The Autism Explosion: Is It Vaccines, Fluoride — or Modern Society?

By Selwyn Duke

Common sense is “that forgotten branch of psychology,” observed philosopher G.K. Chesterton in the early 1900s. One could wonder what he’d say today, with “psychology” — which means “study of the soul” — being both soulless and ubiquitous.

And it being so widespread is a reason, it’s said, that autism diagnoses are so common today. We’re more “aware” of the problem and “the screening is better” is the idea. But then there are other theories. Some have implicated vaccines in autism manifestation, while others have cited fluoride as a possible cause. For his part, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has vowed to investigate the matter and says that by “September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic.”

But will we? What if the cause is cultural as much as, or more than, environmental (or genetic)? What if, as one writer put it Sunday, “society is the problem”?

Hard Truth About a Soft Science

It’s no wonder this is a major topic: The U.S. autism-diagnosis rate has increased 6,800 percent over the last 30 years. The rise over the past six decades has been a whopping 69,000 percent. Of course, a major part of this is that today’s autism is not, well, your grandfather’s autism. More on that momentarily. But first some perspective and history are in order.

Late “Helter Skelter” mass murderer Charles Manson once reportedly said in a prison interview, “You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.” (No, I’m not implying that those with “autism” and every other “disorder” are “crazy.”) Taking his statement loosely, he had a point. As psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Lewis noted in 2022, “everyone seems to have ADHD these days.” Doctors Health Press went even further in 2013, writing:

If the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had its way, we would all be suffering from some form of mental illness.

For sure, when all you have is a psychological hammer, everything looks like a mentally ill nail. The proof is in the pudding, too, as people with certain “disorders” have burgeoned like the national debt. In the last 60 years, psychological diagnoses in America have supposedly increased 150 percent. (All figures are according to Grok-AI internet searches unless otherwise indicated). That doesn’t sound too bad, perhaps, though I suspect the actual figure is higher. But now consider the increase in the United States in a few specific “disorders/conditions” over the past 30 years:

• Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder — 500-800 percent.
• “Gender” dysphoria (GD) — approximately 14,900 percent.
• Autism Spectrum Disorder — 6,800 percent, from about 1 in 2,500 in the early 1990s to 1 in 36 by 2020.

Disorder-creation Disorder?

GD, which really should be called Sexual Identity Disorder (SID — believing you’re in the “wrong” sex’s body), is especially telling. It’s now well established that most kids and adults thus diagnosed today don’t actually have SID. Much of the phenomenon is explained by “social contagion.” And many of the men “identifying” as women have autogynephilia (when males derive sexual excitement from masquerading as female). Moreover, a whistleblower revealed in 2023 that a high percentage of the SID-diagnosed youths at her “gender” clinic actually had other problems — such as “autism.”

This would, mind you, not at all surprise SID sufferer Alan Finch (who went so far as having mutilative surgery). He did say, after all, upon recognizing his error, that “transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists.”

Most inventive they are, too. Just consider that the following “disorders” are or have been in the DSM:

• Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Internet Gaming Disorder
• Caffeine Withdrawal
• Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (bad behavior in children)
• Mathematics Disorder
• Hoarding Disorder

Is any of this surprising? Cookie manufacturers want everyone eating cookies. Tennis racquet manufacturers want as many people as possible playing tennis. Likewise, the mental-health establishment also instinctively tries to widen its market — and hence its earning potential. And this happens every time something formerly called a sin or eccentricity is labeled a “disorder.”

So, returning to autism diagnoses, we must ask: Is this market imperative having an influence? And should we not question a psychiatric establishment that itself has Disorder-creation Disorder? Remember something, too, when assessing credibility. This is an establishment that has insisted boys can morph into girls — and that has mutilated kids on this basis.

Is It All Really “Autism”?

One person questioning the autism narrative is the aforementioned writer, commentator Andrea Widburg. Adding perspective, she points out that in the last decade, the adult (ages 26-34) autism diagnosis rate increased 450 percent. She mentions, too, that she knows and edited a book for someone who has what autism was always understood to be until fairly recently.

Author Ido Kedar, Widburg writes, is “non-verbal, has limited impulse control, and struggles badly with the various stimuli around him…. People like Ido are very rare. In my many years, I’ve only known one other person with true non-verbal autism.”

