Olmsted on Autism: I'm not vaclempt!
By Dan Olmsted
If there is one word I'd like to see banished forever from the dictionary of autism cliches, it would be "emotional." You know what I mean -- "Lawsuits and emotion vs. science and childhood vaccines," trumpets a piece in the Wall Street Journal; "confronting the contentious and highly emotional issue of whether early childhood vaccinations might have caused autism in thousands of children," as The New York Times described the recent vaccine court hearing; "officials from federal health agencies and medical societies tried to calm the fears around this emotional issue," said NBC's Robert Bazell.
Get it? Concerns about vaccines causing autism are emotional; science that refutes it is logical. Parents who believe their kid's autism came from vaccines are fearful; experts who say otherwise are calming and rational. If these overrought parents would just lie down in a bathtub filled with ice and listen to reason, this debate would be over.
And who are those parents? Well, as far as the mainstream media is concerned, they're mostly mothers. Wild-eyed, tangled hair, mangled thinking – it's all part of the same game. Network TV has even managed to cast Barbara Loe Fisher, a calm, rational, evidence-based critic of vaccination policy, as a zealot who would have us all in iron lungs if she had her wicked, wicked way.
Are you getting my drift that the word "emotional" as applied to autism is basically sexist? Mostly moms are on the front lines of autism; they are up against (mostly) men who represent the paternalistic structures of public health, pediatric medical practice and the pharmaceutical companies. (And of course, some women in power can be just as paternalistic as men.)
Around the turn of the last century, Freud and his followers were obsessed with the idea of a disorder called "hysteria." The psychoanalysts, almost all men, decided that "hysterics," almost all women, were suffering from all manner of suppressed, submerged, repressed issues. A female cousin of mine had a different definition: "Hysteria is a word men use to describe women they can't control."
And so is "emotional." It reminds me of the dust-up when someone called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "articulate." The use of that word was criticized, and properly so, because of the unsavory implication that a black woman who had reached the highest levels of the United States government might NOT be articulate. Criticize her job performance, in other words, but don't reveal your own surprise that there are plenty of confident, capable – and articulate – black women in this country.
Calling autism parents "emotional" is especially odious given the long habit of parent-blaming ("refrigerator moms," anyone?) that preceded the current debate. Parents can't catch a break – first they were too cold and unemotional, now they're all hot under the collar and beyond the reach of reason.
Of course, strong feelings are part of the picture, and they should be -- that's true of just about every controversy from gun control to Christmas trees in the town square. But there is nothing inherently more emotional about figuring out what causes autism and what we can do to treat it. So let's stop using the word.
One way that men could help out here is to make sure they are not so woefully underrepresented on the front lines of the autism debate. Of course, plenty of fathers are out there battling, but the autism conferences are by and large a gathering of moms. At the Long Island autism conference I attended last week, that was plain to see. The few men attending stood out; as one autism mom said after spending the evening with three of them: "Wow, it's been a long time since I drank beer with good-looking guys at a bar!"
Maybe autism fathers could think of a special way to make an impact. How about a thousand-man march on the CDC? An awards dinner for Autism Father of the Year. A conference of, by and for fathers. Fathers and children descending on Capitol Hill -- moms get the day off. Anyway, it's time to stop letting the powers-that-be make the rest of us feel like Mike Myers acting like Linda Richmond on Saturday Night Live. We are not vaclempt.
Wow. I hadn't thought of autism as a feminist issue before. You are completely right. Thanks for this.
Posted by: Michelle O'Neil | November 13, 2007 at 01:25 PM
Why does it take just three clinical signs to get a parent or carer life in a USA prison?
Why do one hundred and three clinical signs linking mercury poisoning to nearly every type of neurological harm get called a coincidence?
Why do three of those signs of mercury poisoning get called the "infallible" triad for SBS?
