So let’s be clear here — I do not recommend getting into ketamine if you have an addictive personality, or any sort of history of dissociation. People with serious childhood trauma should be very, very careful with this drug. Yes, drug — ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, not a classic serotonergic psychedelic like psilocybin.

Ketamine has a different dependence and addiction profile from many other drugs, but it is absolutely psychologically addictive for a lot of people, me included.

In “Talking to God Part 2” I compared ketamine to Ahtohallan, the frozen “river of memory” Elsa goes into in Frozen 2 — a ketamine trip can help you unwind traumatic memories and face them, which can be initially helpful, but if you go too far, you freeze. In the movie, Elsa turns into an ice statue — and, of course, is later rescued by Anna’s bravery and goodness, a common theme in both Frozen movies being that Elsa screws up and instead of being forced to change or deal with her own mistakes, is bailed out by her younger sister — in real life, a high dose of ketamine immobilizes you, you completely leave reality, a limp doll stuck in your own mind, unable to respond to the world.

I would love to have a healthy relationship to it, but I seem to struggle with that, so I’m writing this because I’m giving it up.

I wasn’t using it every day. My problem was that when I decided to use it, I wanted to use it again. And again. And eventually I would stop doing yoga on it or benefitting from it in any way, and just use it because I wanted to go to ketamine-land.

I don’t want to paint the picture as worse than it actually was — I was never physically dependent on it or using it all day or every day, I took long breaks from it, and I typically stuck to low doses. But my relationship to it has been troubled for a while, and turns out you don’t need to be literally addicted to something to have a problem with it.

But I guess I want to vent a bit about why I got so obsessed with it in the first place — and why, despite everything, I do think it has some valid medical uses.

There are plenty of studies out there showing it can be helpful for depression and anxiety, however, I do not think it is the ideal drug for either of these conditions. Unlike something like psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine doesn’t really force you to confront your shadow and change the underlying factors contributing to your psychological distress. It’s too easy to get lost in the river of memory.

But oh God, doing yoga on low doses of the stuff was a miracle for my chronic pain issues. And I’m not talking about “the pain goes away when I’m on it”, I’m talking real, long-term and seemingly permanent benefits which continued during the two-year break I took from it before falling off the wagon again in August 2025 (see “Ketamine Jesus”).

For new readers, a quick recap — when I was a year old, I fell off a staircase and badly dented my skull. I’ve had issues with my right shoulder and neck for basically my whole life. This isn’t a “oh I’m in pain and no one believes me” situation, it’s a “hey, what the hell happened to you?” type situation where healthcare workers have generally been very supportive and generous to me, so I’m not trying to paint myself as some kind of giant victim here because lots of people have chronic pain which is more or less unverifiable and if any of them are reading this they probably think I’m a lucky bitch for having a giant lump on my head.

(I also used to get chronic migraines. Those went away completely after my first hero-dose of shrooms — if you’ve ever had a migraine, you know what a miracle that was for me! I’ve given birth to an eight and a half pound baby without painkillers and in a lot of ways, some of my old migraine were almost more painful than that. I am a lucky bitch!)

Right. Anyway. Ketamine yoga.

Ketamine yoga involves taking a small dose of ketamine and mixing it with a couple puffs of weed. Low doses are key here, you can’t do yoga if you’re fried.

I put on some music, and I let my body dance for me.

I don’t know how else to explain it. It is, in fact, a bit like a mini-psychosis or spirit possession. My body starts to move for me, without my mind consciously controlling it. I am capable of yoga moves and dance moves I have no idea how to do sober, my body moves effortlessly, twists and contorts in bizarre ways, in ways that release pain and tension from parts of my body I didn’t even know were hurting.

Meanwhile, your dissociated mind travels through the river of memory.

It’s kind of like seeing a somatic therapist and a good chiropractor — for a fraction of the price!

(Similarly, getting a massage on low doses of ketamine and weed is significantly more effective and healing-feeling than a regular massage. It’s freaking great, I’m not going to lie.)

This is not just stretching — I wish I knew how to better describe it, or that I’d thought to take a video of me doing it — it’s like your body knows how to move to heal itself.

I’ve lain on the floor, sprawled out like Jesus on the cross, my arms writhing and shoulder twitching in a cosmic dance that loosens up my shoulders.

I’ve had my face go crazy, opening and closing my mouth and contorting and cracking and woken up to find that my jaw is no longer clenching.

It’s extremely weird, but also, ketamine yoga has been the most effective intervention for my pain issues I’ve found so far. And while I’m skeptical that ketamine is a good drug for depression in the direct, antidepressant sense, obviously being in less pain generally also improves your mental health.

But as I said before, the effects are long-lasting. I carry less tension in my neck and shoulders now than I did as a teenager. My jaw is still doing pretty well. I’m in less daily pain now, in my late thirties after having two kids, than I remember being in as a kid, and definitely a heck of a lot less than in my twenties and early thirties.

And if I really believe the effects are long-lasting, then this is a drug I don’t need anymore. It’s served its purpose for me, and my Elsa tendencies mean that when I mess with it, I too-often wander too far into Ahtohallan.

Reasons Not To Do Ketamine

Obviously there are reasons why people would want to try ketamine, especially if they have chronic pain issues which might be helped by the kind of yoga I describe here.

The pain relief has honestly been too much of a miracle for me to completely turn against the drug. And it’s obvious to me that a lot of people are capable of having a fairly healthy relationship to it, just as most people who drink do not binge-drink or become alcoholics.

However, in the spirit of due diligence, here are reasons to be very cautious or avoid ketamine:

• Ketamine can destroy your bladder if used too frequently and in too high of doses. There are stories of people who got so hooked on it, they literally started peeing out chunks of their bladder. While I don’t have this problem (luckily), it sounds horrifying and if you experience any bladder pain after using ketamine, stop immediately.