I can second this. As a child in the 1970s, I saw someone with autism once or twice, and you couldn’t miss it. Oh, we didn’t understand these individuals’ inner world the way we can today (Kedar’s book provides such insight). But they clearly had a very serious issue.

That was then. Today there’s that autism “spectrum,” which includes children not even remotely like Kedar. As Widburg writes of the diagnosis:

The manifestations no longer require the full disconnect from the world that Ido and the few others like him display. Instead, autism can now be diagnosed based upon things such as avoiding eye contact, being anti-social or not responding to social cues, being OCD with toys and objects, having obsessive interests, being hyperactive, having constipation, being very anxious, etc.

(More serious signs also may present, depending on the case.)

Widburg states that she knew many kids exhibiting the above peculiarities. “We called those kids geeks, nerds, and, eventually,” she writes, “dot.com billionaires who were geeky and nerdy.” They didn’t have a “disorder,” but “were just part of the vast bell curve of humanity.”

And do they really have an inborn “disorder” today? Or is something else at work?

Cultural Causes?

Widburg theorizes about socialization-oriented causes of the “autism” phenomenon. First, she writes about screen time’s effects:

If your social life is texting (as is true for so many) and your activities are computer games (which is especially true for young men who spent hours in darkened rooms frantically flicking their thumbs while talking to disembodied voices) … well, yeah, you won’t understand eye contact, you won’t pick up on social cues, you’ll lack empathy, and you’ll probably have high anxiety in most social situations. This could describe many of the people in the age 24-36 cohort who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum issues.

In other words … our young people have become de-socialized.

Frankly, I’ve had the same insight. What kind of body language, for example, do you have to exhibit when communicating via screen? (It’s emoji time.)

When evaluating this, consider that children’s brains possess great neuroplasticity and can actually change based on environmental stimuli. This is no surprise. Science has learned, after all, that environment can influence even gene expression.

Extreme examples of environment’s effects are seen in the rare cases of feral/severely neglected children. It appears, for instance, that kids who don’t learn language during a critical developmental period may never be able to become fully functional in it. A denial of human contact leaves them forever stunted. This raises a question, too.

Does it not logically follow that a reduction in human contact might have a similar effect to a reduced degree?

For certain is that it’s not normal for kids to be raised on screens. Historically, children spent time interacting with other humans, not devices.

The Covid Tragedy

Widburg also mentions, as an exacerbating factor, the Covid lockdowns, which kept kids isolated and masked and not socializing. Relevant here, too, is the story of CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen. Wen was a strong proponent of masking children to protect them from the coronavirus.

That is, until the practice harmed her own little son’s “language development.” Then she changed her tune.

(Note: If Wen had read and minded The New American, she’d never have hurt her boy. We warned of the phenomenon that would befall her child early on.)

So what can be said about the autism phenomenon? Well, we know regarding the “trans” situation that youths with disparate issues (e.g., autogynephilia) are lumped in with the rare Sexual Identity Disorder sufferers. Likewise, probability dictates that the “autism” category also includes people with disparate problems. A small percentage certainly have biologically determined issues, and maybe some have environmentally induced ones. What are the odds, though, that none at all are plagued by a socially created cross?

Betting against that means listening to the people who not only may say your anti-social son has autism, but that he also can become a girl if he feels like it.

And the good news for the mental-health profession is that, either way or both ways, it will make money.

                   This article was originally published at The New American. 

Comments

[tj]

Interesting and insightful article, Selwyn. Though I might disagree with you on certain disorders (you ain't seen nuthin until you've seen Oppositional Defiant - like an allergy to being tractable), I concur that the expansion of the list of psychiatric disorders has gotten ridiculous. Autism is a prevalent diagnosis that is likely overly diagnosed; if you're looking for something, you'll probably find it. The characteristics of autism have probably been overextended because the disorder has become popular, especially the high-functioning form. A few decades ago, I taught some non verbal autistic toddlers who were fairly similar to each other despite being ethnically diverse. Then I interacted with a few older children who were supposedly autistic though they didn't have language delay. One child perhaps would have been diagnosed with Kanners but the other was probably dyslexic which is important because the wrong diagnosis could lead to the wrong treatment. I'm particularly skeptical of ADHD because we all have trouble concentrating at times and because the relatively new disorder required a too-sudden evolution. Unless an environmental toxin was introduced in the eighties, ADHD almost has to be behavioral as it has always been through the ages.

