"Where Were They" The Ten Year Wait to See a Patient with Autism: Denial by Blaxill & Olmsted
Note: Denial How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future is now available from Skyhorse Publishing. No matter your position on causation, the fact that the rate of autism continues to climb should be as least as alarming as global warming and which Tweet sent from 1600 PA Ave ticked off whom....
Reviews drive sales. We encourage you to buy and read the book, then write a review on Amazon. Purchase a copy here as a way to thank Mark Blaxill and honor the work of Dan Olmsted for more than 15 years of his life. Thank you. Below is the prologue, chilling in its brevity.
Prologue: Waiting
Where were they?
From his child psychiatry practice in Holland, D. Arn Van Krevelen watched. And waited. He had been on the lookout now for almost a decade.
The year was 1952. In his career, Van Krevelen had seen just about every variety of mental disorder. He diagnosed teenagers developing the first signs of schizophrenia; he saw brain damage from injury and illness; he witnessed the sudden psychic disintegration of children known as dementia infantilis. Now he was watching for something different—“markedly and uniquely different from anything reported so far,” as the first child psychiatrist to observe it wrote in 1943.
These children shared “fascinating peculiarities”—unusual use of language, or none at all; rituals centered on objects and obsessions; lack of emotional connection with parents or any other human beings. They should be easy to spot: they were, after all, unique. Yet Van Krevelen was starting to doubt their existence...
Where were they? Where were the children with autism?[i]
[i] Arn Van Krevelen, personal communication, January 7, 1963, in Bernard Rimland, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964).
Only ten years? Just TEN??? Friends, I began watching for autism when I began my nursery school circa 1972. I think I finally saw the first case in 1994 or 96. Initially the first cases we saw were mostly in children vaccinated abroad. I particularly recall the first few parents who told me that their child had been normal initially. One mother even imitated to me the way her daughter pronounced words at her first birthday. Initially, this made no sense to me because I had never heard of any brain disorder which ocurred in normal children without any illness or injury existing to provoke it, but I did believe the mothers. In the year 2000 the private pediatricians of India (not working for the government) began to add many more vaccines to their schedule and most of those contained high levels of mercury, particularly if the doctor used Indian-made vaccines. It then occurred to me that I might see an increase in autism in my school, but really that was hard to imagine, so I sort of discarded that possibility- But not for long by 2004- 2005 we saw large numbers of autistic kids in our school. My friend was running a nursery school in another part of Delhi and she kept saying, "When we can see it, why cant the doctors see it?"
It should be remembered and acknowledged that it is because autism is a NEW diagnosis that many of the "facts" which are taught about autism are incorrect- or they may be true for one child but not for another.
Posted by: cherry Misra | August 13, 2017 at 04:31 AM
I can dream that one day Dr`s might give it out for free explaining to parents why they no longer vaccinate..
Pharma for Prison
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | August 10, 2017 at 05:24 PM
I went to my local Barnes and Noble today to order (I thought) "Denial." They had three copies on the shelf, in the Parenting section! I took the opportunity to thank the clerk for stocking this essential parenting book, and gave her a mini course in vaccines, as I always do whenever I have the opportunity. I'm saving it for my upcoming doctor's appointment. The best kind of book to read in a doctor's office.
Posted by: Gary Ogden | August 10, 2017 at 04:54 PM
Excellent book, my review hasn't posted yet but hopefully soon.
Reading this, it is hard to see how anyone could think that "autism has always been with us, it's just better diagnosis, diagnostic substitution, and a broadening of the criteria". In fact, the rate of autism was effectively zero prior to 1930, with only a handful of cases that might be autism as we know it today.
Posted by: Tim Lundeen | August 03, 2017 at 02:30 PM
This book could not be a better a monument to Dan's memory, a mixture of old-fashioned investigative journalism and quiet scholarship. Apart from anything else it patiently dismantles the media-hyped books on the history of autism by Steve Silverman, and by John Donvan and Caren Zucker. They ought to respond - more likely you won't see them for dust. But then hit and run is the story of our time.
Posted by: John Stone | August 03, 2017 at 10:44 AM