It doesn’t feel like an accident that my grandmother’s 95th birthday party was two days before the “American Autism epiphany heard round the world.” We knew both were coming (the birthday and the president’s announcement) and both landed exactly as expected. Our country is wildly undereducated on the realities of Neurodivergence. We, the professionals, have been misled, misguided, and left without the necessary tools to identify and help our Neurodivergent clients. Much of what we were taught in school is outdated, and many of the interventions we still rely on are less than helpful, and often harmful, for Autistic individuals. If helpers want to stay current on effective ways to show up for their Autistic clients, they are educating themselves because they want to, not because it is required. While everything we once knew has changed, there is nothing forcing medical or mental health professionals to “download the update.” High masking kids and adults are being missed, misdiagnosed, and treated with inappropriate techniques. And even still, Autism is being called “a crisis.” The crisis you’ll hear about on the news is that “numbers are rising.” They are, but not in the way the news will contextualize it.
Numbers are rising because of better identification across ages and genders, improved assessments and screening, expanded services, and because community education and social media are helping adults recognize that their lifelong struggles have an identifiable cause. That isn’t the same thing as a sudden surge in incidence. Prevalence is up because we finally learned where to look. The numbers didn’t explode. Our lenses improved. This isn’t a wave of new autism. It’s a wave of finally seeing it. Autistic individuals with higher support needs are facing struggles that are different from high-masking adults, and people on all sides of this vast spectrum are feeling misunderstood, scared, and unsupported.
I suspect I have spent my whole life surrounded by neurodivergent family members, parents, friends, and partners. Now I’m here in 2025, often alone with an encyclopedic amount of data, research, and experiences that leaves me feeling more like Cole Sear than a therapist. In ’99, when “The Sixth Sense” was the movie twist everyone was talking about, I had no idea how much I’d one day relate to a 10‑year‑old who saw things that others missed. My life has become a full immersion into a culture of Autistic people who are fighting to find answers in a world that has left them behind. “I see Autistic people.” It is my job to identify and assess their Neurodivergence when they ask me, to “see them” for therapy, a Neurodivergent Adventure, or an Unmasking retreat. But it doesn’t end there. I see Autistic people at home, in my office, and nearly everywhere I go. Neurodivergence is all around us, whether we see it or not. My pattern‑seeking brain has spotted others like me since before I knew what “like me” meant. In the face of unpredictable challenges ahead, I feel compelled, now more than ever, to share with anyone who is willing to listen.
Here is the short version of the long history lesson: soon after Leo Kanner described “early infantile autism” in the 1940s, clinicians were quick to blame autism on mothers for being “emotionally cold.” Society already tended to blame moms first and foremost, as many psychiatric conditions at that time were said to be caused by parent‑child relationships. (Thanks Freud).
Bruno Bettelheim supercharged that idea for the public. He compared autistic children to prisoners living in “extreme situations” and popularized the so‑called “refrigerator mother” claim. He even promoted a “parentectomy,” the idea that removing a child from their parents was therapeutic. We now know this was wrong and deeply harmful. The blame stuck to mothers for decades, and the cleanup still isn’t finished.
Then came 1998. Andrew Wakefield published a case series of twelve children and implied that the MMR vaccine led to Autism. There was no control group. He failed to disclose serious conflicts of interest, used invasive procedures on children, and misrepresented data. The paper was retracted in 2010. Wakefield lost his medical license. Dozens of robust studies since have found no link between vaccines and autism. The fear, however, lingered and spread.
And now, a modern remix. Our president recently suggested that Tylenol in pregnancy might be the culprit. Different decade, same move. A simple story of parental blame gets a shiny, new platform and suddenly it’s everywhere: in doctor’s offices, in textbooks, in family whispers that harden into shame. Meanwhile, autistic people are treated like problems to solve instead of people to support. Parents are second‑guess every decision and every dose of medicine. Real help gets delayed while we chase the wrong villain.
