The Story of Autism: How We Got Here, How We Heal

They had what Kanner called “an anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness .”

To me, the answer seems clear: because corporations have convinced most governments, scientists, journalists, and media outlets that their products are safe.

Scientists have been unable to define how autism is genetic. Over the past two decades, an increasing number of genes have been blamed in causing the disorder. It’s now argued that 500 to 1,000 genes are involved,37 which amounts to 7 to 14 percent of all the genes used in brain function. This is like saying a cut on a leg is caused by genetics, an... See more

Nutrients, fasting, grounding (touching Earth with bare feet or other body parts), sunlight, sleep, and exercise facilitate the body’s detoxifying, self-healing abilities. Animal organs are ample, underused sources of fat-soluble vitamins. Silicon-rich mineral water removes aluminum from the body.125 Bacillus subtilis , a rod-shaped bacteria, can d... See more

Instead of learning from others, autistic individuals gained knowledge out of their own experiences and theories and methods. This made some of their behavior “particularly original and delightful,” wrote Asperger. They had “a special creative attitude towards language,” which they tended to process literally, making them not “get” most jokes and b... See more

In NeuroTribes , Silberman writes that many in Silicon Valley, in the tech industry, seem autistic. I’ve noticed that many autobiographical authors and graphic novelists do too. There’s a connection between autobiographical self-expression and autism, or auto-ism , from the Greek word auto , meaning “self” or “self-referential.” Pain and discomfort... See more

By 2020, around 349 per 10,000 U.S. children (and 498 per 10,000 boys, who are affected around 4 times as often as girls) aged 3 to 17 were autistic.45 The accelerating, exponential rise—3,000 percent from 1970 to 1995, 18,000 percent from 1995 to 2020—is a large problem for the genetic theory. If autism was mostly genetic, rates would be near-cons... See more

In 1974, two years after DDT was banned in the U.S., the already corrupt and/or incompetent EPA allowed Monsanto, the main seller of DDT, to begin selling glyphosate in its weedkiller Roundup. Seven hundred tons of glyphosate were used in the U.S. that year, 20,000 tons in 1995, and 138,000 tons in 2014,70 a 200-fold increase nearly matching the ri... See more

The pleasure, bonding, satisfaction, meaning, fulfillment, and stimulation—the opioids, oxytocin, endocannabinoids, dopamine, etc.—normally achieved through human relationships, in the autist is instead diverted, beginning in the formative years when the brain is rapidly developing, to non-social activities with self-invented goals. This explains s... See more