The redefinition of "autism" to "autism spectrum disorder" ensures that "autism" is no longer a disease. Therefore, autism cannot be "caused" by anything, because it simply does not exist as a disease. In addition, the broad concept of "autism spectrum disorder" ensures that no individual cause can be found - there are many causes of ASD, and no causes of autism. It's scientific befuddlement.
Yeah, and they even have YouTube videos on how to tell if an individual is "high masking" i.e. how to 'detect' people that supposedly have "ASD," but are secretly hiding it. It's easy to see what this is all about, it's about deception, confusion, and above all, pathologizing normal behavior.
That is all phychiatry and the DSM (phychiatry's "bible") has ever been, there's really nothing more evil in this world than psychiatry. They also take behaviors that are symptoms of any number of health issues, and label it as mental illness. Once again, I can't think of anything more evil in this world.
As a parent of a vaccine injured adult, diagnosed with PDD-NOS at age 3 years, this is infuriating to me. I’ve had conversations about this recently with someone who suggested I watch a Netflix series called “Love on the Spectrum” because “it’s so beautiful and pure, their love.” False. I had to turn it off after the first 10 minutes. Romanticizing a profound disability makes it NOTHING, thereby doing a great further injury to the people who have been severely impacted by a tragedy. The portrayal of autism in modern society as some kind of gift of neurodivergence is disgusting and wholly inaccurate. This Substack by JB Handley cover many points well. Recommended reading.
It seems that autism has now become hip and trendy ... just like "gender reassignment". Forgive me for suspecting that white wealthy liberal women are behind both of these trends.
Excellent piece, thanks. Growing up, I never met or knew anyone who had autism, today I'm tripping over them. As an ex teacher, a minimum average of 4/26 students in a classroom is marked down as autistic and they all have fully paid but badly trained adult 'assistants' sitting beside them in every class. Most of these 'assistants' sit scrolling on their phones doing nothing. The modern classroom is a disaster, as is the future for our kids.
Thank you for providing context for what I've been thinking for some time now. Only decades ago, the DSM would have considered me mentally ill for being queer. Nobody with half a brain respects the DSM -- including some mental health professionals. Yet when it comes to ASD, people take it as gospel. 🤔 If anyone's interested in a breakdown of the studies that supposedly show that "vaccines don't cause autism," I wrote about it here: https://mooreamaguire.substack.com/p/i-fact-check-a-fact-check-of-rfk-b80
I work with autistic kids and whenever anyone, especially parents do this it drives me crazy... vaccine-injury is not a super-power.....it's a devasting, lifelong disability that affects not only the child but his family and society, as a whole.
As a parent with two grown sons on the spectrum, one high and one low, I can see this reality beyond all the lovely verbiage, carefully tended to sound just so.
This is such a thoughtful piece—thank you for articulating what so many of us have been feeling. The DSM-5’s expansion of diagnostic criteria has absolutely introduced a lot of gray area where overdiagnosis can slip in—especially in online spaces where self-diagnosis trends thrive without proper context or accountability.
What I appreciate about your article is that —you’re asking us to stay curious about why we’ve seen such a spike in diagnoses. What environmental, social, or even cultural forces might be contributing to this? What needs are going unmet that make people gravitate toward a diagnosis for clarity or identity?
It’s not about gatekeeping—it’s about discernment, responsibility, and a desire for truth. And we can hold space for genuine neurodivergent experiences and question the structures and incentives that may be skewing the conversation. That kind of nuanced honesty is what we need more of.
I wouldn't isolate this issue to any particular edition of the DSM - it's the entire paradigm of psychiatry - and the healthcare system at large. It's entirely deceptive, there is no scientifically sound version of the DSM; it's junk science.
Excellent stuff. I have just begun to look into this. To my mind, if regular, common people suddenly begin angrily shouting at each other across a yawning ditch, I am asking... who dug the ditch?
'You’ve taken Kanner’s and Asperger’s original definition, which indicated that these individuals cannot function independently in society, and mixed it with individuals who are capable of functioning in society—who are just quirky—and now call everyone under this umbrella “autistic.”'
Hans Asperger considered different groups of autistic children, and "individuals [who] cannot function independently in society" were considered to be retarded.
He writes that there is one group of autistic children which are superior to the rest and to non-autistic children, who possess a higher degree of consciousness; "maturity and awareness in personality that even many adults will not reach;" "a maturity of artistic appreciation;" "an astonishingly accurate and mature judgment of the people around them" just as they have of themselves; a lucidity and conceptual grasp of the world which "provides the prerequisite for a professional position and determines the special achievements of such people that are denied to others."
