In response to Carol Sarler’s evil column about one particular autistic child in the Daily Male, the Autism Treatment Center of America has offered its Son-Rise program to anyone who has pockets deep enough to pay for it. It suggests in its blurb, that this intervention can ‘help parents recover their children’.

The original Sarler piece, and its response by Son-Rise are all very much the norm in the USA. In the US, the IDEA legislation for extra funding for disabled children in schools is dependent on the child having a medical diagnosis, completely different from in the UK where we make extra funding provision only on the basis of educational need. In the US autism is medicalised, and working on that model demands that you think about ’cause’ and ‘cure’, so that’s what they do, hysterically, even in the case of autism, which most of us in the UK consider to be a neurological and developmental difference, not a scary-monster epidemic, which is devouring bright-eyed cute babies, every day, before breakfast.

So we have the Mercury causation theory – all these children don’t have autism they have Pink’s Disease (mercury poisoning) caused by vaccines. They can be ‘recovered’ by chelating them, giving them high doses of a chemical which will cleanse their bodies of heavy metals, at a price. A child from the UK died during this process. Within every child with autism, they think, is the cute little baby, waiting to be recovered and reunited with Mom. Every year, at autism conferences, a parade of these recovered children marches in, led by the quack of their parents’ choice, to huge applause. Recently I’ve been in discussion with a Mom who insists that her son has been recovered by biomeds – he was diagnosed at four and a half with autism, then the diagnosis was removed at five after Mom had stepped in with huge parcels of medication for her child who is now indistinguishable from normal folks. It’s a miracle!

Crazies, and Craziers work for Generation Rescue whose mission is the recovery of every autistic child in the USA. Some describe their children as ‘train wrecks’. To be fair, Son Rise isn’t as crazy as that, it’s just after your money for showing you how to play with your child. But then, almost every program devoted to the cause of autism in the US is doing the same. Maybe Carol would like to take note of what some of the wiser people over there say: ‘When you’ve met one autistic child, you’ve met one autistic child……’