John Fryer MSc BSc Advanced Analytical Chemist
Posted by: John Fryer | November 11, 2007 at 11:12 AM
Note also, irrespective of gender (as we know many of the worst professional offenders are women) that the strategy is intimidatory. The strategy alone proves the validity of the case. If they were responsible, sensitive, medics and officials they would be listening intently.
Fundamentally, it is game of institutional repression. If it goes wrong you and your family should be supported, but in fact you will simply be pushed contemptuously aside.
Posted by: John Stone | November 10, 2007 at 06:20 PM
HeraldBlog, we were unable to approve your comment due to its irrelevant content.
Posted by: Editor | November 06, 2007 at 02:35 PM
they have had 200 years practice in covering up vaccine disease and death, the whole time (at the top) knowing vaccination is completely ineffective and dangerous. They know repeating a lie is imperative so they never stop mentioning 'vaccine-preventable' such and such disease. Along with the big fat lie--vaccines saved millions.
Shaken Baby Syndrome is another blame-the-victim one and they know what kills the babies, as Roy Meadows who put one mother away, Sally Clark, with his bogus statistic, used to sit on the vaccine committee looking into adverse reactions! At least with cot-death they killed your baby without killing you as well.
If they were the sort of people most folk think they are then they would have used vitamin C 57 years ago when it was first found to cure infections such as polio, and found to prevent cot-death 30 years ago. Anyone can work out how many babies have been sacrificed since that discovery (10,000 every year in 1984, cot-death USA).
With autism it is 'genetics', or 'change in diagnosis', being the most popular to go with all the fraudulent studies while they declare parent observations don't count.
Ad hominem is the only argument they have at the end of the day--'emotional' being one label. 'Conspiracy theorist' & 'denialist' another, and if they can make a word pejorative they will, eg anti-vaccine (you wont find anyone claiming to be that). They also like to comandeer words such as 'evidence-based', 'skeptic', 'quack', 'science-based', 'pseudoscience', to chuck aro
Posted by: john | November 02, 2007 at 04:01 PM
Dear Mr. Olmstead,
Thank you for putting it so well. This particular method of discrediting really is very familiar. Susan Faludi wrote about the pity-party approach in "Backlash". And a famous black activist- whose name I forget, unfortunately- wrote about the device of culling personal testimony from witnesses or survivors. The very intensity of the atrocities the survivors describe is then used as a fulcrum to "prove" that the survivors/witnesses must be "too clouded by misfortune" to be believed and too damaged by trauma to participate in decisions over what should be done about about the injustice.
During an NPR broadcast on autism, one clearly for-hire vaccine champion used the word "fervor" to describe Omnibus parents so many times that I could just visualize the team of pharma PR handlers coaching this shill on tone and language. Besides over-repeating his talking point, he overacted his moral outrage at the threat this "fervor" poses to our exalted vaccine industry, which might pack up its toys and go home at any moment, leaving the world to rot from the flu and polio.
Then there was Paul Offit's long-winded whine in the NEMJ about how autism parents are becoming dangerous, causing the CDC to pad security, etc.. The spin is getting kind of scary. It could all easily sound like a build-up to manufacture public consent to unleash excessive police action against these "emotional, fervored, dangerous" parents at some rally or other (taser those moms with their practical shoes and pink cellphones!), like lining castle bridge with heads on pikes to dissuade future protest. Though for the moment, things haven't reached that pitch.
Instead, I think the build-up is in the hopes that some parents of effected children will buy into it, either recanting their shameful "fervor" or never getting on the bandwagon to begin with. And that these parents will go home and obediently take some psychotropes to straight-jacket that wacky passion and "out there" sense of injustice, forming a third wave of pharmaceutical profit from the nuking of so many children's brains. They may even be taking the same meds that eighty percent of effected children are reportedly being prescribed to date.
So I think the reactionary trap here is to lose the passion and deflate the movement. They'll always come up with some smear or other and we'll still have to prevail. Reading wonderful exposes of the smear tactics really helps with the prevailing part.
