‘Something’s Wrong’: Donald Trump Was Right About Autism

‘Something’s wrong.’ So said Donald Trump, about the rising prevalence of autism in children. It was in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, on the 17th of December.

It is not an implausible statement. Conservative estimates are that there has been a one-thousand-fold increase in diagnoses of autism in children since the turn of the millenium, in the UK and US at least.

1 in 100,000 children with autism to 1 in 100 children with autism. In 25 years.

Yet Trump’s statement is controversial. So much so that the like of it is rarely made.
Welker’s eyes widened when she heard it. Their whites became clearly visible. We associate the look with a kind of madness.

And indeed a kind of madness ensued, as Welker eagerly parrotted the party-line: ‘Scientists say they’ve gotten better at identifying it.’

As if autism could go undetected. As if autism must be winkled out. As if autism can ‘mask.’

*

Every week I bring my little boy to a social club for local young people with intellectual disabilities. Most have autism. Around two dozen are there, ranging in age from 15 to 35 – my son, aged 10, is considerably the youngest.

Every week these young people come together in a church hall, to play life-size Snakes-And-Ladders or Twister or board-games, then to sit at table for dinner, then for sports led by outreach coaches from the city’s Premier League football club.

John spends the two hours walking alongside the walls of the hall, or from corner to corner. Every now and then, he pauses to snatch someone’s coat from the back of a chair, or a pair of gloves from someone’s bag. He buries his head in these as he walks, taking in their smell. Sometimes John nuzzles a garment you are wearing.

Simon wears a headset with one end behind one of his ears. If there is something playing through the headset it does not stem the tide of Simon’s commentary, which is relentless and without obvious relevance for anyone in the room.

Kate must be watched when the food comes and piles her plate with mountains of mayonnaise and ketchup. She is a compulsive questioner. When did Joseph get his hair cut? What day this week? Why Thursday? What haircut did he get? Why a skin-fade? What number on top? What number at the sides? Why 2 on top? Will Joseph ever get his hair cut on Tuesdays?

…You have to walk away to help her to stop.

Sam is unable to speak. He expresses himself with spasms of his arms and torso and animalistic noises. With encouragement, he can type a one-word answer on his phone, which transmits to a speaker lying in his bag at the end of the room.

Bill never puts down his phone. He looks at it out of the corner of his eye as he holds it near to his ear, while he eats, while he plays football, as he arrives, as he leaves.

Matt can answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ if you ask him a question, but only if he looks away from you and places a hand over his ear. He sits on the floor by your side and moves whenever you move and shakes with excitement at your sheepskin boots which he sometimes reaches out to touch.

My Joseph is in the middle of it all. He likes to know everyone’s name and is happy that there is life around and people moving and making noise. He is unable to respond to comments made to him. He moves contentedly along the Snakes-and-Ladders floormat with no grasp of the purpose of a game, or of winning or losing. He stands still as the handball match is played around him, without any idea of being on a team, playing in one direction, receiving or passing the ball, scoring a goal.

The range of idiosyncracy in the hall of the social club is like nothing on earth. To be of help there, presupposition and spontaneity must be put on hold.

But there is one thing for sure. No expertise is needed to discern autism in these young people. No scientists required to identify their condition. To the untrained eye and from a distance of 20 yards, their situation is almost instantly apparent.

These young people cannot avoid detection. These young people cannot remain in the shadows. These young people cannot ‘mask.’

*

Talk of ‘masking’ is now ubiquitous in autism discourse.

I first heard it two years ago from a BBC documentary on autism, in which a woman described the strain of having to ‘mask’ her autism ‘stimming’ when out in the world.

I next heard it at a local meeting that offered support to parents of an autistic child. The other parents there were seeking advice on how to advance their struggle to have the needs of their child recognised in a mainstream school. All without exception had recourse to the term ‘masking’ to explain a certain ambiguity in the presentation of their child’s autism.

The idea of an autism ‘spectrum’ has done much to increase the attribution of autism.
But the idea of autism ‘masking’ is much more dynamic, allowing not just for a range of autism symptoms, severities and outcomes but also for potential autism, partial autism, hidden autism, emergent autism, retrospective autism.

