Desperate autism parents embrace dangerous pseudo-scientific cures

Evidence

But as I went deeper, I also found something else: an industry of strange magical cures—under-the-table children’s vitamin injections; extreme eliminationist diets; immersive around-the-clock therapy; sound waves and subliminal messages that promised to reprogram brains and reminded me of the research I did into the CIA’s MKUltra experiments on psychiatric patients. Online, I found people who identified as Autism Warrior Parents because they were at “war” with the autism in their child; some coached one another on horrific “treatments,” including getting their kids to drink chlorine dioxide, a bleach commonly used in pulp and paper mills. Several people told me that when they got the diagnosis, they quit their jobs and became their child’s full-time therapists in applied behavior analysis, a system of rewards and punishments with a sinister history that once included electroshock and is still often administered in cruel ways designed to “extinguish” all signs of autistic difference in young children. “Aggressive early intervention is everything,” one of these parents told me. “If you don’t catch it early, it’s too late.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘Autism Warrior Parents’ as a subculture at war with autism itself, whose practices prefigure the anti-vax and conspiracy convergence to come.
• XREF: The MKUltra echo and chlorine dioxide bleach connect to the earlier books’ themes of state experimentation and chemical paranoia — the raw material of the Mirror World.
• SEED: The parallel between desperation-driven parental pseudo-science and the broader dynamic of state failure channeling families toward predatory ‘cures’ could be its own investigative essay.