Going beyond tackling misconceptions about autism
Decades have been spent rebutting myths and misinformation. Now, the harder conversation is what needs to change once the science is no longer in dispute. Over the next few weeks, The Spectrum series will dive into that question.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Despite leaps in medical research and the advent of modern science, fallacies around autism have continued to emerge, says the writer.
ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO
The history of autism is, in many ways, a history of misunderstanding.
In the 1950s, an American psychologist and a few others in his field popularised the “refrigerator mother” theory. Essentially, it attributed a child’s autism to a mother’s cold parenting or aloofness.
It took years for that catastrophic diagnosis by Bruno Bettelheim to be discredited, but not before it inflicted damage upon families through stigma, guilt and shame, as researchers have described.
Since then, despite leaps in medical research and the advent of modern science, fallacies around autism have continued to emerge.
In the 1990s, disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield caused panic by spuriously linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism.
More recently, in September 2025, US President Donald Trump linked childhood vaccines and the use of pain medication Tylenol for pregnant women and children to autism. The claim was quickly and forcefully rejected by global medical experts.
In a perverse way, if there is a silver lining to all these endless battles with ignorance and misinformation, it is the unintended attention they force onto the subject – however flawed the context.
One can only hope that these distractions do not obscure the far more consequential task of steering society beyond mere passive accommodation of people with autism.
At its core, autism spectrum disorder is a neurological and developmental condition marked by variations in brain signalling that dictates how one navigates human interaction, learning and communication.
For people with autism, the challenges can cut across every phase of life, from the sensory battlegrounds of school and difficulties in learning to the realities of adult independence and caregiver burnout.
Those realities are hardly unique to any one country. In Singapore, the experience reflects both progress and the challenges that remain.
A 2023 study by the National University Hospital and National University Polyclinics estimated autism prevalence at about one in every 100 children aged 18 months, compared with an earlier estimate of one in 150 children in Singapore in 2016. The shift reflects improvements in detection and research as much as any underlying change in prevalence.
Public awareness around autism has undeniably improved over the years, as has the support for early detection and intervention, integration in mainstream schools and skills training in the teenage and adult years.
Yet researchers, caregivers and those diagnosed with autism will tell you that critical gaps remain across the life cycle. As Singapore confronts the twin demographic challenges of becoming a super-aged society and grappling with a record low fertility rate, questions over the priority for finite public resources will only intensify.
How we resolve the trade-offs will determine if individuals across the spectrum are integrated into our social fabric or marooned at its periphery.
Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to engage in a series of candid exchanges over coffee, e-mail and long conversations with some inspiring individuals operating on the front line of neurodivergence.
These practitioners and professionals, some of them also caregivers, shared the systemic friction points that deserve urgent attention. These are about gaps – in our understanding of the condition, in inclusion within our education system, in recognition of talents and concerns, and in support at different life stages as well as for caregivers.
Over the coming weeks, starting today, The Straits Times will feature their perspectives in The Spectrum – a new dedicated series examining those issues, and what it will truly take to move Singapore from awareness to genuine inclusion when it comes to autism.
The overarching takeaway for me in those conversations was that despite the foundations and all that has been established, there is still much work to be done.
The Spectrum series hopes to highlight how far we have come in inclusion when it comes to autism, while casting a lens on the terrain ahead. We hope each column encourages deeper dialogues on what else society can do in helping to chart concrete solutions to unresolved issues and institutional gaps.
For decades, it has been about tackling misconceptions and falsehoods. It has been about changing what we know.
But the road ahead needs to go further – in changing what we do.
The Spectrum is an Opinion series that examines the issues and challenges that people with autism face across the different stages of their lives.
