NeuroTribes: The Untold History of Austim and the Potential of Neurodiversity

by Steve Silberman

Inevitably, the more that clinicians and educators looked for a condition, the more they found it.

Anne’s investigation became the basis for a best-selling book by Jonathan Harr called A Civil Action, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film.

Exposure to thalidomide, an over-the-counter drug used in the 1960s to relieve morning sickness in pregnant women that resulted in ten thousand cases of babies being born with serious malformation of the limbs, had been linked to autism in numerous studies over the years.

In the aftermath of the Leominster scandal, other “autism clusters” started popping up all over the country—notably one in Brick Township, New Jersey, where sixty-three million gallons of septic waste had been dumped into a landfill between 1969 and 1979. No one was tracking these events more closely than Bernard Rimland, who started covering the Leominster story in his newsletter two years before the 20/20 broadcasts.

But instead of focusing on the changes in the diagnostic criteria, he raised the terrifying possibility that pollution, antibiotics, and vaccines were triggering a tsunami of new cases, citing the Leominster “cluster” as a dramatic example.

Rimland’s version of the events in the town took hold permanently in the autism parents’ community, becoming part of the growing lore of the epidemic.

was at this point that his work began to attract pointed criticism from British public-health officials who were well aware of the potentially catastrophic danger of shaking public confidence in the safety of a vaccine that prevents millions of deaths worldwide every year.

In addition, episodes of fever, rashes, convulsions, and other usually transitory reactions to vaccines (understandably terrifying to parents) are well documented in the annals of immunology, as Coulter and Fisher had documented extensively in their book.

The most novel aspect of Wakefield’s paper was the supreme confidence with which he turned this confluence of disparate phenomena into a theory of autism causation.

This press coverage sent shock waves through the autism parents’ community and far beyond. For Rimland, the Wakefield study was the smoking gun he’d been waiting for.

After an outcry from organizations like Fisher’s National Vaccine Information Center, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the American Academy of Pediatrics asked vaccine manufacturers to remove thimerosal from their products, and the preservative was quickly phased out of most vaccines in the United States and Europe.

While later studies would show that this had no impact on rising rates of autism diagnosis, this precautionary step had the unintended effect of appearing to provide an official imprimatur to parental anxieties about mercury.

Lorna suggested that blurring the boundaries between autism and eccentricity has also inevitably contributed to the widespread perception that the condition is on the rise.

By leveraging the technology passed down to them by their predecessors in previous generations, autistic people are taking control of their own destinies, with the help of parents who no longer believe that what their children need most is a cure.

Instead, Grandin proposed that people with autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences could make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making.

“Together we felt like a lost tribe. ‘Normal’ is to be in the company of one like one’s self,” she wrote. “We all had a sense of belonging, of being understood . . . all the things we could not get from others in general. It was so sad to have to leave.”

Soon he would begin building safe space for autistics on a frontier so new that most people were barely aware that it existed: the Internet.

“Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity,” the site’s FAQ declared. “There is no known cure.”

He acknowledged that some amount of grief was natural but stressed the importance of parents separating their expectations of an idealized child from the child in front of them who desperately needs their love and support. He pointed out that if grief goes on too long, it transmits a dangerous message to the child: that they are inadequate as they are.

Of necessity, autistic space was tolerant of a wide range of behavior, because autistics are even more different from one another than they are from NTs.

But then he stumbled on a website called Aspergia that was supposed to be like an enchanted island for people with autism.

Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution.