Chapter 7: Fighting the Monster

  After years of parents being brutally blamed for causing their children’s autism by Kanner and Bettelheim, a movement eventually took place that would lift the burder of shame, guilt, and blame from these parents and restore them with a new sense of purpose and creativity so they could better advocate for their children. 

    Bernard Rimland, a Naval Psychologist, was a self-taught outsider in the field of autism trying to find out all he could about his son’s condition from the limited resources at hand. He eventually went on to write a book called Infantile Autism which rejected the suggestion that parents were to blame for their children’s autism. He also helped found the network that eventually became the Autism Society of America.

    While this network of parents was initially united, it would eventually split off into two factions–one that wanted to change their children so they could be accepted in society, and one that wanted to society to change to accept their children.

    Rimland spent decades looking for a cure for autism. He became friends with the father of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Ole Ivar Lovaas after trying out some of the techniques with his own son and seeing improvement.

    While ABA is generally considered an incredible tool in education circles, some of Lovaas’s trials became abusive as he physically struck a subject with self-injurious behavior. Later, Lovaas would recount to a reporter that you only physically punish a child if you’re devoted to that child. Once you strike, you’re committed. Lovaas would eventually come to see these children’s self-injurious behavior as a rejection of society’s ignorance and identify them as noble demonstrators.

    Rimland was voted off the board of the Autism Society of America where he had tried to strongarm others to commit to giving their children specific regiments of vitamins and other supplements. He would later go on to blame autism on vaccines, mercury, and a toxic modern world.