Posted by: Gatogorra | November 01, 2007 at 11:05 PM
I fail to see the comparison to being called hysterical for demanding medical care for your children and being blamed for causing the condition (the Refrigerator theory.) And for everyone who berates, bemoans and belittles the biomedical community, we can ALL (ND's and curebies alike) thank Bernard Rimland, founder of the Autism Society of America and the Autism Research Institute (home of DAN!) for eradicating the Refrigerator Mother theory and forcing docs to at least start to look at our kids as treatable.
From the ARI site: Dr. Rimland's 1964 book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior," was responsible for challenging and changing the long-held belief that autism was an emotional disorder caused by poor mothering.
Rather ironic I think, that the folks who hate/fear DAN! have the founder of the organization to thank for changing the most basic thinking about autism.
Posted by: Stagmom | November 01, 2007 at 08:26 AM
Doc,
You have your percentages wrong. It is less than 1/10 of 1% who you represent who are opposed to helping children. The rest can see the truth despite your obfuscatory rhetoric.
Posted by: John Best | November 01, 2007 at 07:53 AM
I think he's making a play on words: "vac" from "vaccine" plus "lempt" from "verklempt" = very upset about vaccines.
Posted by: Twyla | November 01, 2007 at 12:11 AM
Careful though. Take out "emotional" and what might the representation of parents of autistic children be----are we going to be back in the icebox?
Posted by: Kristina Chew | October 31, 2007 at 11:37 PM
>>"Parents can't catch a break – first they were too cold and unemotional, now they're all hot under the collar and beyond the reach of reason."
You don't speak for "parents" in general - you speak for a small group of parents (the less than 1% of all autism parents) who believe in vaccine etiology hypotheses. Please consider being more specific.
Posted by: Do'C | October 31, 2007 at 09:59 PM
Oy vey! Enough already with the corrections! Such tsores over a word. You get Dan's point, right?
Posted by: Linda Richman | October 31, 2007 at 07:40 PM
It's VERklempt.
Probably Mr. Olmsted has heard someone pronounce it "VA-klempt" --
Most people use it to mean -- feeling upset, distressed, very emotional.
-
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/02/are_there_no_re.html
verklempt means . . . 'caught' or 'squeezed' (as in a vise). It appears in the standard Yiddish-English dictionary.
Posted by: P.F. Jennings | October 31, 2007 at 04:56 PM
Amen. But it's all of a piece; Cindy Sheehan, the 9-11 widows, are emotional women in mourning, so what they have to say isn't valid. The question is, how can we reframe the "debate" in a way that takes the emotions out of the equation? There should be a way to do it regardless of whether it's men or women making the arguments.
Posted by: Garbo | October 31, 2007 at 04:12 PM
Dan,
That picture is “hysterical” -- as in "har har" hysterical!
You make great points. We DO need more men in this battle.
Fortunately, I’ve been privileged to work closely with two of the best in our community – Mark Blaxill and Jim Moody.
I sincerely believe that many of the meetings we have gone to have been “successful” due in large part to their presence. Besides their obvious brilliance, there is just “something” that brings legitimacy to our issue when they are present.
I am honored to be counted among their friends and I just wish there were more like them.
To Mark and Jim: Thanks for all that you do. You are “priceless”.
K
Posted by: Kelli Ann Davis | October 31, 2007 at 10:30 AM
I always thought it was "verklempt". Anyway, I couldn't agree more that advocacy is a responsibility that the whole family shares.
Posted by: Dadvocate | October 31, 2007 at 10:05 AM
Dan:
Great piece! Sign me up for the thousand man march on the CDC and then let's have our guys charge Capitol Hill! How about doing it on the anniversary of the infamous Simpsonwood conference!
All the best,
Kent Heckenlively
Posted by: Kent Heckenlively | October 31, 2007 at 09:58 AM