Regressive Autism and the Media

Jennifer Richler writes at Slate:

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a panicked email. She had just finished reading Ron Suskind’s beautiful essay in the New York Times Magazineabout raising a son with autism: “Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney.” Suskind describes how, at almost 3 years of age, his son Owen “disappeared.” The child was once “engaged, chatty, full of typical speech,” but then he stopped talking, lost eye contact, even struggled to use a sippy cup.
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The kind of developmental pattern that Suskind’s son experienced is very rare. Most children with autism show signs of the disorder in the first two years of life. Yes, studies have suggested that about one-third of children with autism experience some kind of regression, but most of these children do not have typical development to begin with. Instead, they have early delays and lose some of the skills they had attained. This finding shows up time and time again; it’s what I found when I published a paper on regression in 2006, and it’s what researchers are finding today. Losses also usually occur considerably earlier than Owen’s. A recent meta-analysis of 28 studies found the average age of regression to be a bit older than 21 months; studies consistently report a range of 15 to 30 months.

What’s more, recent research strongly suggests regression is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. In one study of 167 children on the autism spectrum, the majority acquired and lost some skills within the first two years of life.
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Stories such as Owen’s make it seem as though unusual experiences are commonplace, and they unintentionally feed parents’ already acute autism-phobia, a creeping anxiety about autism that leads parents to worry when their children don’t meet developmental milestones precisely on schedule. I blame this anxiety partly on alarmist ad campaigns by autism research and advocacy agencies, which often describe the prevalence of the disorder in sensationalist terms.