Focus on Helping Autistic People, Not Spreading Pseudoscience

 A number of posts have discussed Trump's support for discredited notions about autism 

Challenging Claims of an Autism Epidemic — Misconceptions and a Path Forward

Authors: Tara Eicher, Ph.D., John Quackenbush, Ph.D., and Ari Ne’eman, Ph.D.Published January 17, 2026DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2514250

The history of autism offers many reasons for fraught relationships between clinicians and autistic persons and their families. For decades, the psychiatric and especially psychoanalytic communities relied on psychodynamic theories of the causation of autism that blamed “refrigerator mothers.” It is thus unsurprising that a culture of distrust exists between parents of autistic children and physicians — a distrust that the president only exacerbates when he suggests that physicians are withholding information from families about environmental causes. This rhetoric, specifically the blaming of mothers who use acetaminophen during pregnancy for their children’s impairments, harkens back to past decades. Such rhetoric can cause concrete harms, encouraging expectant mothers to forgo essential treatment for fever and leading parents to turn to an exploitative alternative medicine industry peddling costly pseudoscience that frequently harms autistic people.

Autistic people and their families do deserve answers — not answers involving ill-conceived “causes” and pseudoscientific “cures,” but answers to their aspirations for improved services, medical care, and inclusion in society. Much needs to be done to shift the focus of existing autism-research investments toward issues of immediate relevance to autistic people and their families. Researchers who make this shift can help address the root causes of mistrust that make some parents of autistic people so receptive to pseudoscientific treatments and theories of causation. Unfortunately, the direction the federal government is taking on autism seems calculated to exacerbate the divide.

Research programs can be designed to maximize the benefits for autistic people and their families by studying both causes and the most effective and meaningful services and supports in an appropriate balance. Such a constructive shift will not be accomplished, however, by means of alarmist claims about autism as an epidemic, chasing of ill-supported and debunked theories of causation, and further stigmatizing autism. Instead, it will require building strong, collaborative research programs in which researchers from diverse fields join forces with autistic people and their families to generate lasting change.