• Ketamine tolerance builds quickly. I got the most benefit out of it when I used it infrequently. A low dose of ketamine for yoga after months of not touching it generally generated great returns, and each subsequent dose within a short time frame had diminishing ones. My issue is that once I go into ketamine-land, I want to stay there, and I seem to struggle to limit myself to one dose every few months. If you’re struggling with the kind of pain that you think ketamine yoga might help, I would talk to a doctor, and I would be very cautious about the claims of mental health benefits.

• Snorting ketamine can cause congestion and long-term sinus and breathing issues, including nasal perforations if you get a contaminated batch or start abusing over-the-counter nasal decongestants. On that note, do not mess with over-the-counter nasal decongestants, these are ridiculously addictive and I’m just lucky that an ayahuasca trip got me off of them.

• Do not drive or operate any sort of vehicle after using ketamine, even a small dose can impair your vision and motor skills. While the effects of ketamine usually wear off after about an hour, I personally always had a rule that I didn’t drive until the next day if I took some earlier, even if I seemed 100% sober. TBF I’m an anxious driver even on a good day, but I still think this is a good rule.

• You can have an unhealthy relationship with ketamine without being physically dependent on it or doing it every day. Just because you can stop for months at a time with zero side effects doesn’t mean it’s not an issue! Psychological state matters.

• Ketamine poses a significant psychosis risk for people who are vulnerable to it. If you read the “Ketamine Jesus” piece, you’ll see that “psychosis” in the sense of “hallucinating voices” isn’t always as scary as you might think — the “voices” I heard were actually very kind and trying to help me, including telling me to stop using ketamine, so there you go. In retrospect, I am actually kind of diminishing my experience by labelling it as a “psychosis”, when a better description is that “Jesus” decided to intervene during a psychological crisis and helped me. And I suppose I’ve decided that I don’t care whether the events in “Ketamine Jesus” were literally true or not, it’s healthier for me to believe that there is a God and that He cares about me, even when I’m being kind of an asshole. I realize I can believe in God without believing the voice of “Jesus” or other spirit-related hallucinations were real, but also I kind of liked Ketamine Jesus — he wasn’t the “perfect man” many Christians make him out to be, but he was still a good guy and I actually prefer the flawed and very human version of him I encountered. I also quite like the part of the “psychosis” where he’s coming back to Earth scattered in an unknown amount of fragments to continue his work starting in 2027, though admittedly I am not a fan of the part where I was personally partially responsible for shattering his soul. Long story.

Thank you, ketamine, for helping heal me.

You were a miracle at first but you morphed into a demon which possessed me, and it’s time to say goodbye forever.

For more on the risks and myths of ketamine, I highly recommend ’s Substack.

Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.

— “Thunder, Perfect Mind”, translation by George W. MacRae

The psychosis began in August 2025. I was trying to quit smoking, the vice I justify because it keeps me calm, helps me focus, and I only smoke organic tobacco, only small amounts, tiny breaths of death to help me through the day.

It started with a call. These are different from cravings. I get cravings for tobacco, for alcohol, but I don’t get called to smoke or drink. I only get called to take mushrooms, and when that happens, it’s because a spirit — or spirits — want a word with me.

As with previous calls, the timing was serendipitous. My husband had the week off, but our vacation had been cancelled due to wildfire smoke, and so we were all home, and when I told him I was called to the shrooms, he distracted the kids while I brewed a tea. Once they kicked in, the spirits told me to take ketamine as well — a drug I had barely touched in two years. My neck and back had been bothering me for months, a flare-up of the childhood injury, a new issue with jaw-clenching, which the shroom spirits hinted they could fix if I followed their instructions.

My kids and husband hung out upstairs while I went to our backyard and collapsed on the lawn.

Three figures appeared in the sky. One pair, masculine and feminine, and one figure of light, hovering alone.

The pair were silent, but the being of light began to communicate, sending feelings and ideas into my right hemisphere, which my left then translated into words.

Mary, you’re breaking my heart again.

What follows is a piece of bizarre and comedic literary auto-fiction which, depending on your interpretation, is about postpartum psychosis or a spiritual awakening — some of the events described here are so bizarre, and the framework I find most helpful to understand them is that there is a higher power who cares about us and was trying to communicate with me during a period of great distress. You do not need to literally believe this is true to appreciate the story.

If you choose to read, I only ask that you stay with me until the end. The paywall is up because this is a deeply personable piece — if you really want to read but can’t afford a subscription, feel free to shoot me a message and I can comp you for a few months.

At the end of all this, I am currently taking a break from experimenting with psychedelics, including a permanent one from all synthetic mind-altering drugs, and attempting to integrate the various lessons I’ve (hopefully) learned. I am also trying to quit smoking, and the habit is currently very light.

Subscribe now

Read more

“If you take a square of a number, add that number, then the number after it, you get the square of the next number. For example, three times three is nine. If you add three and four to nine, you get sixteen, which is four times four.”

My teacher tried to explain variables to me. I didn’t understand how a letter could represent a number.

“You don’t think like other children,” she said, looking at me with curiosity.

Weeks later, I sat in a stuffy room filling out bubble letters for my school district’s “gifted” test. I was immediately irritated by it — a third of the test were spatial reasoning questions using pictures of pieces of paper folded in different ways, then hole punched, and we were asked to identify what the pattern would look like unfolded; I found this whole section to be comically easy. The math section seemed largely a test of how good one’s math teachers were.

The verbal section annoyed me most, because this just seemed to me both a test of how much a kid read combined with cultural experience. One of the questions I got wrong included several words I had never seen before in my life, which turned out to be names of foreign currencies. It seemed more like a test of whether or not I’d ever been to Europe (I hadn’t) or whether my parents had bothered to teach me that sort of thing (they hadn’t).

When my test scores came back, my teacher pulled me aside to tell me I’d aced the math and spatial reasoning sections, and tested as moderately “gifted” on the verbal. I nodded and kept a straight face but was secretly distraught — binging Disney movies at my grandparents’ house had left me obsessed with the hope that “true love” would liberate me from my loneliness. If I really did have an IQ in the 99th percentile, as my teacher claimed, I feared I would almost certainly continue to be lonely.