Here’s the uncomfortable throughline: none of these episodes came from neutral science. They came with politics, money, and credential gaps. Bruno Bettelheim helped popularize the “refrigerator mother” idea while his own credentials were disputed and allegations of abuse at his school later surfaced. Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, not an autism specialist, was paid by trial lawyers and failed to disclose conflicts. His 1998 paper was retracted and he lost his medical license. In 2025, senior officials amplified a Tylenol–autism claim even as major health bodies rejected it. One of the researchers they cited, Harvard’s Andrea Baccarelli, served as a paid expert for plaintiffs in Tylenol litigation, and a federal judge deemed his testimony unreliable and dismissed the claims. Meanwhile, Leucovorin was promoted from the White House as an “autism treatment” despite limited evidence that it helps a small subset with cerebral folate deficiency; it is not a cure. Even TV‑famous doctors who joined the rollout have faced conflict‑of‑interest questions and have since pledged to divest from supplement‑related holdings. The pattern is the same: big platforms, shaky evidence, and incentives that do not prioritize autistic people’s best interests.
The hardest part isn’t saying “that was wrong.” It’s cleaning up after it. Bad ideas don’t leave politely. They settle into policies, habits, and gut feelings. Bettelheim’s blame still leaks into therapy sessions. Wakefield’s ghost still shows up at pediatric visits. The Tylenol sound bite makes pregnant people hesitate when they need care. Undoing this takes repetition, plain language, and a lot of humility. We have to name the myth, name the harm, and keep offering the truth until it sticks: autism isn’t caused by parenting, vaccines, or Tylenol. It’s a neurodevelopmental difference. And it is genetic. Reliably and visibly, it is caused by the genes that were passed down from our families. I have yet to work with a client who’s neurodivergent traits are not also found (and often unexamined) in the elders of their family.
What’s happening right now with Trump, Autism, and Tylenol is a modern replay of the Bettelheim problem: a powerful figure gives oxygen to a shaky idea, institutions amplify it, and even if it’s later corrected, the harm lingers. The megaphone moves faster than the retraction.
Meanwhile, neurodivergent parents are raising neurodivergent kids without a functional compass. As we uncover the realities of learning differences, spiky profiles, unique social preferences, and the very real joys of monotropism in our own homes, we are largely navigating uphill. Parents are managing their own missed diagnoses and trauma while advocating for kids who do not come with a user manual. Many of us must deprioritize our relationships, pivot from our careers, and become full‑time advocates for our Neurodivergent kids. To be clear, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’d be lying if I said that parenting in my house (and many of yours) is anything less than complicated. In our home, three of four kids are neurodivergent, and no two have the same needs. One needs novelty, another needs predictability. One needs quiet, another needs verbal stimming. One needs to be reminded to do everything, while another has a nervous system that can’t handle being told to do anything. There are never enough fidgets, meds, snacks, dogs, special interests, or patient adults to go around. We are a family with the privilege to maintain two careers and the support of a squad of helpers, and we are still struggling. Not because we were dealt disappointing or “broken” children, but because we are raising the children we love unconditionally in a world that is not built for them. Our neurology is not the problem.
Back to the party. Twenty‑four hours before “the announcement,” I arrived at my grandmother’s birthday party. She spent most of the day sitting where the people “weren’t,” completing a word puzzle. I’m told she does this each day at the same time and refuses to go to sleep until it is complete. She eats the same meals each day on the same schedule. No deviations. Dessert for lunch. Dinner at 4:00 pm. Her coffee belongs in the same cup every morning. She moves to the same chair each day after lunch and watches the same show. Even when nothing changes, she catalogues the tiny ways it does, and she doesn’t keep it quietly to herself. She is blunt, demanding, and direct in the ways that she communicates her needs. My grandmother is a beautiful, stylish woman with class, who now wears a hat indoors to shield her eyes from the sun. She never uses profanity, misses sarcasm entirely, and often sails past a punchline. She is an avid reader, creator, and artist; a loving mother and grandmother; a person who pursues knowledge, animals, and nature. Next to her bed is an urn with her favorite dog’s ashes, dozens of shelves of art and pottery she has collected from all over the world, and an Obama bobblehead. When you ask her where Poppy’s ashes are, she replies, “I know they’re in the house somewhere.” She is a beautiful human, rich with experiences, who has loved and cared for our family in some very unique ways for almost 100 years.
