At least, according to this.
I knew it. I knew it couldn’t be this easy. Whenever I talked about how my kids are going to have severe mental impairments because I’m so old, everyone would reassuringly jump in with “no, the father’s age doesn’t matter blah blah blah.” Well no. My elderly mutant nutcrust is going to create a race of paranoid dwarves who think the refrigerator is their mother. Mine in particular, as I’ve spent my whole life smoking, drinking and doing hard drugs, which I’m sure only accelerates the random mutations that addle your sperm as you age.
Or maybe not. Maybe most diagnoses of autism are actually bullshit, and maybe aging parents are precisely the type of well-off white people who bring their kids to the doctor and the psychiatrist and the neurologist at the slightest sign of anything, and are the types of people who have the money to pay for the egregiously expensive treatments that do absolutely nothing for autism, or “autism spectrum disorders.” Maybe it’s a whole bullshit industry for people desperate for something to be wrong with their kids. Mass hysteria meets Munchausen by Proxy. Meets the type of doctor who rich folks go to, who is never gonna tell you “chill out; it’s probably nothing.” Just like the type of dentist that rich folks go to can always find something wrong; every kid in the rich part of town always has braces.
Most shit, modern medicine can do nothing about. Most shit just goes away. The flu just goes away. Human papillomavirus just goes away. I had severe crippling OCD when I was a kid that would require me to recite long litanies of crazy nonsense 10 times perfectly in a row, in a combination of crazy legalistic language and BASIC computer code or else Satan would come get me and take me from my bed to Hell forever, and if I fucked up once, I would have to start the ten times all over again. It would take hours sometimes. It just went away. I bet a lot of this fake autism spectrum just goes away. I bet left alone the kids just iron out the kinks, learn how to socialize and get laid, and become quasi-normal adults. I bet that’s what happened with the past 10,000 years of autism spectrum disorder.
But if your mom and dad have enough dough to bring doctors and special educators and psychiatrists into your life, shit does not go away. No diagnosis ever goes away. Instead you need to be tested and drugged and put in 15 different kinds of therapy and go to the special class that we all used to laugh at except, isn’t the special class the fucking majority now? Aren’t at least 80 per cent of all kids somewhere on the autism rainbow, or dyslexic, or afflicted with ADD or ADHD or childhood onset mood disorders and etc. etc. etc.– isn’t the whole fucking building the special class now? The short bus is just getting longer and longer until it becomes the regular bus.
It doesn’t help you. To be segregated, medicated– to be marked as some faulty genetic mistake from your first memories. It is not going to help you act more normal and it’s not going to help you feel more normal. Some kids, sure– there is such a thing as autism; there are one in a million people who are Rain Mans or who have a crazy filial attachment to a box fan and when you try to pull them away from it they claw and bite you like a cornered possum, but… most of this shit, most of the “autism spectrum disorder” just has to be middle aged white people with too much money just begging for something to be wrong. Needing some fancy name for the fact that their kid is just a hair off and then to be reassured that they are spending large sums for nothing but the very best in care for this grave and very special brand name condition. If autism were a fruit you couldn’t find it at Safeway but it would be prominently displayed at Whole Foods.
And I think– and don’t listen to me, because I have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about– but I think all this medical and psychiatric attention is doing more harm than good. Making these kids more mentally ill rather than less. So when my cognitively crippled mutant kids come out and are diagnosed with autism, I’m gonna tell them to ice it for a couple minutes and walk it off.
delicioustacos 
When’s the next Dear Son coming out?
You think your ‘crippling OCD’ just went away? That’s hilarious.
He said he took hard drugs. There is evidence that hallucinagens might address OCD favorably.
leave rich stallman aloooone
I work in mental and behavioral health and, to a large degree, I agree. All anyone needs to do to begin to see the evidence for this is look at the development of the DSM and all the secrecy and disagreement in the council attempting to update it. In fact, the guy who was central in developing the previous version is pretty up in arms about the whole damn thing.