We shouldn’t ‘celebrate’ autism, we should be angry

SANCTIONED by the United Nations since 2007, we used to have one day for Autism Awareness – on April 2. This has now turned into a month. The UK’s National Autistic Society tells us that ‘World Autism Awareness Month is an opportunity for everyone to come together and raise awareness, foster acceptance, and create a society where autistic people are supported, understood, and empowered’.

Imagine what Professor Leo Kanner would think, coming back from the dead to find the rare condition that he described as ‘early infantile autism’ being spotlit for attention across the world. His seminal paper published in 1943 documented 11 cases of unusual children with an affective disorder that rendered them unable ‘to form the usual . . . contact with people’. At that time, most paediatricians would not see such a child in the whole of their 40-year career. The rates were estimated to be one or two in every 10,000 although it was so rare that accurate numbers are hard to locate. Now every paediatrician has a queue of children waiting to be seen, and rates are as high as one in 20 or 5 per cent. In Northern Ireland, boys are three times more likely to have a diagnosis than girls, giving them an incidence rate of 7% per cent, or one in 14. At least a quarter of these children have a learning disability and four in every five have a statement of Special Educational Needs. This is a shocking increase in the 80 years since Kanner published his work.

The theme for Autism Awareness or Acceptance month in 2025 is to ‘celebrate differences’. The charity Autism Speaks asks supporters to wear the blue-ribbon symbol and blue clothing to reflect the way that the colour is associated with ‘calmness and understanding’. They encourage people to ‘light it up blue’ illuminating our buildings to symbolise collective support for those with autism. Communities are encouraged to get together to hold awareness-raising events and raise additional funds.

In my book, this should be ‘Angry about Autism’ month. It is now 20 years since our son regressed into autism and there is still no sense of public alarm. Indeed, as the numbers go up, the complacency seems to increase.

This is remarkable. We are being played for fools. How did we ever get to the point where we are being asked to ‘celebrate’ a serious neurological condition instead of asking what is causing the problem and why the rates are rising so fast?

With parallels to charitable fundraising for other health conditions and disabilities, people dress up in coloured t-shirts and run round the park in collective hysteria rather than understand why this is happening. No one asks why we have an autism epidemic, and if you do, I know to my cost that you are likely to get a look of pity or even horror for spoiling a lovely day out.

This is all about appearing to do something and being active while reinforcing the status quo. People are busy talking about autism, shaking buckets and making themselves feel better while the rates carry on rising, the school system can’t cope, local authorities are struggling with the cost of meeting their statutory requirements to educate so many children with special needs, families suffer higher rates of divorce, and the taxpayer picks up the bill. I know people don’t want to hear it, and they want to be nice, but this is a catastrophe.

For my money, Angry about Autism month 2025 should start by focusing on what we DO know about the origins of the condition and working from there. In our case, we did everything parents are supposed to do. Our son had a normal delivery, he was breastfed for more than a year, he had homemade baby foods from the age of about six months and I stayed with him for the maximum eight months before returning to work. Even then, he was with a local childminder who gave him the best possible care for no more than 20 hours a week.

As far as I know, our only mistake was in getting him vaccinated for diseases he was very unlikely to get. Moreover, even if he did get them, I would rather we had borne the consequences than have the severe autism that we live with for life. The diseases he was inoculated against are either very rare or usually mild and susceptible to treatment. He had three doses of a combined vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough) (DTP). He had two doses of a combined vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and two shots for meningitis C, one of which was given on the same day as the first MMR vaccination.

Both my daughter and son inherited a dysregulated and over-active immune system from me. I was one of the few children with severe allergies (hayfever, eczema and asthma, with regular bronchitis) at my school, and this must have been passed on in utero. But while my daughter had eczema and migraines, she did not have the MMR until she was five, and functions extremely well. Our son also had eczema but descended into worsening allergies, bowel problems and autism following the MMR and a vaccination for meningitis C on the same day when he was 18 months old. At that point his normal development stopped.

A cursory glance at recent research into the incidence and trajectory of the kinds of allergies that I had so badly as a child makes alarming reading about what is to come. At least a third of the UK population now reports an allergy of some kind and rates of all these conditions are going up fast. Indeed, the rates of children with hay-fever and eczema have trebled in the last 30 years. If these immune problems are passed on in utero and underpin the likelihood of vaccinations triggering neurological decline, then the rates of autism are set to increase, being compounded with each generation.

However, as these problems increase, the medical professionals seem to accept them as ‘normal’. Just as I was told that allergy was ‘one of those things’, so too we have been told that autism is just ‘one of those things’. The system appears to have lost any institutional memory about the rarity of these conditions in the past. The model is to diagnose and manage rather than cure.

The inaugural Angry about Autism month should be about raising alarm. We don’t need more awareness or celebration. We need answers about what is happening. We need to know why. We need new leadership. This is what has happened in America, and Robert Kennedy Jnr is installing new teams at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Their mission is to change the trajectory of chronic disease including allergies and autism. Their work is critically important for the future of humanity, it’s our best shot at a healthier and happier future. It gives us something to celebrate this April as they start their work.

This is a shortened version of Jane Wills’s article ‘Making fools of us all!’ published on her substack, The Autism Tribunal, on March 31, 2025.