We all gathered to celebrate her, a fact that at times seemed lost on her and her puzzle. At least ten dogs milled around underfoot of 20‑plus humans, which fits my family’s priorities perfectly. We are unique, and years ago I would have said “weird.” I take that back now. We can be intense. We have our share of unhealthy coping, unsaid things, and real medical and mental health challenges. From “bipolar” to hoarding to addiction to disordered eating, we have checked many of the common “Autism adjacent misdiagnoses” that sit on top of the real story. But we all gathered that day to celebrate her. She blew out her candles, and the room erupted into cheers and laughter. Jokes flew about how she ended up with so many birthdays after surviving raising nine children. Without skipping a beat, my grandmother began a five-minute monologue about the “rhythm method,” the Catholic church, and failed contraception in response. Then on to the history of contraceptive beliefs in religion, and on and on and on. Was she spot on in her 95-year-old data dump? Yes. Was she reading the room? Absolutely not.
My nine aunts and uncles, and dozens of cousins were not marinated in Tylenol in the womb. They do not have obsessive interests like flying airplanes, photography, quilting, jewelry making, bread baking, woodworking, banjo playing, lava lamp collections, and mermaid‑tail collecting because they were born to a “refrigerator mother.” They did not take apart electronics and put them back together as kids because of an MMR shot. The chronic illnesses and syndromes that wash over people I love: GI issues, infertility, migraines, Sjogren’s, thyroid disease, Mast Cell Activation, POTS, Ehlers‑Danlos, did not arrive because anyone’s mom dropped the ball. My grandmother met and loved my grandfather, a self‑made genius who owned a thriving business, built his own house, was a professor at Georgetown, read constantly, escaped to the basement to build clocks in the middle of Christmas Day, loved dogs, and spoke without a filter. He was brilliant and very much himself.
Autism is genetic. I know this in my bones. My family is no different from the families I support. Autism does not arrive in your family the day your 6-year-old gets a Neuropsychological Assessment. It didn’t arrive for you when the Tik Tok algorithm started showing you videos that made you whisper, “that’s me!” at midnight. It didn’t show up in 2025 because it’s trendy, or because “everyone wants a label these days.” It has been with your family since the beginning. Every minute we spend chasing a single, tidy origin story is a minute we could spend supporting the Autistic people already in our homes.
Here is the part I want you to hear most clearly. The hope people expect a “cure” to deliver is already here, and it is quieter than you think. There are more dogs than people at our parties because our youngest are learning to soothe their nervous systems on purpose. My cousins and I go to therapy. We take meds. Some of us pursued Autism assessments. We choose work and partners that let us live inside our special interests, invent things, set our own schedules, or work from home. Some of us work relentlessly. Some of us do not work at all. All of us are kinder to ourselves than the generation before us. Autism is an invisible disability, and only the person inside the body knows its full weight. But from where I sit, this newer generation is not “more autistic.” They are more supported. The forty‑somethings can read the room. They can apologize. They have healthy relationships, friendships, and support. They like themselves. They can offer themselves grace and still try again tomorrow. That didn’t happen because someone cracked a code in a lab. It happened because accommodations work. It happened because we stopped insisting on sameness and started building lives that fit.
If you need a place to put your energy, put it here: make your home quieter or cozier, whichever helps. Let kids wear the headphones. Move dessert to lunch. Get the dog. Buy the soft pants. Don’t worry about the mess. Choose the same coffee cup. Call it what it is, an accommodation, and stop apologizing for needing it. Tell your doctor you have more to say. Spend one weekend a month alone, without shame. Ask your psychiatrist for meds that actually help. Request work from home days at your job. Challenge a myth when you hear it. Tell your therapist that what they are doing isn’t working if it isn’t. Support real services now. If there is an epiphany to be had, it is not that autism is finally solvable. It is that Autistic people are finally allowed to be fully themselves and to get the support they needed all along.
