Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

In fact, in early days, the psychoanalytic perspective dominated, especially in the 50s and 60s.

So it was thought that it was resulting from having very cold parents, in particular, a cold mother.

Emotionally cold?

Yeah, emotionally cold.

It was the so-called refrigerator mother hypothesis of autism.

And then in the 70s, some of the first biological studies were done, primarily in twins, that show something quite remarkable, that if you have twins that are identical, genetically identical, and one has autism, then the probability that the other one has autism is very, very high.

Even with different mothers?

Sure, yes.

But generally, we think that there is a strong heritable component to autism.

So that was like in the late 70s.

And really just in the last 10, 15 years, we've learned actually that there are genes associated with autism and certainly with very specific forms of autism.

So that's what we would call generally profound autism today, the conditions that are severe.

that are causing an impairment.

They are very often associated with other conditions such as intellectual disability, so low IQ, epilepsy.

So because it is a spectrum, of course, it creates a lot of confusion.

And certainly there's no doubt that there are individuals that have autistic traits that are fully functional in the general population.

But the reality is also that there are

kids that have autism who are very impaired and will require actually lifelong care of sorts.

Another way of thinking about autism is that autism is not one disease.

And I think no psychiatrist or even biologist who's studying autism will ever consider that this is one single disease.