Name: 【TED】Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism (Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism)
Uploaded: 2015-10-07T10:03:05.000Z
Duration: 13 min 49 s
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or being exposed to someone who'd been there.

The virus then hopped the Canadian border,

infecting more than 100 children in Quebec.

One of the tragic things about this outbreak

is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system,

is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world.

has been available for more than half a century,

but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak

But wait -- wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy

know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.?

continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.

This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time.

autism was considered an incredibly rare condition.

The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it

figured they would get through their entire careers

For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable

at just three or four children in 10,000.

Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks

routinely refer to autism as an epidemic,

as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.

If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta

they tend to rely on phrases like "broadened diagnostic criteria"

doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother

who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact.

If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened,

why were they so narrow in the first place?

Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions.

has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science

than it does with the seductive power of storytelling.

about what autism is and how it was discovered,

are having a devastating impact on global public health.

There was a second, more accurate story of autism

in obscure corners of the clinical literature.

This second story tells us everything about how we got here

The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital

describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds,

by flapping their hands in front of their faces,

like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place

Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic,

Kanner speculated that autism is very rare.

By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject,

he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome

while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa.

because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism

For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures

but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism.

He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids

referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians

but a number of his theories didn't pan out.

He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis

caused by cold and unaffectionate parents.

had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost.

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【TED】Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism (Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism)

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