In this group, traits of 'disability' and social difficulties disappear with age. The latter are inflicted by the non-autistic children, who imitate adults in treating them like a separate species.
He wrote and observed that autistic traits were hereditary and found within families, unlike 'autism' of today: "Over the course of 10 years, we observed more than 200 children in whom the pattern of the autistic psychopath was more or less clearly pronounced. In every case in which we were able to get to know the parents and relatives more closely, we were able to identify related psychopathic traits in the ascendant."
This is supported by statistical and other data, i.e genetic data, today, such as paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro's finding that gene clusters associated with intelligence originate not in homo sapiens, but in Neanderthal, and constitute an 'Asperger gene cluster'. Autism in the past has statistically been understood to have been most prevalent among ethnic groups with the highest degree of Neanderthal DNA, such as Northern Europeans foremost and to the second highest degree Northeast Asians.
It is hard to take seriously an article on autism which focuses solely on Hans Asperger's study of retarded children. He told the NSDAP that these traits were not unhealthy, but common to all high intelligence individuals, and that any accompanying dysfunction improves with age.
This article is also in light of the paleogenetic findings as such, considering that genes for socialisation originate with homo sapiens and the lack of socialisation is NOT abnormal in predominantly Neanderthal individuals, who express these traits even when healthy and unpoisoned by vaccines or other contaminants.
I will never understand the rewriting of autism to refer to developmental retardation—nowadays it seems of largely environmental origin—when formerly it was associated with high intelligence. State eugenics of the early 20th century were monstrous, but today it's as if there is a dysgenic policy instead that robs even gifted children of language with which their condition could be articulated, being lumped in including by this very article with retarded children (or whatever the politically correct term is now—I lost track—since I am not being deliberately offensive in using that term and intend its original definition of growth that has been retarded).
You've become one of my deepest ongoing conversations, Franklin. And this topic has certainly chosen you. I love that your criteria for success is that you taught yourself something new--that's how I've defined my goal also.
What you've led me to realize is that we're not only conflating autism, the true diagnosis, with vaccine-induced encephalopathy, but also with childhood social learning. I had my daughters in the 1990's, and I'd say that it required multiple miracles that I was able to prioritize raising them. The housewife was already an endangered specie. And mine was the first generation where women were expected to serve profits just like men--or be seen as 'cheating' their husbands. In my mother's generation, they were scorned or pitied if they had jobs.
In addition to the vaccines, I think the '80's started the unmothered generation. In particular, I can think of two of my daughters' friends who have had to relearn how to be in a reciprocal relationship--with my daughter training one on how to hold a conversation and listen to the other's responses. Both of these women had particularly absent mothers, emotionally and socially.
It's not that I want to go backwards to my mother's generation when women were subservient to their husbands. But I think we need to go forward into a matrifocal society where mothering is a skill that's nurtured from generation to generation, with the security to foster that.
I’m curious how the recent Telepathy Tapes phenomenon relates to this. Something about it doesn’t feel right from a Christian perspective but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
When reading this article, I also thought about the Telepathy Tapes podcast! But if someone who has deconstructed out of the dogma of Christianity-Calling something “off” without discernment often says more about our discomfort with ambiguity than about true spiritual danger. And in this case, it risks sidelining voices that are helping build bridges of understanding and acceptance for people who’ve long been misunderstood or overlooked.
Yes, I’ve spent the last several years deconstructing out of New Age and recall in the early 90’s having people call my son an “indigo” child, because he was sensitive and kind. He’s 41 now and is still sensitive and kind and a good husband and father. I’m not sure he deserves any other label than that. All of this is interesting and grist for the mill.
Also I work with adult persons diagnosed as autistic with other intellectual disorders. Some definitely are not able to live independently and some are but with a lot of assistance.
Thanks for your thoughts. My college attending son would be considered as high-functioning, but his younger brother will never live independently. In many ways, both have their needs overlooked by others in society.
I would speculate that given the capacity for psi in almost all individuals, the kind of low-functioning autistics (or whatever the correct language for them is now) they look at are unable to develop disbelief and prejudice against the concept of psi and thus are in tune with their intuition and the environment enough to develop it more than a 'normal' individual.
In parapsychology and psi research, there is something called the sheep-goat effect; whereas those open-minded and without prejudice to the result tend to perform statistically above average, those who do not believe a result indicating ESP is possible perform remarkably worse than even the control groups.
Hans Asperger writes relevant to this of autistics, which in the original sense does not include the environmentally poisoned individuals of today but is rather different groups of hereditary conditions: 'Related to this understanding of art is a skill that is also frequently found in autistic children: a special self-observation and a confident assessment of other people. While the "normal" child lives on, barely aware of themselves, yet a properly responsive part of the world, these children reflect on themselves, observe themselves, are their own problems, and focus their attention on the functions of their bodies.
