9:26pm August 11, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: purplewowies: mamagotcrafty: The main problem I have with saying...

purplewowies:

mamagotcrafty:

The main problem I have with saying vaccines cause autism is this:

Most of the time, you don’t know for sure that your child has autism until they’re at least 3, because that’s when they start showing signs that can truly be linked. Anything before that,…

(youneedacat begins here)

Also something you probably didn’t know about speech regression in very young autistic people.

The timing of the regression correlates to the number of words the autistic child knows.

People with Down Syndrome learn speech later than usual. People with Down syndrome and autism experience speech regression later than usual. Because it takes them longer to learn that same number of words. Kids who learn them faster regress earlier.

I lost words the first time at fifteen months old or so. That means I first learned them really fast.

The normal age range for speech regression is the age range of vaccines. So people blame that.

Before that became a popular thing to blame, though, people blamed other things:

Divorce. The birth of a sibling. Witnessing a car accident. The death of a parent.

Anything that happened vaguely at the same time.

Also I hate the myth that says autistic children who regress weren’t autistic before the regression.

Before the regression, I had clear sensory issues. I moved in a rhythmic fashion in the womb. I literally had to be taught to nurse because I lacked the right instincts. In photographs, I melted into my mother in a way described in autism books going back wall the way to the seventies. I screamed when exposed to certain kind of visual stimulation. At well baby visits I responded to the doctor’s stethoscope but not the doctor. I rocked my head side to side. I had a moebius mouth, still do.

These, taken together, are not the signs of a nonautistic infant who only became autistic when I lost speech. I was always autistic. Just because it becomes more obvious when you lose speech doesn’t mean it wasn’t there all along.

Notes: