Kennedy told President Donald Trump in a Cabinet meeting Thursday that the department “will know what has caused the autism epidemic” and be prepared to eliminate environmental exposures that Kennedy speculates cause the neurological condition.
But autism advocates said that Kennedy’s rhetoric on the subject does much more harm than good for those with the neurological condition.
Ciara Bogdanovic, a marriage and family therapist in California, told the Washington Examiner that Kennedy’s approach to autism is “very damaging to autistic people, as it frames their differences as an illness and something that needs to be fixed.”
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“Seeking to identify a ‘cause’ of autism ignores decades of previous research that has identified the complexity of the disorder and has shown autism to be a neurodevelopmental difference,
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