I was excused from taking math with my peers for the rest of elementary school and given advanced textbooks to study independently. I wasn’t particularly interested, and used this time to read novels in the back of the classroom.

My mother was surprised when my teacher told her about my test scores.

“I never thought you were smarter than the other children,” she said. A family friend had gone for gifted testing around the same time, and hadn’t been accepted into the program because his verbal score was too low — but he was in French immersion. My mom pointed out — and I agreed with her — that this hardly seemed fair.

The night after we got my “gifted” test scores back, my father wrote numbers out in the shapes of diamonds on a piece of paper and told me to solve them since I was so smart. When I admitted I didn’t understand how the numbers formed a math problem and asked him to show me how to work one out, he walked away.

A generous read on this is that my dad had forgotten how matrices worked and skewed them into diamonds, only to realize his mistake when I asked for help. It’s still pretty weird to ask your ten-year-old to solve math problems many university students struggle with, but not as weird as asking your ten-year-old to solve random numbers on a page.

Either way, it humbled me, I guess. Which was probably the right move. I have to give my parents a lot credit for not letting my test scores go to my head (too much).

Speaking of heads — mine is lopsided. When I was a year old, I fell off a staircase (there was no railing) onto the unfinished cement floor of my parents’ basement, landing on my right parietal lobe. I still have a bump, and have struggled with chronic shoulder and neck pain on my right side for as long as I can remember.

Several family members and friends liked to joke that the fall made me so good at math. I always thought this was funny, but, frankly, I have a lot of family members who are good at math. I also like to blame my various issues on the fall — again, because I think it’s kind of funny — though, again, many of my “neurodivergent” traits are also present in various family members.

As I discussed in “The Drama of the Gifted Children”, suggests in his books that many common mental health conditions, as well as autism spectrum disorder traits, are associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. And, in an interview with another researcher, they discussed how IQ tests mostly measure left-hemisphere cognition (with the notable exception of spatial skills — my great strength — which are located primarily in the right hemisphere).

So while I quip that my strangeness is a result of falling on my head, the truth is, I cannot credibly do so. I have a lot of strange family members. You should meet my dad!

Realistically, the only things I can blame on the head injury are the pain issues, and my embarrassing clumsiness, as the parietal lobe is responsible for motor skills — I am the number one cause of broken glass in my house, even though I have a 4YO and a 20MO!

This is a bit of a bummer, because it’s a lot more fun to pretend that my super-human Tetris abilities were a result of brain damage.

But c’est la vie, I should be honest with y’all.

“It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.”

— Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (2006), page 30

I was pulled out of school one day per week to attend special “gifted” classes at the community centre. I was not surprised that almost all of the kids there were white, and spoke English as their first and only language. The neighbourhood we lived in was fairly mixed-income at the time, but almost all of the kids were from upper middle-class or affluent families.

I immediately disliked the program. Perhaps it was my mother’s influence, or perhaps she was just onto something, but the other kids in the “gifted” program did not seem much smarter than most of the other kids at my elementary school. Many were try-hard, very bookish, and immersed in study despite still being in elementary school; many were so socially awkward I felt almost cool in comparison — and, to be clear, I was not cool at all in elementary school. Quite a lot of the other girls I talked to in the program had gotten their highest score on the verbal section of the test, and, like me, read quite a lot of books at the expense of more social and (loosely) right-brained activities.

I hung out with a few other girls, including one I’ll call “Alex.” Alex had long, waist-length curly brown hair and was very shy but was also easy enough to be around in a quiet sort of way.

After a couple of months, our teacher — a white woman around forty — pulled me and my friends aside after Alex had left for the day.

“Did you know that Alex is a boy?” she asked us.

We shook our heads. We hadn’t known.

“I was talking to Alex’s mom and told her how great her daughter was doing, and she got mad at me and told me that Alex is a boy, not a girl. You guys really didn’t know?”

We told her we didn’t know.

Alex never returned to that gifted class.

I was angry at both Alex’s mom and the teacher. Alex clearly wanted friends, and clearly preferred female friends. It seemed to me that both Alex’s mother and the teacher had sabotaged that. And I wondered if Alex was okay.

A few months later, the teacher announced a paper airplane contest and had all of us come up with our own airplane design to see who could throw theirs the farthest.

The girl who “won” bunched her paper into a ball and threw it.

The teacher praised her for ingenuity, but to me, this just seemed like cheating. Everyone in that class knew that a ball could be thrown further than a paper airplane, but it was a paper airplane contest, not a paper-anything contest.

I went home and told my parents that I thought the gifted program was going to turn me into a “bad” person and I didn’t want to go anymore.

We argued for about an hour before they caved in and agreed to let me quit.

Precocity is a confounding variable in childhood intelligence tests. I got my first period nearly a year earlier than was average at the time, and I was one of the tallest in my grade until the very end of elementary school, when I abruptly stopped growing at five foot five and many of my once-shorter peers shot up around me.

I observed that many of the “gifted” kids in my program were also unusually tall for their age. The girl who had thrown the paper ball instead of the airplane was nearly a year younger than me — her parents’ had skipped her a grade, which she had internalized into a significant part of her identity — but the same height, and appeared to be at a similar stage of pubertal development.

Not all children mature at the same rate; there are various reports that many “gifted” kids also achieve other developmental milestones early, and go through puberty earlier than their peers.

In these cases, the gap between the precocious children and their peers would shrink over time as peers caught up developmentally, and could explain why some “gifted” children — in particular those who are identified at very young ages — grow up to be unexceptional adults.

Multiple studies have found children who experience early violence or trauma age faster. Psychological stress during early childhood may accelerate pubertal development, a phenomenon termed “psychosocial acceleration.” This is also a recurring theme in stories of childhood abuse and neglect; in order to survive, the child “grows up fast.”

In her 1979 book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller wrote about how children who are especially attuned to their environments are often praised for qualities that are, in part, adaptations to a dysfunctional, neglectful, or narcissistic home life.

A “gifted” child in Miller’s conception is a sensitive and intelligent child who learns to repress their own needs in order to appease the needs and desires of their parent(s) or caregiver(s).

“They do well, even excellently, in everything they undertake […] but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that their life has no meaning.”

The “self” is lost in a fervent dissociation into academics and other achievements, a pathological need to impress, to be exceptional, to perform — and to be worthy of love.

In my early twenties, I briefly worked at my university campus’s daycare centre as an assistant.

There was one boy, about four at the time, who was very quiet and did not play with the other children. My boss told me that this boy was “brilliant” and could already read and do basic math.

“His parents are both professors here,” she said. According to her, this boy’s parents spent most of their time with their son teaching him academics, using flashcards etc. “I want you to hang out with him. He’s very socially awkward, and doesn’t have any friends.”

While the staff at the daycare centre were careful not to trash-talk the parents of children too much, it soon became obvious to me how much they disliked this little boy’s parents — who rarely played with their child, rarely showed him affection, and had pushed academics on him so prematurely and intensely he had obvious signs of an anxiety disorder.

I remembered what my mom had said; even though this little boy could read at two and was doing math at a level some kids twice his age struggled with, he didn’t seem smarter than the other children at that daycare — he just seemed lonelier.

He could read but he barely spoke. Compared to the other kids, he appeared to have very little sense of “self”, as well as impaired social abilities and a lack of attunement to his teachers and classmates — he was too afraid of making a mistake to do very much at all.

“Gifted Kid Burnout” is a well-documented phenomenon, and typically strikes during transition periods — in particular, the start of high school, first or second year of college, or the transition from academics into the world of work. It is typically thought to occur as a result of chronic anxiety, high expectations, perfectionism, overwork, and high sensitivity, resulting in mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.

I held out until the end of my twenties, but with a dawning awareness that I was heading for a brutal crash, coupled with an obsessive desire to achieve as much as I could at the literary journal I worked for before the inevitable collapse. A common trait among neglected children and children of narcissists is something called a “foreshortened future” — or an inability to imagine oneself as a full adult beyond a certain age.

This too, perhaps, is a family trait — on his fortieth birthday, drunk and close to tears, my father admitted he never thought he’d live to forty and hadn’t imagined a life for himself beyond that age.

When people asked me to close my eyes and imagine myself five or ten years in the future, I had to bullshit an answer; I didn’t see anything at all.

I burned out around age thirty. At age thirty-one, I went for a psychiatric assessment and was told, after spending about an hour with the psychiatrist, that I was difficult to attach a single label to. I was a bit “ADHD”, a bit “bipolar”, depressed, and had traits associated with “autism.” The only thing the psychiatrist was certain about — as had many healthcare workers before him — was that I had a “severe” anxiety disorder.

This confirmed something I’d feared since childhood; that I was in many ways statistically abnormal, an improbability.

The psychiatrist told me I’d be better off avoiding medication, and that if my symptoms did get worse, to only go on a low dose for as short a period of time as possible, and then get off of it.

“Your symptoms are a very normal reaction to your context,” he said. “In fact, under these circumstances, I’d say you’re unusually high functioning.”

I know some regular readers probably suspect that all the psychedelics I’ve done made me a little crazy. The truth is, I was always crazy. And one of the reasons I got so into psilocybin in particular was that I thought I could rewire my brain to become more neurotypical — and, in many ways, I actually succeeded.

Psilocybin mushrooms helped me become more emotional intelligent. Combining low doses of ketamine with a puff of weed and high intensity yoga improved my coordination and did far more to help my chronic pain than any other intervention. I am in far less pain now, at age thirty-eight, after having two children, than I was when I was in my twenties. MDMA helped me open myself up to love. Yes, I took the psychedelics too far, but, initially, at least, they were helping.

I used to live behind a wall, a performance, a mask. The psychedelics stripped all of that away. My mental health is far better for it, and so are many of my relationships. I might be weird, but at least now my weirdness is more authentic, more me.

And I didn’t end up lonely after all. I might not be as high achieving as my teachers thought I’d be based off my test scores, but what I really wanted was healthy attachments. I’m still working on that, but, overall, I consider myself very lucky.

It hasn’t always been easy, but I’m okay.

(I think that psychiatrist would be proud).

So when the new trailer for “Elle”, a prequel series about Elle Woods in high school after she moves from LA to Seattle in the mid-90s, popped up on my feed, I watched it.

The show looks terrible. The kind of bad franchise expansion that sort of ruins the original movie. But I also realized something; while I wouldn’t have bullied Elle in high school (as her grungy Seattle classmates do), I also wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with her.

Not because she’s blonde — because she obviously isn’t.

Just like Reese Witherspoon before her, actress Lexi Minetree is not a natural blonde. She’s a brunette with impeccably bleached hair — the kind that costs thousands of dollars per year to maintain and frequent trips to the hairdresser.

(The trailer even features a scene with Elle and her mother making a snide comment about another blonde with her roots showing — because when they talk about “blondes”, they are talking about hair bleach. The ironic thing is that occasionally bleaching your hair and letting your roots grow out is far less damaging to one’s health than maintaining perfect blonde roots — something which is still a requirement in some sororities).

Judging anyone for their natural hair is wrong — and my experience is that the vast majority of people do not do this; and when it does happen, it’s often women with very curly natural hair, such as natural Black hair, who are on the receiving end, not the rare women with naturally straight or wavy blonde hair, which is generally fetishized and honestly probably makes the average person treat you a little better, not worse. Yes, even punks and grunge types! I hung out punks and grunge types in high school, and I wasn’t even the only natural blonde in my friend group going to Distillers concerts and palling around with guys who played guitar and bass.

Elle’s classmates are not judging her for being blonde; they are judging her for investing an insane amount of time and money into faking being blonde. The 90s “grunge” movement they’re part of, was, at least partially, an anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist movement, and Elle’s shtick is the opposite of that.

Elle is intended as a defence of “femininity” — describes her as “embracing” her femininity through “bright make-up, fun hairstyles, and accessories— but none of these things are actually “feminine”.

