(A few years ago I remember listening to a group of NIH doctors talking about autism.   The meeting opened with one official asking if anyone knew if the rate of autism was really getting worse.  He seemed genuinely baffled by the idea of a real increase.)

Silberman is the poster child for this.  He cleverly argues that Leo Kanner, the scientist who defined autism, was wrong when he blamed the "refrigerator mother" for causing autism.  In addition, Silberman alleges that Kanner was equally wrong when he said autism was a rare disorder.  And Kanner wasn't the only false autism prophet.  Silberman accuses Andrew Wakefield of bad science too because he linked autism to vaccines. 

Of course the media will eat this up.  It's the best way to make the vaccine debate go away.  If autism is nothing new, then introducing more and more vaccines to the childhood schedule can't possibly matter.  We need to stop talking about this.  Furthermore, we need stop looking for the cause of autism.  We only need to know the cause of things we want to fix. 

We're told Autism Speaks is culpable here.  They've been raising alarm about autism, calling it an epidemic and spending millions on genetic research.  Silberman sees this as misspending.  Money needs to be channeled into improving life for people with autism.

The coverage below is very convincing.  People who haven't looked into the issues involved here might think Steve Silberman makes sense.  So, if all the autism is really due to a broader definition and better diagnosing, shouldn't we just recognize and provide for this minority of unique people among us?  Calling autism a disability is really an insult. 

What Silberman and the reporters cheering him on don't want to talk about are the inconvenient truths about the autism rate and the link with vaccines.    I have the following questions about the glaring gaps in his reasoning.

How could all the doctors of the world have missed the signs of autism as a distinct condition until the last century? 

Where are the adults with the symptoms of autism that we can so easily recognize in our children?  I'm talking about men and women with classic autism with its serious limitations, not people who are a little eccentric or odd.  I want to see the non-verbal adults, stimming and prone to wandering.   Why is the rate always based on studies of eight year olds, not eighty year olds?  Shouldn't we look at autism across the population?  Why doesn't Silberman devote his energies to finding the one in 68 forty, sixty and eighty year olds out there on the autism spectrum? 

Why is nothing said about regressive autism in any of coverage of Silberman's theories about autism?  How does Silberman explain the sudden and dramatic loss of learned skills and the development of chronic health problems in previously thriving children?  

Why is there a dead end in the road for young adults with autism after high school?  With all the autism everywhere, we must have had to come up with something for these people in the past, even if we didn't call their condition autism. 

Why do we still have increases in the autism rate when, as Silberman claims, the definition was expanded over 20 years ago?  How much of the population will eventually be considered autistic?

Why do we have to train people in every walk of life about autism?  Stories are in the news constantly about educating doctors, police, fire fighters, teachers, EMT's, librarians and others about autism.  Why is everyone so unfamiliar with the signs of autism?   Surely all the people with autism weren't hidden away in the institutions and state hospitals that Silberman talks about.

If everything Silberman alleges about autism and vaccines is true, why isn't he asking for a comparison study of fully vaccinated and never vaccinated children?  If his theories are correct, there should be no difference in the autism rate in the two groups.  This would convince a lot of people that he is really on to something here.

How is it possible that medical experts at HHS conceded the vaccine injury case of Hannah Poling?  What about the dozens of other claims involving autism that the government has compensated over the years?  How could government officials be fooled into believing vaccines can cause autism?

Reporters don't ask the hard questions.  Instead we get this. 

Jennifer Senior at the New York Times said that Steve Silberman's book, Neuro Tribes, is "ambitious, meticulous and largehearted." as well as "beautifully told." 

Rachel Adams at the San Francisco Chronicle called it "lively and readable."    She wrote that according to Silberman, "autistic people have been around since the beginning of human history. In medieval Europe, autistics were prized for their ability to copy manuscripts, tune instruments and advance the science of alchemy."   Silberman purports that number of scientists and inventors in history were in reality autistic.

Emily Willingham at Forbes wrote a review of Neuro Tribes entitled, 'NeuroTribes' Will Change What You Think About Autism And Here's Why.    She sees his book as proof that autism has always been here.  Willingham outlined the history of autism. "Silberman’s story begins in the 18th century and follows the path of autistic people through the decades as they were persecuted, misunderstood, mistreated, killed, brutalized, and institutionalized."   

