My son has autism, and I founded the government relations department at Autism Speaks.
One in 150 kids is autistic these days. The autism spectrum is growing.
In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities.
Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.
I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.
Lets get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I dont think in a language, and animals dont think in a language. Its sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. Its putting these sensory based memories into categories.
There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.
The main problem, certainly, for the people who will not get vaccinated with Thimerosal, which was put into polio vaccine. And the belief was that it may cause autism. And there's been an awful lot done in terms of studies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and no correlation was found between Thimerosal and autism from those children who took vaccines. Indeed, when Thimerosal was taken out of many of these vaccines, the autism rate in the United States still rose.
I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.
One out of every six American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism, blindness, mental retardation and heart, liver and kidney disease.
Let me see if I can put this in scientific terms: Think of autism like a fart, and vaccines are the finger you pull to make it happen.
I am the father of a 9 year-old son whose descent into the world of autism began at the age of 7 months old after receiving numerous vaccinations in a single day; the same story that is told by thousands of other parents of children throughout the country whose healthy, normally developing children have become autistic after vaccinations.
I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone facing racial or social prejudices to add autism to their list of struggles. It might be less stressful and at times, easier, to ignore the autism.
A new baby is like the beginning of all things - wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities.
I strongly believe as a mother, as does my husband, that there are certain contributing factors that lead to autism and some of it is very much the chemicals in our environment and in our food.
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism
My little brother is autistic, so I would love to be involved in a charity for autism, but I haven't found the right one yet.
I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.
People think about autism as something with kids. Well, those kids grow up.
William Stillman's Autism and the God Connection is a sensitive and illuminating work which could dramatically change how we view autism.
I have friends struggling with autism, juvenile diabetes.
A major cause of the Roman Empire's decline, after six centuries of world dominance was its replacement of stone aqueducts by lead pipes for the transport and supply of drinking water. Roman engineers, the best in the world, turned their fellow citizens into cripples. Today our own "best and brightest," with the best of intentions, achieve the same end through childhood vaccination programmes yielding the modern scourges of hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, appetite disorders, and impulsive violence.
Im not a doctor or scientist. Im just a mom. But I do think theres a genetic predisposition, and there are environmental triggers. I feel like that combination, in my childs case, is what resulted in autism.
As a parent with a child with autism, its been really tough to experience your child having autism.
Having a child with Autism can mess with your head: You feel like you can move mountains for them yet you're powerless at the same time.
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