The Problematic Obsession With ‘Curing’ Autism -- Science of Us

Silberman’s interest in the subject was first piqued in 2000, when he realized that a startling number of kids in Silicon Valley were showing signs of autism — something that looked like an “epidemic” was afoot, and people were starting to freak out. His reporting on that phenomenon led to “The Geek Syndrome,” a 2001 article in Wired in which he explained how the concept of assortative mating — basically, people pairing off with those who are similar to them — could help explain what was going on with Silicon Valley’s children. There’s a reason Asperger’s has long been called “the engineer’s disorder” (or disease), after all — people in programming and engineering seem to have these traits more frequently than people in other fields. And if you put a bunch of them together in one place and they start having kids, there’s an explanation for the “epidemic.”

But that was only the start of Silberman’s research. “As time went on, I began to feel I had blown a much larger story,” he said. Even ten years after the publication of the article, he kept getting emails from families — increasingly, they were concerned not with figuring out what had caused their kids' autism, but rather what to do now that their kids were “aging out of services.” The problem is that, as Silberman explained, is that “once autistic kids graduate high school, the families are left to twist slowly in the wind and there are very few resources to help the kids translate from school to the workplace.”
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Silberman started to see this sort of focus on causes and cures as missing the point. “I think the idea that there’s going to be a cure ‘just around the corner,’ which is the phrase that gets echoed in media coverage all the time, comes from the mistaken belief that it’s a historical aberration, that autism was very rare before, now it’s very common — something’s changed and we’re going to zero in on that and fix it, and then there won’t be so many autistic people,” he said. “That’s a lie — it’s an illusion.” The traits that define the autism spectrum have always been around, he explained — while it might make for a pat story to suggest that chemicals in our food or evil pharmaceutical companies have led to skyrocketing rates, the available research suggests this isn’t an accurate way to look at it. Rather, NeuroTribes makes the case that a collusion of forces in the 1980s and 1990s produced the skyrocketing rates, including drastically broadened diagnostic criteria, the introduction of easy-to-use clinical tools for autism assessment, and — somewhat entertainingly — Rain Man, which made autism in adults visible to global audiences for the first time. These factors came together in what Silberman calls “an epidemic of recognition.”


The Problematic Obsession With ‘Curing’ Autism -- Science of Us