[...]
Just as these children observe themselves, they often also have an astonishingly accurate and mature judgment of the people around them, sensing very well who is well-disposed towards them and who is not, even if their behavior is completely different. They have a particularly fine feeling for the abnormalities of other children; indeed, however abnormal they themselves may be, they are almost hypersensitive to them.
[...]
The normal child, especially the younger one, who is correctly positioned in the environmental situation, reacts correctly to it, and goes along with it, does so out of their healthy instincts, but usually does not reach conscious judgment; this requires a distance from concrete things. Distance from the individual object is the prerequisite for abstraction, for becoming conscious, for the formation of concepts. The very increased personal distance, indeed the disturbance of instinctive, emotional reacting, which characterizes autistic children, is thus, in a certain sense, a prerequisite for their good conceptual grasp of the world. We therefore speak of a "psychopathic lucidity" in these children, because it only occurs in them.' (Die „Autistischen Psychopathen“ im Kindesalter)
He is describing a higher degree of self-awareness, self-reflection, and insight; a higher degree of consciousness, which is lucid to what a normal individual is not. This is what is required for developing psi. In theory anyone can, but some have a vocation for it. The most gifted individuals I've read as documented or studied as demonstrating some form of psi all had traits of high-functioning autism, i.e Asperger's.
Ironically, environmental poisons (vaccine, dietary, or otherwise) inhibit psi, as do certain lifestyles that are conducive to or require suppression of the self's consciousness.
Wow! Fantastic work! Just came across your stack thanks to Tereza Coraggio, and I'll definitely be back!
This article cleared something up for me that I've long wondered about - the semantic drift of the word autism.
One thing that you don't mention is that kids who are simply intellectually impaired (the people who used to be called "retarded") are increasingly being referred to as autistic... which I guess is to spare their feelings (or their parents' feelings). I surely understand the use of euphemism in such cases, but it seems unfortunate that this euphemism might distort the understanding of medical conditions which are all too real.
The redefinition of "autism" to "autism spectrum disorder" ensures that "autism" is no longer a disease. Therefore, autism cannot be "caused" by anything, because it simply does not exist as a disease. In addition, the broad concept of "autism spectrum disorder" ensures that no individual cause can be found - there are many causes of ASD, and no causes of autism. It's scientific befuddlement.
Yeah, and they even have YouTube videos on how to tell if an individual is "high masking" i.e. how to 'detect' people that supposedly have "ASD," but are secretly hiding it. It's easy to see what this is all about, it's about deception, confusion, and above all, pathologizing normal behavior.
That is all phychiatry and the DSM (phychiatry's "bible") has ever been, there's really nothing more evil in this world than psychiatry. They also take behaviors that are symptoms of any number of health issues, and label it as mental illness. Once again, I can't think of anything more evil in this world.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jbhandley/p/rfk-jr-just-dismantled-the-better?r=o6h1o&utm_medium=ios
As a parent of a vaccine injured adult, diagnosed with PDD-NOS at age 3 years, this is infuriating to me. I’ve had conversations about this recently with someone who suggested I watch a Netflix series called “Love on the Spectrum” because “it’s so beautiful and pure, their love.” False. I had to turn it off after the first 10 minutes. Romanticizing a profound disability makes it NOTHING, thereby doing a great further injury to the people who have been severely impacted by a tragedy. The portrayal of autism in modern society as some kind of gift of neurodivergence is disgusting and wholly inaccurate. This Substack by JB Handley cover many points well. Recommended reading.
It seems that autism has now become hip and trendy ... just like "gender reassignment". Forgive me for suspecting that white wealthy liberal women are behind both of these trends.
Excellent piece, thanks. Growing up, I never met or knew anyone who had autism, today I'm tripping over them. As an ex teacher, a minimum average of 4/26 students in a classroom is marked down as autistic and they all have fully paid but badly trained adult 'assistants' sitting beside them in every class. Most of these 'assistants' sit scrolling on their phones doing nothing. The modern classroom is a disaster, as is the future for our kids.
Thank you for providing context for what I've been thinking for some time now. Only decades ago, the DSM would have considered me mentally ill for being queer. Nobody with half a brain respects the DSM -- including some mental health professionals. Yet when it comes to ASD, people take it as gospel. 🤔 If anyone's interested in a breakdown of the studies that supposedly show that "vaccines don't cause autism," I wrote about it here: https://mooreamaguire.substack.com/p/i-fact-check-a-fact-check-of-rfk-b80
I work with autistic kids and whenever anyone, especially parents do this it drives me crazy... vaccine-injury is not a super-power.....it's a devasting, lifelong disability that affects not only the child but his family and society, as a whole.