Wrt autism: It's shocking that a disorder such as autism has been applied to what may be personality traits or poor social skills, sort of as has been done with Schizophrenia though not to quite the same extent. I'd say diagnosing computer nerds with autism would be roughly the equivalent to labeling highly emotional people as manic-depressive. There's also the potential for the emotional types to use such a diagnosis to pathologize what they instinctively recognize as the political opposition. During the years in which I did various teaching gigs, I got the distinct impression that higher IQ white males were frequently misdiagnosed as psychotic because they were more analytical than emotional (and maybe smarter than or more conservative than the psychologist who diagnosed them). I don't know if autism has replaced psychotic as a means of vilifying those who are smarter or who have traits that may also be typical of conservatives though this may well be the case. Is it possible that some psychologists are pathologizing what they view as the Authoritarian personality? That being said, the bipolar diagnosis could easily help neutralize the liberals. Conservatives wouldn't necessarily be at any disadvantage in this version of psychological warfare.

Psychology has developed insight into the learning process as well as how to alter maladaptive behavior patterns such as addiction. It may also be too value neutral, too connected to leftist political ideology or too prone to conceptualizing everything in terms of medicine. It's disturbing that the same discipline that produces wonderful strategies for teaching autistic children is currently attempting to normalize MUSS. I guess one must always separate the various techniques from some kind of overweening worldview that may be as detached from traditional morality as it is from physical reality.

[370H55V I/me/mine]

In my son's case, there's no doubt he's on the lower-functioning end of the spectrum, with all the attendant behaviors, but at 26 still the most gentle, cheerful, and affectionate child we could ever hope to have.

Back in 2003 I read an article in Wired magazine about unusual clusters of autism reported in high-tech communities such as Silicon Valley, Austin, Seattle, and Route 128 in Massachusetts. It seems that what had been a male preserve of coding geeks suddenly began to accommodate female geeks as well. Some of them were pairing off and producing offspring even more obviously affected.

The other factor involved is increasing age of marriage and delay in childbearing. When you do that too long, the risks of birth defects rise exponentially.

[tj]

370H55V, do you think RFK, Jr is really going to figure out what causes/is causing Autism? The parents of the few autistic children I knew a few decades ago weren't really older. Another interesting factor was that the autistic child was often the second or the middle child. This was also prior to the widespread use of fertility treatments but after the number of childhood vaccines had significantly increased. I was skeptical about the vaccines being the culprit until I found out they give so many nowadays. I figure RFK, Jr is going to blame vaccines. The effect would manifest rather quickly if that is the case.

[Linda S Fox]

I have to agree with you about autism NOT being linked to one specific cause. I'm a retired teacher, and, from what I can see, our society virtually TRAINS kids to be inattentive, easily distracted, and unpracticed in turning information fed to them into long term knowledge.
Technology has its uses - as a science teacher, the data probes enable students to collect data, analyze it, and tie the results into what they are learning in non-hands on input.
For me, a tremendous plus is that the collection of the data is FAST. So, if a lab team screws up, there will usually be time to repeat the experiment (easy to do in most chem/physics labs, unlike bio, where repetition is often limited by the cost of the lab materials/specimens).
I could also use the SmartBoard to display each group's results, and lead them through the process of examining the trends/correlations.
In other classes, maybe not quite so useful.
Many times, students want to be able to take a photo of what is on the board. That's bad for insight/retention.
Really, repetition of vocabulary and concepts is still still key to learning.
And, for probably around 1/2 of students, their preferred learning mode is to stare into space, browse for shoes on the web, update their social media, and, at the last minute, ask other kids, "What answer did you get?"

[370H55V I/me/mine]

@tj

Just to stipulate, I don't buy into the vaccine cause either.

I also will see your anecdotes about autistic kids not having particularly older parents and raise you with our own experience since I was 46 and my wife 40 when our son was born, and he is our only child. Both of us have advanced degrees and are well into geekhood ourselves.

I don't recommend anyone duplicating our experience. People should get married and have kids while they're young, like nature intended.