Sara Luterman

When I was 4 or 5 years old, my parents told me there was no Santa Claus. As a child who attended a Jewish parochial school, this didn’t come as a shock. But at the mall one day, I became incensed on behalf of children lining up to sit on the lap of a man who wasn’t who he claimed to be.

John Elder Robison

Some institutions can restrain people against their will. Should it be allowed?

Restraint is emerging as a hot-button topic among autistic self-advocates and some parents.  

People on both sides feel their position is obviously correct: Restraint leads to abuse, and should be banned; or restraint is necessary for the safety of some people, and those who deny it are crazy or idealistic.

Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca Black

In one Harry Potter fan fiction story, Hermione Granger anxiously awaits the results from a recent test.

It isn’t her performance on an exam in a potions course that she’s concerned about. Instead, the higher-ups at Hogwarts had ordered she undergo some psychological tests. They had noticed how quickly she talked, along with her nervous tics.

By Brittany Shoot

One in every 40 children in the United States could have autism or an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to a new article published in the journal Pediatrics.

By contrast, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the estimate at one in 59 children having ASD nationwide.

The true number of children with autism in the U.S. may be somewhere in the middle. And the reason for that discrepancy may have to do with how the data was collected. The study published in Pediatrics relied on numbers from the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, which is based on reporting from 50,000 parents of children ages 17 and under.

Grunya Sukhareva characterized autism nearly two decades before Austrian doctors Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. So why did the latter get all the credit?

Lina Zeldovich

Alycia Halladay

Observations

It’s also harmful to serious science

Michael A. Ellis DO

Those with autism spectrum disorder have a shorter life expectancy. Here’s why.

Two recent studies will undoubtedly shock individuals and families affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These studies show a much earlier age of death in those with ASD as compared with the general population.  

Jen Monnier

In 1987, psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas reported that he had created a therapy that would make the behavior of some autistic children indistinguishable from that of typical children by 7 years of age¹. His approach, applied behavioral analysis (ABA), involves hours of drills each day, in which children are rewarded for certain behaviors and discouraged from others.

Jessica Wright

The lore about autism is that prevalence rates are rising — leading many people to call it, misleadingly, an ‘epidemic.’ Even among scientists, many assume that the largest prevalence estimates are the most accurate.

But epidemiologists know that the prevalence depends greatly on the methods used in the study.