The concept of autistic ‘masking’ is itself a masking device, obscuring the tragic reality of autism by recasting autism as a natural human condition that ebbs and flows through young and old.

‘Masking’ diffuses the autism-effect so widely that we have lost our bearings with regard to autism, and have not the clarity required even to say ‘something’s wrong.’

*

Talk of ‘masking’ works first and foremost to mask clinical autism – the autism that onsets at the age of 2 or 3 and so dramatically that there is no question of its reality and no hope of its retreat.

‘Masking’ quietens the anger that we ought to feel at the rise of clinical autism by implicitly denying that the condition exists.

If ‘masking’ denotes a strategic modification of behaviour in response to the judgements of other people and the world, it describes precisely what children with clinical autism cannot do.

Those who care for a child with clincial autism in fact expend their energies in trying to train their child to mask, just a little. The project is a lifelong one.

Clinical autism is the inability to mask. To put abroad the idea that autistics mask is to deny its defining symptom.

But really, talk of ‘masking’ denies that autism has any symptoms, insofar as symptoms are manifestations of an adverse condition.

Because talk of ‘masking’ reframes autism as an ‘identity,’ aligning autism with all those other ‘identities’ which it is the duty of our society to encourage to ‘come out.’

Our society castigates itself, not for generating and incubating autism, but for failing to ‘include’ ‘auties.’ Rather than look for the cause of the autism in order solve it, we look for the cause of the masking in order to solve it.

Clinical autism is a profound derangement that consigns its sufferers to unending exclusion from human sympathy and worldly functioning.

The concept of ‘masking’ conceals this sad reality, remaking clinical autism as a problem of societal prejudice.

*

But the concept of ‘masking’ also masks the growing problem of social autism – the autism that emerges in halting fashion, the autism that is partial, the autism that can pass muster more or less, that struggles for a diagnosis, that is retrospectively recognised.

Social autism is quite different from clinical autism. Whatever the cause of the latter – environmental or pharmaceutical toxins – social autism is caused by the social infrastructure to which our children are submitted.

Alarmingly quickly, the lives of our children have been given over to the depersonalizing and derealizing effects of institutional and digital interfaces.

The consequences of this are now being revealed, as vast numbers of children are emerging, slowly or quickly, wholly or partly, with autism-like propensities and behaviours.

Inability to engage with people, lack of concentration, hyperactivity, equivocality, inflexibility, ennui: these and other symptoms, so characteristic of clinical autism, are being produced in our children by their neglectful relegation to impersonal settings and remote interactions.

The abstract character of curricula and online content, and the rapid exchangeabilty of one topic or vista for another, further exacerbate in would-be non-autistic children the jaded disaffection and fractious inattention that are the tell-tale signs of clinical autism.

And ‘masking’ is at the heart of it all – a clean-up concept with which the tragedy of social autism is concealed and the tragedy of clinical autism deepened and further obscured.

The concept of autistic ‘masking’ hides social autism by conflating it with clinical autism – social autism is clinical autism that ‘masks’ more or less.

This obviates the need to look for the cause of social autism, positing social autism as the struggle for free expression of a naturally occurring condition and not as manufactured by the nature of contemporary childhood.

In fact, the concept of autistic ‘masking’ causes us to celebrate the intensification of social autism as liberatory, as a glorious unmasking, a great autie coming-out.

The more our socially autistic children come to resemble their clinically autistic peers, the more we congratulate ourselves on our diversity and inclusivity.

Meanwhile, the admission of swathes of socially-damaged children into the autism fold further obscures clinical autism by flooding it with victims of social autism.

And the crisis of clinical autism is exacerbated as it is further concealed, by the submission of clinically autistic children, along with everyone else, to the institutional and digital experiences that, however damaging of children generally, are utterly destructive of children with clinical autism.

The concept of ‘masking’ makes it difficult for us to grasp two separate, though related, assaults on our children, even as it works to excuse and intensify those assaults.