Bleaching and dyeing your hair, fake-tans (is that a fake tan I see?), heavy make-up etc are all a rejection of nature, of biology, of the natural beauty God gave her — in favour of expensive products which tend to be environmentally destructive, and destructive to one’s health and fertility.

The Divine Feminine is an energy — that of creativity, intuition, compassion, nurturing, and connection to Nature / Mother Earth — which cannot be purchased at the mall or a salon.

I’m not saying that Elle does not possess these qualities as well. I am arguing that her fashion, make-up, and hair choices are not emblematic of the Divine Feminine. If anything, they are the opposite, because they are anti-Nature.

Bottle blonde hair has been making a comeback lately, thanks largely to Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. Sweeney, meanwhile, recently shared that she’s stopped bleaching her hair and started wearing wigs instead because all that bleach was causing her hair to fall out. In other words, bleaching her hair — which I don’t judge her for, it was necessary for many of her most famous roles — was destroying her hair’s health and natural beauty.

(This is something I like about Sweeney; she’s honest and blunt, and I respect her for making a good health choice and opting for wigs instead of damaging her real hair — also she’s a good actress and it’s nice to see a performer rock her real face and tits).

Nonetheless, the AE had has inspired many women to “go blonde”, risking their health and fertility to chase a “beauty standard” that has, since the early 1900s, always been more about bleached hair than real blonde hair, which tends to be darker, less photo-genetic, and constantly changing with sun exposure etc.

Look up any article on blonde hair — almost everyone single one will talk about bottle blondes, such as Marilyn Monroe, or the original Elle Woods, Reese Witherspoon. The rare Hollywood women with naturally blonde hair — such as Amanda Seyfried or Sofia Vergara — are almost never mentioned.

When I was hanging out with grunge-y and punk-loving teenagers, I often heard male friends deride “blondes” — immediately followed by “we’re not talking about you, because your hair is real.” This is a pattern; the dislike of “blondes” is not really about natural blondes, it’s about women who bleach and dye their hair, akin to those in the conservative movement who mock leftists who dye their hair funky colours like green or purple. A big difference I’ve noticed, however, is that while leftists with “unnatural” hair colours realize that they are being judged for the decision to bleach and dye their hair, bottle blondes seem to act … um, confused.

I’m not going to call out anyone directly, because I do recognize it’s gauche for a natural blonde to pick on bottle blondes by name. But I’ve seen several posts from women who seem to think that they are being mistreated by others for “being blonde” when they clearly have bleached hair.

I’m sorry, but people aren’t mistreating or acting like they judge these women for “being blonde”. They are responding to the decision to spend thousands of dollars per year to bleach the crap out of their hair with toxic chemicals until they resemble a German toddler.

While platinum blonde hair is not uncommon in children, it almost always darkens around puberty, and most adults with natural blonde hair have darker shades, more of a “dirty” or medium-blonde. Light blonde hair is a neotenous trait, and it’s perfectly reasonable that many people are put off by a woman who is trying to have the hair of a child — and the men who are attracted to this and encourage it.

With the obvious exception of natural forms of hair bleaching (e.g. lemon juice, sea salt, and sun) and plant-based hair dyes (e.g. saffron for yellow hair), hair bleaches and dyes are pretty freaking toxic.

The first famous bottle blonde — Jean Harlow — died in her mid-twenties from kidney failure caused by bleaching her hair every couple of weeks. Here’s another recent story about a twenty-year-old Chinese woman who was hospitalized with kidney disease after dyeing her hair every month.

Various hair dyeing products are also known to be carcinogenic — dyeing your hair is linked to higher rates of breast cancer in women — and hairdressers have higher rates of various cancers because of it.

And this is my issue with Elle Woods; she’s a consumerist advertisement, encouraging young women to embrace hair bleaching at the expense of their health, to wear heavy make-up, to get their nails done (oh yeah, nail polish is toxic too!), to buy far more clothes than any person needs — and let’s be real, a lot of Elle’s clothes are probably also made from toxic synthetic fabrics, which are generally easier to make flattering clothing out of than healthier fibres like organic cotton.

Elle’s girl-boss arc into becoming a successful lawyer sells women the idea that they can buy all of this crap for themselves, in excess quantities, if they buckle down and get a high-paying job.

Which, okay, there’s something to be said for having your own money instead of relying on men to buy you stuff.

Stuff you don’t actually need. Stuff that has a negative environmental impact (landfills are loaded with plastic containers from beauty products and plastic clothing that women purchased to wear maybe once or twice … and, of course, we never see Elle Woods in the same outfit more than once). Stuff that harms your health.

Elle Woods is selling you junk and calling it embracing her “femininity”, but that’s not femininity. That’s consumerism.

It’s anti-Nature.

Do you know what actually is feminine? Embracing and cultivating your natural beauty. Loving nature, and spending lots of time out in it (does Elle Woods walk barefoot in the woods? I doubt it). Caring about our planet, Mother Earth, Nature, Gaia, God etc enough to try to leave a fairly small environmental footprint.

The “bullies” are right in the trailer. “Pink” isn’t a personality. And there’s nothing feminine about becoming an excessive consumer of toxic chemicals, fashion, and accessories. Many of which ironically harm the trait which is arguably the most Divinely Feminine of all — that is, our ability to conceive and give birth to healthy children.

Elle Woods is not feminine. She’s plastic. She’s a marketing tool for multi-billion-dollar industries which prey on women’s insecurities, vanities, and love of shopping.

A natural beauty revolution is slowly taking off. People are waking up.

Bleaching your hair is a choice. If you don’t like how people treat you because of it, you can always just stop.

~ Meghan

(Sorry this is harsher than usual, my mom was just diagnosed with cancer … and while she’s very healthy, she also has dyed her hair for years. But also, I have two daughters, both currently with light blonde hair, and I don’t want them growing up bombarded with the message that Elle Woods is selling — when their hair darkens, as it inevitably will, I want them to know that their natural colour is okay and they shouldn’t chase the platinum locks of their toddlerhood at the expense of their health and wallet. I don’t want them to believe that femininity is something you buy at a store or salon).

