More on McCarthy – from a parent of a child with autism.

The Toronto Star has a good essay that, like my own writing, explores the issue of what happens to a parent when they receive the diagnosis.

When my son Max, now 5, was diagnosed with the complex brain disorder
just after his third birthday, it was like a sucker punch to the gut.

In one bracing instant, the dreams I’d nursed since his conception went up in smoke, landing my wife and I somewhere in

The


Twilight Zone

.

Forget about little league, rock superstardom and flinging pithy bon
mots at the dinner table (note: this last one was never going to happen
anyway).

What became immediately clear was that, at least in the short term,
the majority of our time would be spent chauffeuring our son to
specialists and therapy groups, advocating on his behalf to school
officials and attending parental support groups to figure out which end
is up.

Overwhelming? That’s not the half of it.

Had someone approached me at that precise moment and offered a magic
pill to take away Max’s autism-related issues — the volcanic meltdowns,
the testy inflexibility — would I have considered it?

My wife and I have this discussion, however hypothetical, all the time.

She says no, because Max — a sweet kid with a probing, curious
intelligence — is the sum of his quirks, and to alter his fundamental
DNA would change the essence of who he is.

There’s nothing “wrong” with him: his brain is just wired differently.

I agree, but I would still go for the pill, because as far as I’m
concerned, Max is Max, autistic or not, and anything that’s going to
make his life less challenging and easier to navigate is fine with me.

The one thing we do agree on — and this supersedes any New Age
flakiness on my part — is that McCarthy is a quack, the Honey Boo Boo of
autism awareness, a vainglorious hustler with no medical background who
relies on what she refers to as her “mommy instinct,” even when it
flies in the face of scientific facts.

It’s Snooki pontificating on the origins of the universe, Kim Kardashian lecturing NASA about nuclear fission.

“The University of Google is where I got my degree,” the former
Playboy pin-up boasted to Oprah Winfrey, flaunting her ignorance as a
sign of authenticity.

So three points:

1. The diagnosis is hard. I write about it as a death experience, where the imaginary child one lives with, the child who you imagine grown, dies. It’s harsh language, but I think accurate.

2. “Cure” and “Identity” are complex. I have a lot more to say about this vis-a-vis the new Down syndrome research.

3. The anti-intellectual = authenticity thing really irritates me. But if you, in fact, spend a lot of time talking to anti-vaxxers (which I have lately), they immediately revert to M.D. and SCIENCE. I have an email in my “junk-mail” folder right now titled 72 Studies showing a link between vaccines and autism. I just don’t have the time or energy to go through and deconstruct how the very modest correlative findings are, in fact, not relevant. But the point here is that the anti-vax crowd, like most humans, seek bias confirmation, and are delighted to use science/medicine when it supports them, then demean it when not.