Bix dot Blog

The newsletter of Spectrum News this morning re-linked two older articles about kids who “lost” their autism diagnosis having all sorts of developmental, learning, psychological, or psychiatric issues “to the researchers’ surprise”. One of the articles is about research I’ve mentioned before, and I just wanted to underscore here what I said there, which is that if you’re “surprised” at a result, you should be asking why—and the crucial why here would be asking whether or not the “early intervention” treatments to which these kids were subjected in fact might be responsible for all of these other problems they have after they “lose” the diagnostic label of autistic. By which I mean: perhaps they are still in fact autistic and you’ve simply trained them to suppress it, leading to all the other things you’re “surprised” by afterward.