Either of assisted suicide, outright murdered or of neglect.

long ago many autistic folk were probably put in sanatoriums

why do these fucking morons keep lying about autism? WTF

A lot of words for people like me. Now that I know what I am, I can look at my family tree and spot guys like myself back in the 1000's.

Even all the western and cowboy shows always had characters who were just the blacksmith who was single, lived alone, just did the job, went home, ate slept and went back to the work location. No parties, no socializing just solitude and maybe a hobby. Just the people who kept things working and the ones who were always made fun of.


The reason they believe it is something new is because of the Internet. We can now find other people like ourselves. we can now figure out
"OMG, THAT IS WHY I AM LIKE I AM". and that folks is an amazing thing to find out when you are in your 60's. Now 77 and that was the best thing I ever found out.

yes, as the sister of a severely autistic younger brother it is heartbreaking to realize how such folk were treated in the past and so disgusting to see what is going on now - what Trump and RFJ Jr are doing is pretty much the GOP playbook now - find a target and demonize them.......they've done it to POC, immigrants, LGBTQ, and now anyone on the Spectrum........seems to me like none of those folk are the issue, MAGA assholes are the real problem

Someone asks "Can I use your car?" Yea sir

"Can I borrow $500?" Oh. all I have is $450, but here ya go.

The big one... Neighbor asks me to leave my house to him in my will. I told him that I do not have a will as I do not have anything worth anything but my little house and the banks would put a lean on it for credit card debt anyway.
Well you can just let us have it and we will take care of it..
Never thought that my neighbor would charge me rent on something that cost them nothing..

Yea, if he is inclined to be a friendly and giving person, this is a very big deal..

In my 20's a guy at work asked me to co-sign a note for a new 69 Corvette.. Yep, skipped out

I hope kids these days are taught that us on the spectrum are VERY EASY marks. People do not have to work very hard even to con us.

yes I can see how that could happen, for sure

my brother received benefits from my dad's military service and I can easily see some families trying to take advantage of that

I had had decent paying jobs, but kept giving it away. I think it stems from wanting to have friends and only attracting narcissistic people. Those seem to see us coming from a mile away.

I remember working in NYC and going out with co workers every few nights and end up paying for all the drinks. Always..

Now I know about it and I still almost give in, but I reach for my phone in my pocket like I have a call and their moment is gone. A side note is now that I have told a couple of people is that they never ask me for anything at all, ever.

Good luck

Last edited Sat Sep 27, 2025, 07:25 PM - Edit history (1)

he was in hospice and due to Covid I could not visit him - I was out of state and skyped with him via a nurse but he looked confused, like he didn't recognize me

I feel sad when I think of his life - autistic folk notoriously don't like change but that's all we had growing up in a military family - we moved constantly, sometimes overseas.....different schools almost yearly.

Now when so much more is known about autism there should be great advances in how such children are educated, for example......but now we have a bunch of quacks using these folk as political targets.....it is deeply disturbing.

I think they are targeting people deemed unworthy, similarity to what was done in Germany during the early stages of the Nazi regime. "Lebensunwertes Leben." It is the predictable next step in the catastrophic course down which we are being driven.

I think it is genetic.

I had a severely autistic younger brother and also I remember a great-uncle who was a lot like him - of course, back then he was pegged as "brain damaged" (my younger brother was labeled "emotionally disturbed)" - but even as a kid I knew Uncle Henry was in many ways smarter than the people around him - and my younger brother, he had savant tendencies with certain subjects, like sports.....he read extensively and knew a lot.

The head of the FDA doesn't know that there are nonverbal people with autism in their 60s and 70s?

He's never heard of group homes?

I remember back in the late '60s, such a facility was opened near where I grew up called "Northwest Center". During the '80s, when many of the "institutions" had closed or were being phased out, they expanded exponentially in the Philly metro area. Now they have locations across the state and looking it up, they were apparently bought in 2018 and now go by the name "Merakey", a non-profit entity that provides developmental and mental health services for adults. I expect they even offer rehabilitative services for individuals to be able to operate in the workplace (the federal government has hired employees from places like that to do custodial and other services work).

more like

that I know of. Farther back it is difficult to discern.

We now call a lot of things "autism" that were described in different ways over the ages. I see it all over my family tree, too.

I think a lot of "geniuses" who invented and created things were on the autism spectrum.

Another quack on bob's payroll who has his own "beliefs" like some people "believe" the earth is flat. Forget science, go on your "gut feeling" (and whatever gets more sales for your wacky books!!111!!)

Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack,
Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack,
Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack,
Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack …

Is a bunch of quacks pushing junk science and lies. Everyone of them should lose their medical license, if they even have one. And they should all be charged with reckless endangerment.

We are as close minded as RFK if we don't consider all angles on autism. There seems to be a genetic component, but there are a number of environmental insults to the nervous system in our modern world that could conceivably account for the high incidence of autism (and yes, it's high, even considering how many kids are diagnosed with mild forms who would not have been in past decades). So many, in fact, it would be hard to pin down causative factors because there are just so many, particularly exposures during pregnancy, toxins such as pesticides, air pollution, heavy metal exposure, etc. Also the older ages of new mothers. Vaccines containing ethylmercury were a good candidate for study, back in the day, but of course studies ruled them out plus they were phased out in 2001.

RFK's anti-vaccine stance is ridiculous and dangerous, but genetic vs environmental causes of autism are not football teams where you back one or the other. A curious and open mind is needed to get to the root cause (or more likely, causes) of such a prevalent disorder.

Period.

Autism as a medical term was only introduced in 1911. And the recognition that there is a 'spectrum' of related conditions is much more recent.

It's a classic case of "there weren't as many cases reported in the past because they weren't recognized in the past". True of many phenomena, and not just in medicine.

The number of people who died of COVID-19 initially was heavily under-reported because not every case was autopsied, so an ultimate (as opposed to proximate) Cause of Death was not established. It wasn't worth the risk of exposure to a highly contagious and fairly lethal disease for the Medical Examiners to be examining the bodies of people who obviously had COVID, but it meant they couldn't sign off on COVID as the established cause.

Deaths due to heatstroke are largely under-reported because the forensic evidence for heatstroke is far from unique, and hard to distinguish from other causes. The living patient may have suffered from heatstroke in an obvious way and under obvious circumstances as confirmed by multiple witnesses, but chances are that won't be reported as the COD, particularly if the patient was already in ill health otherwise.

This is such a well-established, known defect in the study of diseases that no "expert" has any right to be unaware of it -- but RFKJ appointed him anyway.

I really like the term neuro-divergent.

We still don't understand it very well at all, but denying that it exists, or promoting quack conspiracy theories re. its cause(s) is no longer even remotely consistent with what few facts ARE known.

And, I know for a fact, that neuro-divergent
people are wonderful and have a lot to offer
all of us.

My significant other who is very bright, college educated has an autism diagnosis -

But so does a friend’s child who can’t speak, swirls around, bangs his head, is not bathroom trained and will never have a job or live independently. I think instead of one long spectrum- it should be divided.

We know that pesticides, heavy metals, toxic chemicals could be involved. When saying it’s genetic - a second possibility could be lots of people in same family exposed to same toxins -

Example - Navajo SW families all living in a house built with radioactive soil, entire farm families exposed to pesticides, even a non farm family where someone is always setting pesticide bombs in their house. So many toxins in the world - just living near a factory. In NM, rows of houses around Intel are vacant because of toxic fumes being released.

Nothing is black and white.

The behaviors he says were unheard of a generation ago were common knowledge not only in the medical and mental health communities but to anyone who read Life magazine 60 years ago:

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/133/3/364/32244/Screams-Slaps-and-Love-The-Strange-Birth-of?redirectedFrom=fulltext

"On May 7, 1965, an extraordinary photo essay titled “Screams, Slaps, and Love” appeared in the pages of Life magazine. It portrayed the lives of 4 “utterly withdrawn children whose minds are sealed against all human contact and whose uncontrolled madness had turned their homes into hells.”1 Their diagnosis was “childhood schizophrenia,” the term applied at the time to the condition we know as autism. Two were nonverbal, 2 others had no language other than endlessly repeating television commercial jingles, and all 4 exhibited very disruptive behaviors such as head-banging to the point of bruising.

The article’s focus was on a novel treatment that had recently been developed for autism at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In an age when psychoanalytic ideas dominated therapy for autism in the United States, this new intervention was grounded in behaviorism.2 The therapists in the photo essay were depicted..."

Do we ask the autism experts for their views on surgical oncology? No? Then maybe we shouldn't ask surgical oncologists for their views on autism

lobectomy because of her mood swings. It’s not known if she was autistic or on the spectrum or some other form of illness or not. That was a thing in the 50’s and 60’s. That would be RFK Jr’s aunt.

Today's 'autistic' child's brain is busy accumulating information, digesting it, categorizing it . . . he/she may be tomorrow's brilliant scientist, researcher, politician, business leader.

We are all different, we develop in different ways, different speeds, with different outcomes.
No one should judge.
The quiet introspective adult may look at the world and wonder why so many people are loudly unintelligent.