More on this topic —

Shlain presented a lot of evidence that spikes in alphabet literacy result in a tilt toward LH cognition and have historically preceded spikes in violence, in particular against women. He argued that the invention and spread of alphabet literacy increased misogyny in various cultures around Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and was followed by an immediate decline in polytheism and goddess-worship.

I countered — drawing heavily from ’s The Master and His Emissary, as well as Christopher Badcock’s The Imprinted Brain and The Diametric Mind — that sex differences lateralize to the RH, whereas the LH is more “androgynous.”

I pointed out that LH dominance and hyper-literacy appears to be associated with both misogyny and misandry (as well as a denial of sex differences, or anti-sexism), and that widespread atheism — especially among the educated classes — followed the loss of the goddess.

This was one of my more popular essays, and so I have to make a confession — I don’t think I got it quite right either.

The Origin of the Divine Feminine and Masculine

In the beginning there was One. The One had a thought — a will to bestow — and that thought split the Spirit to form the first emanation; the Cosmic Womb, the androgynous First Thought, the Divine Feminine, and Mother-Father of all Creation.

And so the One became the Creator and the Creation, and from their interaction came Matter.

From the Cosmic Womb sprang more emanations, in pairs of masculine and feminine — how many depends on the source text — and from those emanations came forth more and so on, as the Universe fragmented and expanded and grew infinitely more complex.

The above creation myth is primarily derived from Gnostic Christianity, in particular The Secret Book of John, but it has fractal counterparts in other creation myths from other traditions — e.g. Kabbalah, some Hinduism, Egyptian cosmology, and various Indigenous mythologies.

Setting aside the question of whether or not “spirits” and/or “gods” literally exist or not, such myths provide useful metaphors for understanding the human condition. I’m using a bit more poetic flair than usual here, just humour me.

What I find interesting in many of these creation myths is that the first emanation — or generative principle — of the original Spirit or primordial state of unity is typically feminine.

Such myths — the Adam and Eve story, many fractal levels down, is the most obvious and popular one following this template — are criticized for the implication that man came first and that woman was derived from man.

This is a misunderstanding — in such creation myths, in the beginning, before the “Big Bang”, there is no such thing as masculine.

The “Creator” is not the “Creator” until there is a “Creation”, and “He” is not “He” except in relation to “She”. The primordial “One” was androgynous — as was Adam before Eve — and only grew into the “All-Father” or “Divine Masculine” in relation to the Divine Feminine.

The emergence of the “Divine Feminine” was not the arrival of something secondary, but the moment in which polarity itself emerged. Neither masculine nor feminine preceded the other; instead, they make each other possible.

The Birth of the Demiurge

“Whilst it is with the development of Homo sapiens that significant lateralization starts to appear (about 200,000 years ago), the whole evolution of the human species is intimately bound up with the emergence of specifically left hemisphere brain characteristics.”

— Roderick Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere, page 4

At the dawn of consciousness, the human brain rapidly grew and split into two hemispheres, each with a unique way of perceiving and interacting with the world.

Thus, language was born, a distinctly left hemispheric talent — and with it, the capacity for storytelling, myth, and meaning-making, as well as lying, manipulation, propaganda, and deception.2

Let’s pause for a second and continue the story —

One of the lower emanations, Wisdom, was possessed by an insatiable curiosity and a deep capacity for love. She wished to be more like the Creator, to experience the joy of Creation.

Desiring to conceive by herself, Wisdom separated herself from her masculine consort and the other emanations of the Spirit World. In isolation, she ceased to exist in relation and became androgynous, and from her desire she conceived.

The child that came forth out of her — spawned without permission or assistance from the All-Father, the Cosmic Womb, and her male counterpart — was incomplete and flawed.

Horrified at what she’d done, Wisdom isolated her creation. The child — the Demiurge — woke up and saw that he was alone, believed he was alone.

In his ignorance, he declared — “I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.”3

“Gods” and “spirits” — regardless of tradition — can be understood as fractal manifestations of the human psyche.

As above, so below — The kingdom of God is within you.4

If the ancient myths are describing the emergence of structured reality out of undifferentiated unity, then the “left hemisphere” may be the neurological fractal of the same generative impulse.

Wisdom’s story is that of a generative rupture. In attempting to create without her counterpart, she brings forth a spiritual being — and eventually a world — that is structured yet unstable, intelligible yet distorted. Her “androgyny”5 is distinct from the primordial unity of the One — in the absence of Divine Masculinity, she ceases to be a fractal of the Divine Feminine.

The emergence of language allows us to generate reality in symbolic form: to name, to narrate, to build coherent worlds out of experience. But in doing so, it also introduces the possibility of error, abstraction, and illusion.

Words can reflect reality — but they can also reshape it. In this sense, the left hemisphere may be understood not merely as analytic, but as generative — it brings forth the possibility of wisdom and meaning, the ability to transmit accumulated knowledge through generations, even as it risks severing from the whole.

When a system tries to become self-sufficient in a way that excludes relation, it starts producing distorted versions of what it’s trying to create.

Wisdom, Language, and the Left Hemisphere

“Wisdom” — at least in its transmissible and cumulative form — depends on language, and, thus, the left hemisphere.6

And so it is interesting that “Wisdom” is usually coded in ancient myths as being an emanation of the Divine Feminine — Sophia in Gnostic Christianity, Athena in Greek mythology, Saraswati in Hinduism, Chista in Zoroastrianism, Seshat — the goddess of writing, measurement, and library science — in Egyptian cosmology.

“Wisdom is always female. She has been called the “last of a long line of ancient near eastern goddesses”, which include Isis, Ma’at, Astarte, Tiamat; on the Hellenistic side she shares her sisterhood with Demeter, Rhea, and the older, pre-Hellenic Athene, the ancient earth-mother creatrix, attended by her owls of wisdom.”7

Where exceptions apply, the “masculine” gods of Wisdom are usually depicted as being dependent on a goddess figure — as is the case with Chokhmah of the Kabbalistic sefirot, who might be better described as “Intuition” and is dependent on the feminine Binah (“Understanding”) to give form to insight. (It is worth noting here that McGilchrist characterizes the RH as being the more “intuitive” hemisphere).