And generations of our children are being lost either to clinical autism or to social autism or – worst of all – to both.

*

And still talk of ‘masking’ goes on, obscuring not only the autism assault on our children but also a nascent autism assault on us all.

The concept of ‘masking’ is set to mask an unfolding, third autism tragedy, the cultural autism from which we are all now beginning to suffer.

Life in our societies is increasingly an experience of detachment, our human spirit suppressed by the elaborate artifices of corporate invention and state promotion.

Vernacular ways of life have been all but smothered by the low-level virtuousity that is required in metropolitan environments. Familiar human-to-human modes have been replaced by proliferating impersonal routines.

We yearn to ‘switch off’ because we are always ‘on’; the jobs we work mine more and more of our private lives and the lives we live feel more and more like work – we clock on for a shift with our ASDA ‘family’ and ‘manage’ our children’s weekends.

‘Work-from-home’ is but the fruit of all of this, as we scramble to discern some time and space in which to put aside the ‘soft skills’ that we must reuse and refresh ad nauseum and that make of daily life a wearying repeat performance.

The encroachment of AI is making this performance unbearably rote, stifling what remains of the human impulse.

As we strain to distinguish an iota of humanity in our daily routines, we lurch between hyper-excitement at some left-over human feeling and anxious discontent at its otherwise absence.

Excess of stimulation and agitated disaffection are two indications of clinical autism. Modern metropolitan culture is making autistics of us all.

Then enter the concept of ‘masking,’ so all of that is fine and dandy.

‘Masking’ repackages the cultural autism against which we ought to raill with every fibre of our being, as the experience of an underlying identity.

If we feel that we must put on a face for other people and the world – and in our culture of the managed heart, we feel this all the time – we are encouraged to understand ourselves as ‘masking’ and to identify ourselves as at least somewhat ‘autie.’

And, insofar as we are somewhat ‘autie,’ far from objecting to it, we welcome it. Because it points to a truth, which requires only to be set free – Ahh, now I get it. I’m autistic.

Once again, we are deflected from trying to solve the autism towards trying to solve the masking.

We purchase stress-toys on Amazon and search out times and spaces in which we can ‘be ourselves’ with impunity.

We look forward to a world much like Joseph’s social club, a world where we can nuzzle someone’s shirt…

…or give a Nazi salute.

A world where all of that’s ok. Because we’re autistic, you know.

A world of ‘free expression’ without reason or repercussion, a kind of Babel that we can scarcely conceive, with technical solutions running the show while we ‘stim’ our way to oblivion.

*

In 2019, the University of Montreal published the results of a meta-analysis of trends in the diagnosis of autism. These results showed that, if trends continue, within 10 years there will be no objective means of distinguishing between those in the population who merit the diagnosis of autism and those who do not.

Is the growing phenomenon of cultural autism, allied with the formation of our children as socially and/or clinically autistic, destined to capture us all? While talk of ‘masking’ covers up the crime?

And if so, what then?

At Joseph’s social club, there is at least one volunteer or carer for every young person with autism. Those who like board games sit alongside one another at the table, waiting for someone to play with them.

These young people can play Connect Four. But they can’t play Connect Four with one another. Because they’re autistic, and so require non-autistic scaffolding to enter into purposeful activity.

Who or what will do this scaffolding when autism has affected us all? Who or what will determine the purposes of our lives and direct us to their fulfullment? The prospect is as bleak as a prospect could be.

We need to pull back.

We need to start saying ‘something’s wrong.’

Something’s wrong with children like Joseph, whose horizons narrow irrevocably between the ages of 2 and 3 and whose lives are thereafter an unrelenting struggle for some modicum of sympathy and significance.

Something’s wrong with a society like ours, which dispatches its young to institutions and devices so that those children who are not already like Joseph are made to be like him.

And something’s wrong with a culture that so saps our human spirit that we are all remade as at least a little autistic, and clamour for the ‘freedom’ to act out or opt out within parameters administered by others and their machines.

Something’s wrong with all the autism.

Sinéad Murphy’s book ASD: Autistic Society Disorder is now available.

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