Ivar Lovaas was a pioneer of applied behavioral analysis (ABA), often the only “treatment for autism” that insurance covers in the United States. Given the sadism baked into an intervention as counter to nature as forcing right-handedness on left-handed children, it’s not surprising that Lovaas consistently dehumanized autistic people. He characterized them as non-humans in human form, writing bluntly that “they are not people”:

You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose and a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.

Given ABA’s dark beginnings, it’s also not surprising that related myths about autistic people persist to this day — including the idea that they are robotic humanoid creatures incapable of real feeling, real morality, real human ideation, and real empathy and emotion. Yes, it’s pretty rich that the seeds planted by a sadist like Lovaas yielded such bitterly ironic fruit, with the people he vilified and harmed tainted by society with the shades of his own dark soul.

The reality is as bright against that darkness as noonday after a moonless night. A piece now making the rounds is pulling back the curtains and revealing that light, debunking bleak myths about autistic people that have perpetuated society’s willingness to treat autism as a threat to avoid instead of a crucial contribution to our human behavioral rainbow. These myths perpetuate harm well beyond ABA and eugenics. They cast their shadow on to broader public health through bad actors who leverage fears arising from these fictions to scare people away from lifesaving vaccines.

The piece, by Ludmila N. Praslova, PhD, and published at Psychology Today, lists some of the most pervasive harmful myths about autistic people and carefully debunks them, one by one.

• “Autistic people lack empathy” – debunked. In fact, as Praslova writes: “Where researchers had assumed impairment, they found autistic people applying moral principles more consistently — even to strangers, even when costly.”
• “Autistic people lack creativity” – debunked. Compared to non-autistic people, “autistic children and teenagers … produced a greater number of creative metaphors” and “autistic people produced somewhat fewer ideas, but these ideas were significantly more original.”
• “Autistic people lack moral sensitivity” – debunked. “Research shows that autistic people report being more morally engaged in workplace contexts and less likely to ignore ethical violations. What some call a deficiency looks a lot like moral clarity.”
• “Autistic people lack joy” – debunked. “Research documented extraordinary diversity in what brings autistic people joy — nature, animals, creative work, organizing systems, research, solitude, relationships.”

Praslova noted that these myths arise and persist because of “prejudice patterns” that many studies addressing these questions have in common. Not only do such studies bring an uncreative, rigid lens to assessing how autistic people think and what they believe, but also few studies over the decades have bothered to investigate the inner lives of autistic people, she writes. In closing her smart piece, Praslova says:

For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.

News you can use

• Enjoy this sweet piece on parenting a higher-support autistic child, by Teslin Joseph and published at Bambino Therapy, the website for an inclusive speech therapy clinic in Bengaluru, India, offering neurodiversity-affirming support for autistic and neurodivergent children. In “Loving Arthur Means,“ Joseph writes: “Loving Arthur freely means letting go of expectations that aren't ours to carry. It means celebrating every way he expresses himself — whether through a message on his AAC app, a song on YouTube, or a nuanced gesture showing his legs for an oil massage.”

• The news media loves to do stories on “profound autism” but rarely do we see real work being published that addresses the needs of high-support autistic people. An international team that got its start at a 2025 panel at INSAR has a commentary out that calls for engaging in this work using a neurodiversity paradigm as a “framework for advancing autonomy, dignity, and inclusion for those with the most complex support needs.”

  They list four recommendations for ensuring inclusion of autistic people with complex support needs (CSN) in the research process: “First, researchers should adopt a fundamental belief in the value of inclusion – affirming that all Autistic people have thoughts, feelings, and the capacity to learn, and prioritizing the perspectives of Autistic people with CSN. Second, they recommend embedding structural support across all stages of research, working flexibly, and applying universal design principles to ensure accessibility. Third, authentic relationship-building should be treated as the foundation of participation, with researchers engaging with Autistic partners as whole people and approaching communication differences with curiosity and care. Finally, continuous reflection and improvement should be built into the research process, using feedback to strengthen inclusion and viewing adaptation as a necessary part of ethical research practice.”

• What a relief to know that using heartburn relief medicine during pregnancy doesn’t make your child autistic, I guess. Because who wouldn’t want to live through that agony night after night while ever-enlarging uterus crowds your stomach into your chest and your risk of esophageal disease increases over time – just to avoid having an autistic child.

• Private equity is buying up “autism centers,” which I must infer means the beginning of the end for “autism centers.” That would leave me worried or at least feeling conflicted except that these are pretty much all ABA centers.

• Just another reminder that autism “services” is Big Business. Also, AMERICA!

• Supplements, diets, herbals, and acupuncture, oh, my, none of them are useful for autistic people. That’s according to an analysis of 53 already extended analyses of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAIM) interventions for autistic people. The authors of this huge study themselves conducted 248 meta-analyses to examine 19 candidate interventions and, well, I’ll let them say it:

  We found no high-quality evidence to support the efficacy of any CAIM for core or associated symptoms of autism.

People you should know

• TPGA contributor and all-around wonderperson Sarah Kurchak keeps up with the hottest in autistic news, writing about Shane, the coded-as-autistic hottie in the much-hyped hockey/sex tale Heated Rivalry. Read it at Time. Rachel Reid, the author of the book series that inspired the show, says that the character of Shane is “probably autistic,” although she didn’t set out to write him that way.

Bits and bobs

• Shocked, shocked, I say, to learn that Jenny McCarthy, earner of the first Google U degree, loudmouth and ill-informed destroyer of worlds, and a living debunkment of the claim that there are “no second acts in American life,” has now praised the current erstwhile occupant of the White House. To be clear, I am not remotely shocked, and none of us should be.

• Good lord, calm down, New Scientist. WaPo already scooped you last week on this 6-month-old overhyped story. There is not one thing that is “profound” about the implications of this single study of people who represent about 10% of the global population. Chill, y’all.

• Check out freelance journalist and human rights activist William Gomes, a podcaster who posts at Modern Ghana and has a YouTube series on being autistic. His latest entry is “Creating supportive environments for autistic people,” in which he “considers what it means to build environments that genuinely support autistic people, not through grand interventions but through careful attention to everyday conditions. [He] reflects on how sensory design, predictability, communication and emotional safety shape autistic wellbeing in ways that are often overlooked by those who do not live with constant environmental strain.”

Thanks for reading, and may we all live in a world where people pay careful attention to everyday conditions.

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