In 1987 I worked for an organization that provided group homes for people being de-institutionalized and put into group home settings (this movement started in the 70s, I believe). At least HALF of the people in those homes were the "non-existent" autistics you describe. There was one that would do nothing but rock from foot to foot while shaking his hands, except the rare times when he decided to sniff you, and another that moaned and chewed constantly on the thick callouses his hands had developed from constantly being bitten.

I actually agree with the "you didn't notice them because they were institutionalized." When a child was that severely disabled, parents were assured that it was best for the child and the rest of the family if the child were hospitalized. It was probably not often discussed with children (those of you who are trying to remember all of the autistic children in your schools), because it was a very sad thing, for starters, also, sometimes siblings/family worried that if it were known they had a family member that required institutionalization that they would be regarded as similarly 'defective,' so it just wasn't brought up.

The autistic patients I worked with in the mid-80s were in their 40s through 60s, by the way...

Cherry:
My daughter is autistic, having been given the hep-B vaccine at birth with its then full component of mercury. But millions of children are autistic because of the MMR, which is a live virus vaccine, and never had mercury. Mercury is by far from the only problem, vaccines in themselves are the problem, and their ingredients, highly provocative antigens by definition, often provoke the immune system into excessive inflammation (encephalitis) or chronic inflammation (autoimmune diseases). The enemy is not just mercury, but vaccines per se.

how about the myriad of other disorders...did we miss those, too? Like asthma, or say, latex or peanut allergy? When we were kids, we all played with balloons and ate peanut butter sandwiches. Maybe we just weren't paying attention to those who were keeling over from anaphylactic shock after ingesting a peanut. But surely they were always with us... :/

Kendra's comment should be its own post- it's spot on! I cannot understand when people don't reflect on their own life experiences and realize that articles like the LA times is one big line of bullsh*t. I also grew up in a smallish town and I don't recall one. person. ever. having a condition with any resemblance to autism. I'm only 35. My own brother had a learning disability and was in a special ed class- the only one in the county- not a one kid had autism or anything even similar. I have a kid with the unmistakable variety of autism. People like my kid did not exist 50 years ago. And even 20 years ago were exceedingly rare. Now we are everywhere.

When people like "Sincerely" make their claims, they have to immediately be disputed by truth. The institution argument does not hold water. If we simply didn't know about them, then they would have had to be whisked off to the institution at birth. And still we would have known about them. "What happened to Sarah's baby, where did it go"? In reality, Autism is not normally diagnosed for years, even worse prior to the last decade, so these children would have been in our midst before being whisked off to the institution. We would have known about them no matter what they were being labeled. I have always said we have to look at the small towns scattered throughout America, towns where everyone knows everyone, schools are small, and especially children with disabilities or special needs were and are known to all. I grew up in such a town. No disappearing children, no autism. In fact I knew one child my entire childhood with moderate mental retardation. He went to school with all of us.
We have a project where we encourage people to scour through old yearbooks and find the people who might have been autistic and missed, you know the quirky, different, even mildly disabled. They can't find anyone. No remembered children that flapped, toe-walked, made noises, rocked, couldn't sit still or learn in a normal classroom environment, couldn't speak, weren't potty trained, attacked other children or self-injured, lived in their own world. We can't find anyone even close, even if we stretch the definition to mild. They simply didn't exist. But now...autism classrooms are bursting at the seams, and even more kids with severe issues never dealt with before and they do not even have a diagnosis of any kind. We have "drug cubbies" where 80% of most students in any given class are on some kind of drug that is dispensed daily by teachers or school nurses. ANA Kits, inhalers, insulin, and the gambit of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants are dispensed daily without batting an eye. My school did not even have a special ed teacher because there was only one child that qualified for special ed. We didn't have a school nurse because no one took medication of any kind. Now they have an "autism expert" a special ed director, a special-ed teacher and at least 5 special education aides. My state went from 3 children known to have autism to over 8,000 in less than 25 years, and I have yet to meet one of them that does not obviously meet anyone’s criteria as being disabled. I have met 100s of these children and I can guarantee you that even 20 or 25 years ago not a one of them would have been missed. 20 years ago those same mothers would have demanded to know what happened to their child and parents would have regularly discussed the fact that a normal child could suddenly regress and become disabled. No one ever heard of that before this epidemic. I cannot find one adult over the age of 40 including retired doctors that ever knew of a child whose development regressed after being normal. Now it is parents' greatest fear. All you have to do is simply ask tenured teachers, especially in these small towns. Ask teachers that have been there for 30 years and hear their stories of how children went from Norman Rockwell's happy-go-lucky freckle faced kids to chronically ill and disabled. Instead of there being one child in town that everyone knew about with a disability or horrible life-long illness, now we are inundated with them. My daughter is diagnosed with DSM-IV Autism, yet in our tiny town there are many more with autism, and no less than 5 children relegated to the "resource room" of her school with no diagnosis at all, yet all 5 are far more profoundly affected and disabled than my child. Not only is it an epidemic, a tsunami coming of epic proportions, we are no longer even counting or diagnosing all of them as it is simply too much for schools to handle and they now have to start being far more selective about who they allow to be labeled and receive expensive services. Sincerely, obviously lives in a different suburb of the reality universe than the rest of us. It gets tiring countering the absurd, but it must be done as others hear it and believe it if they are not shown the evidence proving otherwise. Think about it... 3 children to over 8,000. Far beyond anyone's wildest dreams of better diagnostics, diagnostic substitutions, sweeping in of lesser cases otherwise missed before. No one can look at those numbers and deny "epidemic", not without having a very evil agenda behind such denials. The truth is ugly, the truth is painful, the truth does not take us to a happy, hopeful place, but it is the truth nonetheless and denying it will not make it go away. Show me the hidden horde, I should have known some of them, I do not and neither does anyone else I know.
I never heard of disabled children wandering and drowning, that alone seems to be epidemic today among autistic children, what we previously labeled them would not have changed their propensity to elope. I have never heard of disabled children denied boarding airplanes, never heard of disabled children being tazed or pepper sprayed by law enforcement, never heard of disabled kids being denied church attendance or preschools because their behaviors are so disruptive and no one seems to know how to handle them without special training. I have never heard of special schools being built for the disabled and most especially for one form of disability because there are just so many of them. On any given day you can find 20 to 30 news stories nationwide dealing with a disability so profound and so affecting our population that it is even newsworthy. We are all shocked as we have never ever seen or heard such things in our lifetimes. And as we hear the numbers, hear the costs, and see the outcomes, we know for a fact and without a whisper of doubt that we have never seen anything like this in the history of our nation, in the history of the world. The greatest and most devastating epidemic in history and some would simply try to sweep it under the rug. Denials and lack of preparation are only going to make it worse. As millions of families wonder what will happen to their loved ones when they are gone, too many simply seem not to care. If they have always been here, there wouldn't be an issue now would there, no debate, they will simply go where they have always gone. But it is obvious this is not the truth, there is no place for them to go. The epidemic is already aging out of childhood and Social Security is being slammed, agencies that help young adults have 10 year waiting lists, and it is only going to get worse. You deny reality at your own peril, and the peril of our loved children.

