quote:

Autism is a neurological disorder. The damaged membranes occur during fetal development. There's a near enough zero chance autism is caused by vaccines that have no way to cause an effect on areas that formed wrong.

What's your source for this? Not trying to dispute but this is news to me.

Also, those of you saying "Autism is the new ADHD, autism is just a label doctors give out, autism is just another word for weird now" - I'm not trying to be rude but honestly if your experience of autism is maybe knowing one high functioning person with autism and a few magazine articles please, and I say this with love, just STFU for now and either learn more or be quiet.

Autistic disorder is on a spectrum. It's not binary. The treatment for the symptoms of autism is applied behavior analysis, basically disguising a bunch of boring repetitive tasks to get the patient to do certain things like make eye contact. And sure, you can get an autistic person to make eye contact, it's not that hard, but try getting them to actually take something from the eye contact. Try getting them to look where you're looking when you're acting scared or pleased about something behind them, try getting them to do that in a natural and non-formulaic way.

The fact that someone appears to you, on the surface to be "just a bit quiet" and "not real autistic" because they can hold a back and forth conversation without sounding like an automated call answering system doesn't mean they don't have deficits, it doesn't mean there aren't minor or even significant issues that you can't see. It's really not helpful for high functioning autistic kids or adults to just be lumped back into the weird category, even with the best of intentions. And this is especially important in girls and young women - autistic girls look very similar to socially below average "weird" boys. The doctors and other professionals dealing with these issues do not take this stuff lightly.

Here's a great article on the autism in girls issue

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Pelphrey is a leading autism researcher at Yale University's world-renowned Child Study Center. But even he did not recognize the condition in his daughter, who was finally diagnosed at about five years of age. Today Frances is a slender, lightly freckled 12-year-old with her dad's warm brown eyes. Like many girls her age, she is shy but also has strong opinions about what she does and does not want. At lunchtime, she and her little brother, Lowell, engage in some classic sibling squabbling—“Mom, he's kicking me!”

Lowell, seven, received an autism diagnosis much earlier, at 16 months. Their mom, Page, can recall how different the diagnostic process was for her two children. With Lowell, it was a snap. With Frances, she says, they went from doctor to doctor and were told to simply watch and wait—or that there were various physical reasons for her delays, such as not being able to see well because of an eye condition called strabismus that would require surgical treatment at 20 months. “We got a lot of different random little diagnoses,” she recalls. “They kept saying, ‘Oh, you have a girl. It's not autism.’”

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