt to the world that most of us experience, but they cannot be changed, nor ought they be.
Second, for the autism spectrum of presentations to be “preventable,” we would have to know the cause. We do not. We only know that this spectrum is not caused by vaccines despite what Mr. Kennedy and his followers believe. Might there be an environmental factor? Sure. Might certain people have the genetic proclivity to develop autism when exposed to such a factor? Possibly. But the overwhelming evidence, currently, is that autistic people are born that way due to their genes. It is heritable. It runs in families. It is likely genetic and thus not likely to be readily preventable.
Third, there is undoubtedly this significant genetic component to the spectrum. I know this from my own family. I have become intimately acquainted with the autism spectrum and read about it a bit. I have come to believe that rather than a disorder of any kind, it is just another way that the human brain develops. We choose to call it a disorder because it is not mainstream, but what if it is simply an alternative form of intelligence. Look at Elon Musk, a person on the spectrum. You can’t get any more successful than being the richest man in the world.
Fourth, if you know anyone on the spectrum, and you do if 1 in 31 8-year-olds have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, you’re as likely to find that person in the corner office as in a long-term health care facility. The Rain Man syndrome is quite rare, but even that is associated with remarkable mental gifts. Maybe autism is just evolution in action. There are abilities that autistic people have that could represent progress in the development of the human brain. To think that current mainstream 100 IQ humans are the end of human evolution is not logical. We evolved, but we are not done evolving and that includes our brains.
The point here is that the federal government has decided to get to the bottom of the autism “epidemic.” Mr. Kennedy does not want to believe that the increase in autism is due to wider diagnostic criteria, greater awareness on the part of health care professionals, and the greater awareness of parents, too.
Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a burst of anti-intellectualism and skepticism about science. It is reminiscent of natives in an old movie who first set eyes on a rifle or any modern implement. They don’t understand it, so they fear it.
Clearly, there is a war between the White House and academia. Mr. Trump likes to pick on people he believes he can push around. The courts will determine if his bullying is constitutional. Trump’s wrestling match with Harvard is far from over. The result of this tug-of-war may determine the independence from government intrusion of American higher education.
We may be entering a new Dark Ages if the Trump people have their way. Mr. Kennedy thinks he knows more about autism than the experts around the country.
He doesn’t.
Autism is as complicated an issue in mental health as any. It needs a great deal of study and research. Only then can humanity determine the wisdom of “preventing” what could be the next link in the evolution of the human brain.
2 thoughts on “Thinking About Autism”
As someone on the spectrum himself, I think what also needs to be talked about is RFK Jr’s eugenics-style way of thinking. I think it’s a bit over-the-top to call it full-on eugenics (at least as of now), but there’s definitely a sense that he views sick people of all types as “undesirables.” That’s borne out by his desire to send addicts and mental-health patients to “wellness farms,” which are essentially involuntary labor camps. This isn’t hyperbole. Nor is the fact that he actually said black Americans should be on a different vaccine schedule than white Americans because black people’s “immune systems are better than ours.”
And I’d highly urge anyone reading this to read up on David Geier and his father. Geier is the man that RFK Jr’s assigned to head his mission to “get to the bottom of” autism. He wants to collect the private health records of every autistic person in the country, not unlike creating a registry. Geier, by the way, has no medical background and was caught practicing without a license. His father’s license was suspended in an emergency action by the Maryland State Board of Physicians after the two of them preyed on desperate parents of autistic children by bilking them for thousands of dollars and giving the children Lupron. The board that suspended the elder Geier’s license said he “endangers autistic children and exploits their parents by administering to the children a treatment protocol that has a known substantial risk of serious harm and which is neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.”
The idea that my future may be in any way dependent on these two absolute goons is frightening to me. So in short, we could continue to talk about RFK Jr’s anti-intellectual, anti-science bent, but that’s nothing haven’t known for years already. It’s much more important to throw as many spotlights as possible on the people RFK Jr is appointing and the incredibly dark path we might go down very soon.
And you just did it well!