The clue to the nature and profoundly difficult path away from high rates of autism is Rahul Parikh’s introductory description of the homicidal threats of apparent parents of affected kids. That level of reaction is not about settlements or vindication of theory, but about the elephant in the room – the sense that parents may have that their culturally-directed ways of interacting with their children may have contributed to the disorder. They have.

Mental health disorders of infancy, childhood and young adulthood result from a combination of genetic predisposition and, overwhelmingly, childhood environment including quality of early attachment. Yes, it’s that simple.

Parents grasp onto unsupported rationalizations like the hypothesized thimerisol–autism link for precisely the same reason that, for example: 1) we distract ourselves with trivial links between food additives and ADHD when we know that, nearly consistently, children with ADHD have prior exposure to trauma or attachment injury i.e. deficits in the parent-infant bond, 2) we ignore the solid long-standing links between dysfunctional communication patterns, conflicts and insecurity in family dynamics with schizophrenia, 3) we point to skinny models as explanations for eating disorders in young women, when we have solid evidence to support association with invalidating family environment, etc.

We are simply not ready and willing to tolerate the discomfort associated with accepting the overwhelming evidence for the role of early environment in these disorders. The medical model, which is entirely unrelated to mental health disorders, aids and abets Family in preserving a safe distance from understanding these disorders in ways that might lead to more effective use of preventative and psychosocial interventions, by offering parents distracting links to e.g. viruses or food additives, or addiction as a “disease”.

Autism represents an excessive, maladaptively compensatory shunting of brain development toward functions related to ordering, memory, orientation, pattern, and mapping, explaining the special positive, intellectual abilities of kids with this spectrum, who are not at intellectual deficit to an extent often thought. Those over-developed abilities come at the cost of impaired development of ability to read the social environment.

An overwhelming need in early development is for the organism to learn to safely venture into an unknown, hostile, potentially lethal natural environment, locate resources needed for survival, and find its way quickly and safely back to a secure base. Survival has depended on this, constituting a potent selective force and consequent brain architecture. The infant-toddler learns this skill, critical to survival, by gradually exploring its environment, ordering and memorizing features, learning and mapping safe routes, three-dimensional patterns, auditory, tactile and visual environmental cues, and refuges. It’s about life and death. What millions of years of selective pressure has wired into our brains as necessary for survival, we, as positivist Western culture, have provided effective barriers to for our children: physical restraints like playpens; stimulatory restraints like TV; and shunting them daily to and from so many different physical environments (home to pre-school to day care to sitter to home to new apartment to playgroup to new day care) that they are not provided the opportunity to master safe navigation in any environment. They are prevented, distracted, or overloaded, and their brains maladaptively over-react developmentally to the blocked survival need.

These developmental barriers are secondary to increasing deficit in Western culture to provide the prerequisite for the toddler’s safe exploration and mapping of environment: secure attachment, increasingly blocked by modern, convenient parenting styles that substitute cribs, immediate daycare, and succession of temporary caregivers for healthy parent-child bonding.

This is why autism is not about low socioeconomic status, why there seem to be strong links to TV exposure, and why incidence is much higher in males – evolutionarily selection has operated more strongly on males who do not learn to safely venture out, map, and navigate in their environments.

The fraudulent vaccine link as a barrier to productively addressing autism spectrum disorders has been dispelled, but new distractions designed specifically to save us from facing cultural/social causes will arise to replace it, just as “genetics” and the disease model will continue to protect us from facing the psychosocial roots of addiction. The underlying need that will continue to stymie efforts to understand, address, and reduce ASD is about us – our need as parents and professionals to protect against facing the roles of our continued choices and cultural practices.

Mr. dworkin and Ms. Svutlana got on the right track real quick.

The fearful man was a frightened child, unsure of his security and safety, whose psyche compensated by strengthening developmental paths that would later manifest as attitudes and behavioral tendencies selected for survival and reproductive success: aggression, competitive hoarding of resources, lowering status of others to raise his own, and controlling behaviors of others, including reproductive partners - regressive traits promoting survival, hindered by capacity for empathy, celebrated in patriarchal structures as “success”, and in actuality expressing facets of pathology variously constructed e.g. as “social dominance orientation” or “antisocial” or “narcissistic” personality traits. The drives toward augmentation of wealth, status and power, and toward control of a reproductive partner are linked not causally, but as regressive traits common to a syndrome also likely to include strong group identity, criminalization of behavior, moralism, political conservatism, and religiosity.