I’m pretty sure I’m on the autism spectrum.
It’s a reasonably wide spectrum these days, wide enough to accommodate even certain people in the federal government.
It’s possible that my mother took too much Tylenol when she was pregnant with me. (That’s ‘acetaminophen’ to those of us who prefer the generic Walmart brand. Luckily, we’re not required to pronounce it when we purchase it.)
My mother will deny taking Tylenol when pregnant, if you ask her, and I don’t blame her for denying it. I would deny it myself, if I had been a pregnant woman back in the 1960s. Who knew anything about autism in the 1960s? Up until the 1970s, psychologists thought autism was a form of schizophrenia. They later changed their minds, much to the relief of anxious parents.
The history of autism is quite fascinating, to the point of being overwhelming. The Wikipedia entry on autism racks up 24,000 words, which compares favorably with a Stephen King novel. And the Stephen King novel is only slightly more frightening — with the caveat that the Wikipedia autism entry has the scariest parts at the beginning, whereas a Stephen King novel generally gets scarier towards the end.
Needless to say, I didn’t read the whole 24,000 words, because I wasn’t really interested in what doctors thought about autism prior to the time I could have been diagnosed as autistic (but wasn’t). That allowed me to skip about 10,000 words.
Along the way, I learned that autism became recognized as a developmental disorder distinct from schizophrenia for the first time by a major psychiatric body, the World Health Organization, in 1978. That didn’t make life any easier for us autistic people, but who wants to be schizophrenic?
Naturally, as soon as doctors start defining a disorder as being ‘distinct’, the next thing they want to do is find out what’s causing it. And it’s my personal theory that anytime the doctors think they’ve found the cause of any illness, they later find out they were wrong.
But I did find a couple of interesting factoids that might bear on the current controversies around autism.
From Wikipedia:
American psychiatrist Stella Chess conducted studies on the potential link between rubella and autism. In 1971, she found that children with congenital rubella syndrome developed autism at rates 200 times higher than the general population at the time. She followed this up with a 1977 study.
“200 hundred times higher” seems like a pretty impressive number. We might wonder about the claims that the MMR vaccine commonly administered to children at age twelve months might be a cause of autism. The “R” being a rubella vaccine.
But most doctors laugh at this claim. It’s not easy being a doctor these days, and they deserve things to laugh at. Quietly, of course, in the privacy of their own offices.
Then we have this entry in Wikipedia, which mentions the Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger, who invented Asperger Syndrome.
In April 1968, Asperger wrote about the similarities and differences of his and [Leo] Kanner’s concepts of autism in the paper “Zur Differentialdiagnose des kindlichen Autismus”, noting:
“Yes, it seems to us that a dash of ‘autism’ is absolutely necessary for certain top scientific or artistic achievements: a certain turning away from the concrete, simple and practical; a narrowing down to a specific, dynamically and highly original special field, sometimes to the point of eccentricity; a narrowing or abnormality of emotional relationships with other people.”
Now, that’s more like it. Nothing like a dash of autism to make a person highly original.
We need more psychiatrists like Dr. Asperger, who recognize that top scientific artistic achievements are possible only to people on the autism spectrum. Even if we may have abnormal emotional relationships with other people.
Maybe if the mothers of those “other people” had taken more Tylenol when they were pregnant, we’d have more scientific and artistic achievements to brag about.
I mean, really… what’s more important… a normal emotional relationship, or an artistic achievement?
A rhetorical question maybe only folks on the autism spectrum can fully appreciate.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.