Note: While we were offline taking care of behind the scenes tech issues, Dan was at the forefront of our work. After all, Dan Olmsted WAS and IS the driving force behind Age of Autism. We carry on his work and legacy as best we can, but none of us can replace or duplicate or even approximate his sharp, pithy take on the state of the autism epidemic and how it relates to the world. Below is a post he wrote to tell you about his and Mark Blaxill's third book together.  Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future available now from Skyhorse Publishing.  Please honor Dan and thank Mark Blaxill by purchasing a copy and sharing it with family and friends. And leave a review anywhere you can, especially Amazon.  This book shines a light into the dark corners of the genesis of neurodiversity and its intent to obfuscate the reality of a crippling epidemic. Haters will trash it, because autism is a parallel universe diagnosis.  But you, dear readers, know that. Enjoy these words from Dan. And thank you to Mark Blaxill for making sure the book was finalized under the most difficult circumstances. A lesser man, a less dedicated father and community leader, might have walked away. Kim

By Dan Olmsted, December 2016

Last week I said adieu to old acquaintances and was touched by the comments I got both on- and offline. This week it’s time to move forward into what promises to be a big year for AOA and its allied enterprises. There’s even more to come than I’ll talk about here.

But first let me say, did you ever work on a big project over a long period of time that you cared a lot about – but still had a moment of, “How did I ever get myself into this?” Or, even worse, how do we translate an important but overlooked paper from 1907 in a journal called, I kid you not, Zeitschrift fur die Erforschung und Behandlung des jugendlichen Schwachsinns.*

Well, that moment has come and gone as regards the book Mark Blaxill and I are finishing up this month. Although the title is not set yet, the topic is autism epidemic denial – how it hurts kids, families and our future.  AOA readers always come to the rescue, and Birgit Calhoun translated a trove of useful documents from German that are crucial to understanding the whole issue. Thanks, Birgit.

The book, our third together and something of a bookend to the first (The Age of Autism) and second (Vaccines 2.0), will be out in a few months. It has been a fascinating and deep dive into the history of mental disorders in children, which of course is a dark topic, but what we came up with makes hash of the “better diagnosing, awareness, substitution/these kids were always there” mantra we are all so sick of. One more time: No these kids were not ”always there”! We aim to present the definitive account of why autism instead must be a man-made epidemic (the subtitle of our first book) that needs to be stopped. As we say in the book, epidemic denial is not just improbable or implausible; it is, based on both facts and logic, impossible.

We quote our redoubtable colleague J.B. Handley on Paul Offit and his ilk of deniers: J.B. calls epidemic denial the “original sin” of autism. “In Offit’s world, there is absolutely no problem here. Things are as they always were, we just understand it better. Of course, we all know, if there’s no epidemic, there is no environmental trigger, because why have a trigger if something hasn’t actually grown? Said differently: Denying the autism epidemic is to deny the suffering of millions of children and their families and also to deny the exploration into the true cause so the epidemic might end.”

Amen. That’s all I’ll say for now. We have some finishing up to do but are grateful that Skyhorse is again proving a hospitable publisher for our cause. Oh, and we dedicate the book to Bernie Rimland, who “sought the truth and helped sick kids.” Like all of us, we hope to in some small way to further that effort. And we think the timing could be good, eh?