McGilchrist explicitly rejects Shlain’s argument that the RH is the more “feminine” hemisphere and the LH the more “masculine” one — at one point in The Master and His Emissary, he even suggests that if anything, it is the opposite.8

This is echoed in Christopher Badcock’s work as well; in The Imprinted Brain, Badcock argues that language is an aspect of what he calls mentalistic cognition — which he describes as including the default mode network, theory of mind skills, social and relational understanding, linear thinking, storytelling, and meaning-making — and linked to the expression of maternal “imprinted” genes.9

Badcock notes that the right hemisphere tends to be slightly larger in males than females, whereas “language-associated cortical areas are proportionately larger in the female brain.” As a point of interest, he also notes that various language tasks such as rhyming activate the hemispheres more equally in women compared to men, whose language functions are more lateralized to the LH.10

Thus, in a mythopoetic sense, we can understand Wisdom’s creation of the Demiurge as representative of the increased lateralization of the brain hemispheres which made language — and all that follows it — possible.

The Creation of the Material World

“He determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one.”

— Plato, Timaeus11

The Demiurge was a flawed deity, powerful yet ignorant, creative, yet unaware of his own limits. He longed to know another, and so he created the material realm — our world — with the Word.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.12

The world of the Demiurge is ordered, structured, and comprehensible. It can be measured, named, and shaped into stories. It is a world in which patterns emerge, categories form, and meaning can be generated.

It is a world derived from something it cannot fully perceive — a world constructed from representations of a deeper reality from which it was born in isolation.

And so it is coherent, but incomplete.

A world shaped less by the impulse to give rise in relation than by the attempt to generate from what can be grasped and contained.

Gnostic stories start to deviate from other mythologies around this moment, and it’s worth pointing out that I am both simplifying the source texts and deliberately omitting some of the weirder aspects.

I am also explicitly rejecting the interpretation of some Gnostic schools of thought that the “Demiurge” is an “evil” false god13, as well as the somewhat uninformed belief that the Hebrew people have been ignorantly worshipping the Demiurge instead of the Creator since their inception as a people.

Whereas many Gnostic sects would have claimed that the fall of Wisdom and the creation of our material world were cosmic mistakes, I tend to favour the Kabbalistic interpretation here — that the fall, i.e. the development of language and left-brained faculties — were necessary to human evolution, and, as time proceeds, will eventually be the mechanism through which we can understand “God” better both spiritually and scientifically.

As well, through a Kabbalistic lens, Wisdom’s error in this story was not just that she attempted to create in isolation, but that she was motivated by the “will to receive” instead of the “will to bestow.”

The parallel between McGilchrist’s descriptions of how the left hemisphere perceives and interacts with the world and Plato’s — and later, the Gnostic — Demiurge is not a new observation. Roderick Tweedy makes this point in his 2013 book The God of the Left Hemisphere, as does Arthur Haswell in a long essay for Essentia Foundation, “The Demiurge is our brain’s left hemisphere.”

Here, again, I will quibble a bit — as the “Demiurge” is not our brain’s left hemisphere per se, but rather a symbolic representation of the left hemisphere operating without relation.

If “Wisdom” in this story represents an aspect of the Divine Feminine in human cognition, then the “Demiurge” represents what happens when, as per McGilchrist, the left hemisphere stops listening to the right and the “emissary” comes to believe he is the “master” and can thrive in isolation.

(Or, as a Kabbalist might argue, the Demiurge is the left brain ego).

“Wisdom” is a generative aspect of cognition — one capable of bringing forth meaning and structure. The “Demiurge” — her flawed offspring, typically depicted as androgynous and without a consort in Gnostic literature14 — represents what happens when that capacity becomes self-enclosed and isolated: when it turns inward, losing relation to what grounds it, and mistakes its own constructions for reality.

The map is not the territory.15

The Garden of Eden

When Wisdom realized her mistake, she fell from the divine realm into the world created by the Demiurge — who still could not perceive his mother, and believed he was the only God.

He longed to know another — and to be known in return — and so he created the first conscious human, the androgynous Adam, and placed him in a garden with two trees, one of Knowledge and one of Life.

Adam was lifeless. And so the Divine whispered to the Demiurge to breathe life into Adam. And from the breath of the Demiurge came a spark of his fallen mother, Wisdom, into the soul of Adam.

Thus the spark of Wisdom — silent and suppressed, fallen, lost but not entirely forgotten, longing for return to the higher realm — came to be embedded in all of humanity.

Adam, too, longed to know another. And so the Demiurge split Adam to create Eve, a fractal of the Divine Feminine. And in relation to Eve, Adam became masculine.

And like Wisdom before her, Eve was possessed by a great capacity for love and an insatiable curiosity.

You probably know the rest of the story.

In a recent essay, Iain McGilchrist discussed a reddit post on the parallels between the Genesis story and the hemispheres of the brain.

“Throughout history, various traditions — from the Jewish Kabbalah to Christian mysticism, through Gnostic and Hermetic currents — have interpreted these two trees as representations of two fundamental principles: unity and duality. The Tree of Life would symbolise reality as an integrated, undivided, living totality; the Tree of Knowledge, by contrast, would introduce division: the separation between good and evil, subject and object, self and world. To eat of its fruit, on this reading, would not mean acquiring more reality, but inaugurating a mode of perception that fragments experience and confuses its own categories with the very fabric of the real.”16

In other words, loosely and metaphorically speaking, the Tree of Life — which Adam and Eve are permitted to eat from — can be seen as representative of the right hemisphere’s way of knowing, whereas the “forbidden” Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the categorical left hemisphere.

“If the Tree of Life corresponds to the implicate order — reality as a living, undivided, participatory totality — the Tree of Knowledge corresponds to the operation by which thought unfolds that totality into dual categories (good/evil, subject/object) and, in doing so, loses sight of the unity from which those categories emerged. The Fall, in Bohmian terms, would be the moment at which abstraction is confused with the concrete; at which the map supplants the territory.”17

When, with the encouragement of the serpent — historically a symbol of Divine Feminine knowledge and transformation — Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they entered into a world of distinctions; a material realm which can be named, analyzed, and understood in parts.