As a parent with two grown sons on the spectrum, one high and one low, I can see this reality beyond all the lovely verbiage, carefully tended to sound just so.
This is such a thoughtful piece—thank you for articulating what so many of us have been feeling. The DSM-5’s expansion of diagnostic criteria has absolutely introduced a lot of gray area where overdiagnosis can slip in—especially in online spaces where self-diagnosis trends thrive without proper context or accountability.
What I appreciate about your article is that —you’re asking us to stay curious about why we’ve seen such a spike in diagnoses. What environmental, social, or even cultural forces might be contributing to this? What needs are going unmet that make people gravitate toward a diagnosis for clarity or identity?
It’s not about gatekeeping—it’s about discernment, responsibility, and a desire for truth. And we can hold space for genuine neurodivergent experiences and question the structures and incentives that may be skewing the conversation. That kind of nuanced honesty is what we need more of.
I wouldn't isolate this issue to any particular edition of the DSM - it's the entire paradigm of psychiatry - and the healthcare system at large. It's entirely deceptive, there is no scientifically sound version of the DSM; it's junk science.
for what it's worth, research has found significantly higher levels of the vaccine adjuvant aluminum in the brains of autistic individuals... https://eccentrik.substack.com/p/new-paper-evidence-showing-childhood
Excellent stuff. I have just begun to look into this. To my mind, if regular, common people suddenly begin angrily shouting at each other across a yawning ditch, I am asking... who dug the ditch?
'You’ve taken Kanner’s and Asperger’s original definition, which indicated that these individuals cannot function independently in society, and mixed it with individuals who are capable of functioning in society—who are just quirky—and now call everyone under this umbrella “autistic.”'
Hans Asperger considered different groups of autistic children, and "individuals [who] cannot function independently in society" were considered to be retarded.
He writes that there is one group of autistic children which are superior to the rest and to non-autistic children, who possess a higher degree of consciousness; "maturity and awareness in personality that even many adults will not reach;" "a maturity of artistic appreciation;" "an astonishingly accurate and mature judgment of the people around them" just as they have of themselves; a lucidity and conceptual grasp of the world which "provides the prerequisite for a professional position and determines the special achievements of such people that are denied to others."
In this group, traits of 'disability' and social difficulties disappear with age. The latter are inflicted by the non-autistic children, who imitate adults in treating them like a separate species.
He wrote and observed that autistic traits were hereditary and found within families, unlike 'autism' of today: "Over the course of 10 years, we observed more than 200 children in whom the pattern of the autistic psychopath was more or less clearly pronounced. In every case in which we were able to get to know the parents and relatives more closely, we were able to identify related psychopathic traits in the ascendant."
This is supported by statistical and other data, i.e genetic data, today, such as paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro's finding that gene clusters associated with intelligence originate not in homo sapiens, but in Neanderthal, and constitute an 'Asperger gene cluster'. Autism in the past has statistically been understood to have been most prevalent among ethnic groups with the highest degree of Neanderthal DNA, such as Northern Europeans foremost and to the second highest degree Northeast Asians.
It is hard to take seriously an article on autism which focuses solely on Hans Asperger's study of retarded children. He told the NSDAP that these traits were not unhealthy, but common to all high intelligence individuals, and that any accompanying dysfunction improves with age.
This article is also in light of the paleogenetic findings as such, considering that genes for socialisation originate with homo sapiens and the lack of socialisation is NOT abnormal in predominantly Neanderthal individuals, who express these traits even when healthy and unpoisoned by vaccines or other contaminants.
I will never understand the rewriting of autism to refer to developmental retardation—nowadays it seems of largely environmental origin—when formerly it was associated with high intelligence. State eugenics of the early 20th century were monstrous, but today it's as if there is a dysgenic policy instead that robs even gifted children of language with which their condition could be articulated, being lumped in including by this very article with retarded children (or whatever the politically correct term is now—I lost track—since I am not being deliberately offensive in using that term and intend its original definition of growth that has been retarded).
You've become one of my deepest ongoing conversations, Franklin. And this topic has certainly chosen you. I love that your criteria for success is that you taught yourself something new--that's how I've defined my goal also.
What you've led me to realize is that we're not only conflating autism, the true diagnosis, with vaccine-induced encephalopathy, but also with childhood social learning. I had my daughters in the 1990's, and I'd say that it required multiple miracles that I was able to prioritize raising them. The housewife was already an endangered specie. And mine was the first generation where women were expected to serve profits just like men--or be seen as 'cheating' their husbands. In my mother's generation, they were scorned or pitied if they had jobs.