Sincerely, I am 51 years old and have worked in an institution in the mid eighties; it was phased out for group home models and in-home care a couple of years after the year I worked there. I also visited some institutions as part of a PASS (analysis of service systems) course. I definitely think there were some children/ adults who had autism in the past but were labelled very generically as 'mentally retarded.' BUT, the VAST majority of kids there had known etiology for their problems- yes- Down Syndrome, various translocations, hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy or genetic problems. I find it even more frightening that there are large numbers of kids today for whom they know darn well (even after all this highly touted genetic stuff that has produced no explanations and the newest, largest twin study that shows environment to be more important than previously estimated) there is no genetic basis for their problems. I look forward to more real research like the stuff being done by Drs. Like Wakefield, Hewitson, Allen-Vercoe, MacFabe, Shaw, to name a few.

Alan Zarembo is another journalist with an agenda. When the whole scandal is completely exposed, people like him will not have jobs in journalism.

If you are in my generation, most children with Down Syndrome and other severe development delays or mental illness (autism was not used as a common diagnosis until the 1990s) were institutionalized.

For infants with Down Syndrome, it was often thought best to institutionalize them from birth (!) in the 1960s and 1970s. (Down Syndrome couldn't be accurately diagnosed until the 1950s.)

So while you and I were going to public schools, most disabled children were in institutions, or schools for the blind or schools for the deaf. Where they were NOT was in our schools or our communities.

Beginning in 1970s, this began to change. Institutionalization was phased out.
Public schools were obliged to provide an appropriate education for first those with cognitive impairments, and then for those with physical impairments. Those students began to be educated in public schools and live at home with their families.

With the acceptance of autism as a valid diagnosis in the 1990s, programs were started specifically for autism. The generic and vague diagnosis of "mentally retarded" is being abandoned for more useful (but still frustratingly vague) diagnoses of ASD, PDD/NOS and so on. Genetic testing has created a host of named diseases such as leukodystropies, Fragile X syndrome and various genetic translocations or deletions.

Things have changed. Things will continue to change. I look forward to further genetic studies with great interest.

Typical. They cannot find the genetic cause so they deny the autism epidemic actually exist. If they tracked just the kids with classical autism, they will see the HUGE rise in classical autism. These kids are impossible to miss. I am in my mid 40's and I NEVER saw a kid with classical autism when growing up. Now I see them everywhere. When David Kirby interviewed Dr. Insel regarding the incidence of autism, he stated that he had trouble finding a kid with autism. Here is a quote from that article...

"He added that he never saw a single case of autism during his training in the mid-1980s, including a full year's rotation in child psychology. "I wanted to see children with autism. I couldn't find them," he said. "Now I wouldn't have to go any further than the block where I live to see kids with autism today."