I think it's fair to say there there is still no safe analgesic. Normal NSAIDs wreck your stomach and probably your heart. Opioids are physically safe in comparison but addictive.
The trouble with autism is that it's eaten up all other developmental disorder diagnoses:
It used to be you were MR or a little bit weird or in some other way different. If you're a bipolar adult like Kanye West you might say you are autistic to escape the stigma of serious mental illness.
The autism awareness movement has everybody scared so when a paper like this
presents data to the effect that 37-90% of people who think they are autistic actually aren't it is presented as if there are five autism subtypes.
bediger4000•4mo ago
You've hit on some important things here, but the "escape stigma" part strikes me as important. It appears that the MAHA theme is going to re-stigmatize autism and other mental illness, with a side of making them moral failures. Like they were in the '60s and before. If we want to help in general, this is the wrong approach.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
I'm not sure if that's the right frame.
RFK Jr's main target seems to be pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment although they are playing on the feeling of parents for whom it seems a terrible fate to raise a child who, in the worst case, seems to barely recognize you and for whom you might be caring for until you die. RFK is certainly not saying that autists or their parents are moral failures.
There's another whole question of reinstitutionalization but that's a place the right won't got because deinstitutionalization serves their interests and the left won't because of ideology.
That is: if you believe in private schools over public schools you want public schools to bear 100% of the burden of educating the uneducatable, warehousing violent students who drive other students to private school or homeschooling. (Happened to me and happened to the grandchildren of the guy who cuts my hay)
If you believe that the public sphere should be starved for the benefit of an unequal private sphere, if you believe that people should take an Uber instead of taking the bus, if you believe it's better to order a private taxi for your burrito than to eat out, if you want to demonstrate to people that it's worthless to spend on the welfare state, you want a person with severe mental illness screaming on every street corner. And if leftists defend the right of that person to do that they are doing the job of the right, and unlike the Koch Network or the Heritage Foundation they're doing it for free.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
Liberals now are going to run to the defense of a drug that causes a significant number of overdose deaths just to spite Trump:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37436926/
I think it's fair to say there there is still no safe analgesic. Normal NSAIDs wreck your stomach and probably your heart. Opioids are physically safe in comparison but addictive.
The trouble with autism is that it's eaten up all other developmental disorder diagnoses:
https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Matrix-Gil-Eyal/dp/074564399X
It used to be you were MR or a little bit weird or in some other way different. If you're a bipolar adult like Kanye West you might say you are autistic to escape the stigma of serious mental illness.
The autism awareness movement has everybody scared so when a paper like this
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study...
presents data to the effect that 37-90% of people who think they are autistic actually aren't it is presented as if there are five autism subtypes.
bediger4000•4mo ago
PaulHoule•4mo ago
RFK Jr's main target seems to be pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment although they are playing on the feeling of parents for whom it seems a terrible fate to raise a child who, in the worst case, seems to barely recognize you and for whom you might be caring for until you die. RFK is certainly not saying that autists or their parents are moral failures.
There's another whole question of reinstitutionalization but that's a place the right won't got because deinstitutionalization serves their interests and the left won't because of ideology.
That is: if you believe in private schools over public schools you want public schools to bear 100% of the burden of educating the uneducatable, warehousing violent students who drive other students to private school or homeschooling. (Happened to me and happened to the grandchildren of the guy who cuts my hay)
If you believe that the public sphere should be starved for the benefit of an unequal private sphere, if you believe that people should take an Uber instead of taking the bus, if you believe it's better to order a private taxi for your burrito than to eat out, if you want to demonstrate to people that it's worthless to spend on the welfare state, you want a person with severe mental illness screaming on every street corner. And if leftists defend the right of that person to do that they are doing the job of the right, and unlike the Koch Network or the Heritage Foundation they're doing it for free.