Even now nobody can tell us what could possibly have caused these extreme mental disabilities in our children—nor can they, shall I add, in the vast majority of autism cases. It’s not your imagination: the field is stagnating in the wake of wave after wave of unsuccessful attempts to understand the origins of autism, or to alter its trajectory.

The recent rise of the “neurodiversity” identity movement, where autism is reinvented as a natural difference to be celebrated, not investigated, prevented, or treated, has helped spread a fairy dust of complacency over the autism world. While rates continue to climb—to 1 in 36, or nearly 3 percent, of all eight-year-olds by the latest count from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the world, except of course for parents like me, seems to be waving a white flag of surrender. It’s become de rigueur to normalize autism rather than treat it as the national emergency it most certainly is.

The examples are everywhere. The leading autism conference, INSAR (International Society for Autism Research), which once focused on serious-minded biological research, has drifted into something of a celebration of neurodiversity. In this reality distortion field, Lee Wachtel, MD, medical director of the Neurobehavioral Unit at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, which treats hundreds of autism patients, said to a group of us parents, “I work in a war zone, but here at INSAR you’d think autism was a celebration.”

[Escher considers this a surrender, and rightfully so — a hijacking of a real medical emergency by the identitarian-politics movement. She also forcefully rejects the anti-vaxx crowd as yet another political manipulation. Meanwhile, diagnoses are still skyrocketing, and Escher argues that it’s no longer attributable to better reporting that started decades ago. This is really an expanding epidemic, she argues, and wants the medical establishment to take it seriously. She does not address another movement that is hijacking the autistic — transgender activists — but perhaps a better focus on cause and prevention will curtail that movement, too. — Ed]