Autism Vox

The Real Autism Mystery

by Kristina Chew, PhD on April 27th, 2007

I guess everyone wants to make the next Rain Man—-the next Academy Award-winning movie that features an autistic character. The April 25th Variety announced that Warner Bros. Pictures has bought the rights to Daniel Tammet’s memoir, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. Almost a year ago there was talk of Julia Roberts in a movie based on Marti Leimbach’s novel, Daniel Isn’t Talking; Signourney Weaver plays an autistic woman in Snow Cake, which will be opening with IFC First Take in New York City and selected other cities on April 27th, and will be available by pay per view.

Autism is going to the movies: A film of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is in development with Warner Bros. In The Curious Incident, the protagonist, autistic teenager Christopher, plays detective to figure out who killed his neighbor’s dog, Wellington. Something about this book’s plot especially holds my attention: It is a murder-mystery and one keeps reading to find out, whodunit?. Similarly, autism, according to more than a few books, articles, news reports, organizations, et alia, is a mystery and perhaps this is why some advocates, journalists, and others continue to write about autism, and especially the rising prevalence of autism, as a mystery to be solved, and even as a controversy that someone has been trying to cover up.

Consider the latest piece in Dan Olmsted’s “Age of Autism” series, “Ground Zero,” which reads a bit like a summary for some investigative film on finding where the autism mystery started. As Arthur Allen writes in the April 26th Huffington Post:

In his latest column, which builds to a crescendo like a good horror movie soundtrack, Olmsted reports that the “big bang” of autism started in and around Beltsville, Md., a suburb of Washington where the U.S. Agriculture Department had a research center (anxious cello dissonance while the camera pans over an ominous red brick complex). One of Kanner’s kids was the son of a senior researcher who experimented with fungicides, including ethyl mercury. Another was a chemist at the U.S. patent office. A third lived in Greenbelt–very close to Beltsville (also close, for that matter, to the woods where they filmed The Blair Witch Project).

In case this isn’t convincing enough evidence that these men and their kids were the first “victims” of (mercury-induced) autism, Olmsted introduces a fourth adult autistic whose dad who was an engineer in White Oak, Md., “just a hop and a skip across I-95 from the Beltsville agriculture center” (pounding kettle drums).

Olmsted’s series, Allen notes, has “real screenplay potential” in the same way that David Kirby’s Evidence of Harm does. Allen writes:

Do I have to spell out how ludicrous it is for a wire service reporter-playing-epidemiologist to expect us to believe any of this? Olmsted has zero actual information about these families’ exposures to ethyl mercury. Not to mention that these children were only a few of the millions of Americans living in a country that was one big toxicological experiment……..

There are facts here but the narrative being fashioned out of them seems to be more Hollywood than history. The autism movie that could be made from the Age of Autism series, or from Evidence of Harm, may well have the elements for a gripping plot—-perhaps with a desperate mother on the hunt for who put something into the environment that made her child sick—but they well add up more to a Blair Witch Project sort of mockumentary. Who isn’t drawn to a conspiracy theory, especially when there is a great conundrum to be solved: How can what was once thought to be a rare disorder (occurring in every 1 in 2,500 - 10,000 births) now be diagnosed in such great numbers that some speak of an “epidemic of autism”?

In Don’t Believe Everything You Read, Allen refers to the “more reasonable hypothesis” in the essay by Roy Richard Grinker and myself about there not being an “epidemic of autism”:

When scientists respond that there has been no true rise in autism, that we are diagnosing autism more, and counting it better, believers in an autism epidemic— mostly parent advocates, philanthropists, and politicians—argue triumphantly that if there is no epidemic, then 1 of every 150 adults in the United States must, in fact, have autism. Along with journalists, they repeatedly ask, “Show me where the one in 150 autistic adults are. We can’t find them.”

Just where might those 1 in 150 adults with autism be?

As surprising as it may seem, they are living and working among us.

For instance, the woman who lives across the street from me. She and her 80-year-old mother have been my in-laws’ neighbors for I don’t know how many years; “something not quite right” and “MR” have been the words used to describe the woman, who is now in her 50s. I have spoken to her from time to time; were she a child today, I think she may well have been diagnosed with autism. I think of a good friend of my husband Jim’s: Barely a week studying engineering in college and he was back home with his parents and has spent his life as a caddy. He always tells the same stories; he has eaten the same thing for his meals for years and years; he does not speak a lot. I think of a former older colleague of Jim’s, some of my fellow students in my highschool Latin class who were good at grammar and never knew what to say when we started reading Virgil’s epic poetry………….

If they were all in a movie it might not be a box-office draw, but it would be some documentary, and if the twist of mystery in the plot would be, why has it taken us so long to see all the autism—-all the autistic people—who have always already been here?

Share This

Related Stories

Time magazine reporter tries her hand at FC
No Book for Jenifer
The Autism Detective: Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern
Autism as Mystery: ‘The Only Boy in the World’ by Michael Blastland
The Most Complex Object in the World?

POSTED IN: Autism Lit, Books, Epidemic, Literature, Movies, Vaccines