Steve Silberman
speaker
584 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2018
last heard Jul 2022
Steve Silberman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But what they were becoming obsessed with was the question as to whether or not vaccines cause autism.
And this, too...
was also causing a tremendous amount of human suffering because, in fact, I remember reading on an anti-vaccine website this woman saying that, you know, basically the day that she ruined her life and her daughter's life was the day that she brought her daughter for a measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
And so people were really suffering from these ideas that were
constantly being argued about online, while meanwhile no one was talking about what families and autistic people, i.e.
the people really on the front lines of autism, were having to deal with, which didn't really have to do with vaccines or what causes autism or whatever, but it had to do with a failure of society to support them.
You know, it was like every article you read for that whole decade, practically, even in very deeply reported newspapers like the New York Times, would always say, we don't really know why the number of autism diagnoses keeps going up.
And I thought, really?
10 years have passed.
We don't really know?
Like, why don't we know this?
And so as a science writer, I took it upon myself
to start going back through autism history to try to figure out where the concerns of the mainstream media, which seemed to be all about vaccines, and the concerns of parents and autistic people, which seemed to be all about accessing services, where those two interests diverged.
And what I discovered in the course of my research was that
the history of autism as it had been sort of repeated over and over again in thousands of textbooks and Wikipedia was incorrect.
And that if you understood the correct timeline of autism's discovery, that it was a lot easier to understand why the estimates of prevalence and number of diagnoses started to soar in the 1990s.
And so my book is basically about
the story of how societal attitudes and medical models and disability rights politics changed around autism over the course of 80 years in order to try to answer questions that were literally keeping parents up at night and preventing autistic people from having as productive and safe and secure lives as they possibly could.
I did the TED Talk about I guess was about three years ago, it was several months before the book came out.
It was sort of a lucky break in a sense that I got asked to do a TED Talk, because I had done a presentation
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