In addition to the vaccines, I think the '80's started the unmothered generation. In particular, I can think of two of my daughters' friends who have had to relearn how to be in a reciprocal relationship--with my daughter training one on how to hold a conversation and listen to the other's responses. Both of these women had particularly absent mothers, emotionally and socially.
It's not that I want to go backwards to my mother's generation when women were subservient to their husbands. But I think we need to go forward into a matrifocal society where mothering is a skill that's nurtured from generation to generation, with the security to foster that.
Thanks for the thought-provoking dialogue!
I’m curious how the recent Telepathy Tapes phenomenon relates to this. Something about it doesn’t feel right from a Christian perspective but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
When reading this article, I also thought about the Telepathy Tapes podcast! But if someone who has deconstructed out of the dogma of Christianity-Calling something “off” without discernment often says more about our discomfort with ambiguity than about true spiritual danger. And in this case, it risks sidelining voices that are helping build bridges of understanding and acceptance for people who’ve long been misunderstood or overlooked.
Yes, I’ve spent the last several years deconstructing out of New Age and recall in the early 90’s having people call my son an “indigo” child, because he was sensitive and kind. He’s 41 now and is still sensitive and kind and a good husband and father. I’m not sure he deserves any other label than that. All of this is interesting and grist for the mill.
Also I work with adult persons diagnosed as autistic with other intellectual disorders. Some definitely are not able to live independently and some are but with a lot of assistance.
Thanks for your thoughts. My college attending son would be considered as high-functioning, but his younger brother will never live independently. In many ways, both have their needs overlooked by others in society.
I would speculate that given the capacity for psi in almost all individuals, the kind of low-functioning autistics (or whatever the correct language for them is now) they look at are unable to develop disbelief and prejudice against the concept of psi and thus are in tune with their intuition and the environment enough to develop it more than a 'normal' individual.
In parapsychology and psi research, there is something called the sheep-goat effect; whereas those open-minded and without prejudice to the result tend to perform statistically above average, those who do not believe a result indicating ESP is possible perform remarkably worse than even the control groups.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/sheep-goat-effect
(And for those in doubt of psi: https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references )
Hans Asperger writes relevant to this of autistics, which in the original sense does not include the environmentally poisoned individuals of today but is rather different groups of hereditary conditions: 'Related to this understanding of art is a skill that is also frequently found in autistic children: a special self-observation and a confident assessment of other people. While the "normal" child lives on, barely aware of themselves, yet a properly responsive part of the world, these children reflect on themselves, observe themselves, are their own problems, and focus their attention on the functions of their bodies.
[...]
Just as these children observe themselves, they often also have an astonishingly accurate and mature judgment of the people around them, sensing very well who is well-disposed towards them and who is not, even if their behavior is completely different. They have a particularly fine feeling for the abnormalities of other children; indeed, however abnormal they themselves may be, they are almost hypersensitive to them.
[...]
The normal child, especially the younger one, who is correctly positioned in the environmental situation, reacts correctly to it, and goes along with it, does so out of their healthy instincts, but usually does not reach conscious judgment; this requires a distance from concrete things. Distance from the individual object is the prerequisite for abstraction, for becoming conscious, for the formation of concepts. The very increased personal distance, indeed the disturbance of instinctive, emotional reacting, which characterizes autistic children, is thus, in a certain sense, a prerequisite for their good conceptual grasp of the world. We therefore speak of a "psychopathic lucidity" in these children, because it only occurs in them.' (Die „Autistischen Psychopathen“ im Kindesalter)
He is describing a higher degree of self-awareness, self-reflection, and insight; a higher degree of consciousness, which is lucid to what a normal individual is not. This is what is required for developing psi. In theory anyone can, but some have a vocation for it. The most gifted individuals I've read as documented or studied as demonstrating some form of psi all had traits of high-functioning autism, i.e Asperger's.
Ironically, environmental poisons (vaccine, dietary, or otherwise) inhibit psi, as do certain lifestyles that are conducive to or require suppression of the self's consciousness.
Wow! Fantastic work! Just came across your stack thanks to Tereza Coraggio, and I'll definitely be back!
This article cleared something up for me that I've long wondered about - the semantic drift of the word autism.
One thing that you don't mention is that kids who are simply intellectually impaired (the people who used to be called "retarded") are increasingly being referred to as autistic... which I guess is to spare their feelings (or their parents' feelings). I surely understand the use of euphemism in such cases, but it seems unfortunate that this euphemism might distort the understanding of medical conditions which are all too real.
Another excellent article. Thanks so much!