Silberman's critical view of Autism Speaks is included in her piece.  In response to one question from Willingham, Silberman said, "It’s the same impulse behind talking about autistic children as being kidnapped or not leading the lives that they were supposed to lead, both of which phrases have been used by Suzanne Wright, the co-founder of the leading autism organization in the world, Autism Speaks."

Silberman contends that the history of autism is the history of discrimination and cruelty. The Nazi regime exterminated autistic individuals.  In the U.S., according to Silberman, autistic children were hidden away in state mental hospitals and diagnosed with "childhood schizophrenia.:"

". . . when people say autism used to be so rare, what I point out is that in the ’50s and ’60s, there was an epidemic of what was called childhood schizophrenia in state hospitals and special schools, and if you look at the description of childhood schizophrenia, It. Is. Autism. It’s autism, it’s autism."

The Boston Globe had a review of Silberman's book called, The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.    The Globe called it, "breathtaking."

"Rather than seeing autism as a relatively new condition, one that’s on the rise due to some unknown environmental factors, Silberman tracks its prehistory, including the pioneering work of pediatrician Hans Asperger, . . ."

The Guardian, which originates in the UK, published the story, The man who wants us to embrace autism.    It was all about people coming to recognize autism as a normal condition and "the general awakening across society to human diversity of all sorts."     Silberman compares the struggle for autism acceptance to what's happened for gay people. 

Silberman: 'Autistic people were invisible in the past and they are made invisible in the present if you write an article in which autistic adults are not represented … In media coverage in general, a lot of it is talking behind the backs of autistic people as though autistic people don’t exist.'

This 14 minute video was included in the Guardian piece: Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism

Steve Silberman: ". . . Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? . . . Millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.  Why?

"Here's why. . . .  

Silberman showed an Autism Speaks graph of the dramatic increase in the autism rate starting in the 1990s.

He went on to explain how autism went from being a condition affecting "just 3 or 4 children in 10,000" to an explosion in the rate.  He said, "Fund raising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely referred to autism as 'an epidemic, . . .' 

"So what's going on?  If it isn't vaccines, what is it?  If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they' tend to rely on phrases like, 'broaden diagnostic criteria,'  and 'better cases finding' to explain these rising numbers.  But that kind of reasoning doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two year old's face for eye contact.  

"If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place?  Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?

Silberman said he researched why the autism rate has increased so dramatically.  He found out that experts had it royally wrong about the origins of autism and we're all suffering because of it.

Silberman cited Leo Kanner's work on autism back in 1943, when Kanner declared that this was a rare disorder.  Silberman feels that Kanner criteria was too narrow.  For instance, he excluded children who had seizures.  According to Silberman,

"Now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism.'  It seems that Kanner failed to recognize all the autism everywhere, while blaming refrigerators mothers as the reason for autism.   

"Autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large. 

"Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare."

"Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London. . .   To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families, Lorna and her colleague, Judith Gould, decided to do something that should have been done thirty years earlier.  They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population.  They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community.  What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse.  Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty.  In other words, these children didn't fit into nice neat boxes,. . .

"At first they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed their children before?  But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten. . . .

Lorna Wing read the paper.  It was about the research of Hans Asperger and high functioning autism. Asperger blamed bad genes, not bad moms.  "He believed autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent minded professor.  He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."

Lorna Wing and Judith Gould knew Kanner was wrong. Autism wasn't rare and parents didn't cause it.  "Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called the autism spectrum.  In the late 80s and 1990s, their changes went into effect. . . . These changes weren't happening in a vacuum.  By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time.  Before Rain Man came out in 1988, only a tiny ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like.  But after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt, earned Rain Man four academy awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers, and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like. 

"Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced."

Voila!  A once rare disorder is now a normal and acceptable part of not only childhood, but the whole human race.


Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism and author of  The Big Autism Cover-Up: How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public, which is on sale now from Skyhorse Publishing.