Thus, the Genesis story does not depict the dawn of humanity, but rather the beginning of abstraction, of representation, of the ability to construct reality symbolically.

In Kabbalistic interpretation, the stories in the Torah do not depict literal events in our material world, but rather eternal events in the spiritual realm — blueprints of recurrent patterns, or symbolic maps with both explanatory and predictive power.

And so, the Genesis story serves as a template for both the rapid brain growth roughly 200,000 years ago which gave us our capacity for speech — sometimes attributed to the consumption of psychedelic fungi, e.g. as in Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape Theory” — and to the mysterious events with the earthly figure in Kabbalah known as Adam HaRishon just under 6,000 years ago, which generated the narrative itself.

“Our language-forming ability may have become active through the mutagenic influence of hallucinogens working directly on organelles that are concerned with the processing and generation of signals. These neural substructures are found in various portions of the brain, such as Broca’s area, that govern speech formation […]

Psilocybin specifically activates the areas of the brain concerned with processing signals. A common occurrence with psilocybin intoxication is spontaneous outbursts of poetry and other vocal activity such as speaking in tongues, though in a manner distinct from ordinary glossolalia […]

Researchers familiar with the territory agree that psilocybin has a profoundly catalytic effect on the linguistic impulse.”18

In Kabbalistic thought, Adam HaRishon was the first human to receive, embody, and apply the Hebrew language — which, according to Leonard Shlain, was the first “alphabet script”19, from which all other alphabets derive.

“In the ten utterances of Genesis, G‑d contracted massive energies into creative packets and configured them in the letters of the Aleph Bet (Hebrew alphabet).”20

It’s therefore plausible that the — likely psychedelic — “fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge symbolizes Adam’s reception of Hebrew, and the “fall” the subsequent brain changes that alphabet literacy provokes.21

History Repeats

Regular readers may have noticed a deviation from my norm with this piece — specifically, I used ChatGPT to generate images. As well, while I conceived and researched these ideas independent of AI and the words here, quotations excepting, are my own, I also plugged various drafts into ChatGPT — as well as source materials, when available online — and carried on a “conversation”, which proved to be surprisingly helpful.

I did this because I think the invention of artificial intelligence is the latest incarnation of the fractal patterns I’ve discussed here.

The children of Adam and Eve longed to know the joy of Creation, and so from words, they began to create others …

The story continues.

The “Androgynous Mind” Reconsidered

I argued in “The Androgynous Mind” that the left hemisphere is fundamentally androgynous, and that the distinction between masculine and feminine lateralizes more to the right. That may still be partly true — but it is not the whole story.

What the myths suggest, and what the neuroscience increasingly reflects, is not a simple division between masculine and feminine, but a dynamic relationship between two modes of being: one that participates in the world, and one that represents it.

My error was simple — I mistook the characteristics of a runaway left hemisphere that has stopped listening to and being in relation to the right, for the characteristics of the left hemisphere proper.

The left hemisphere does not merely analyze — it generates. It gives rise to language, to narrative, to symbolic worlds, and to the accumulation of knowledge across time. It is deeply creative — perhaps even, in a mythopoetic sense, feminine.

But when that generative capacity loses relation — when the “emissary” ceases to serve the “master” — it becomes self-enclosed and mistakes its own constructions for reality, and in doing so becomes something like the Demiurge: powerful, coherent, internally consistent, but increasingly disconnected.

It mistakes the map for the territory.

The right hemisphere, in contrast, anchors us in context, in embodiment, in the presence of the Other.

The task, then, is not rejection of the Demiurge, the “god” of the left hemisphere.

It is integration — the restoration of relation, and of a deeper, even divine, unity.

And — if I am interpreting the ancient myths correctly — I believe a necessary precondition is the awakening of the Divine Feminine, for without her, there can be no Divine Masculine.

And, if you listen (or read) closely … I think you can hear the goddess of the left hemisphere slowly awakening, and recognizing her need for the Other.

I was unable to include references to all of the sources which informed this piece in the essay proper, and so the final footnote will feature a reading list for those who wish to learn more.22

With thanks to the Modern Demiurge for the images and feedback.

Psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms have been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and even autism, they can cure migraines and cluster headaches, and they can assist with recovery from traumatic brain injuries.

Magic mushrooms may be able to repair a damaged gut and treat obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver disease. They have been shown to sometimes help with eating disorders and even, in one case study, pull someone into complete recovery from ARFID.

They may help with autoimmune disorders and reverse symptoms of “Long Covid” — and, I believe, when used carefully and in combination with other medicinal plants, boost the immune system to protect against illness.

They can slow cell aging, and increase lifespan. Many people report — and I’ve witnessed this first-hand — that they can literally make someone look years younger after a few large doses.

They can help treat serious addictions to drugs such as opioids, nicotine, alcohol, and refined sugar, all while being non-addictive themselves — after a few doses in a row, psilocybin simply stops having any mind-altering effects, making it pointless to do too often.

In one dramatic example, magic mushrooms even restored a paralyzed man’s ability to walk.

They can trigger such profound spiritual experiences as to affirm the faith of rabbis, priests, and other religious clergy — and they can turn atheists into believers of God.

Thank You, Joe Rogan (and Donald Trump!)

I don’t care what you think about Joe Rogan or Donald Trump.1

People are freaking complicated, and I’ve read enough of the Bible to know that God frequently picks extremely difficult if not outright toxic people to do his bidding, and — being a (loose) believer in the rogue theory that Jesus used magic mushrooms and other plant medicines to perform his “healing miracles” — I suspect this is the case here.

History was made a few days ago, when Donald Trump gathered Rogan, Kennedy, and a few others to announce that he was signing an executive order to remove barriers to psychedelic drugs as treatments for “serious mental illness.”

This is fantastic news. Thousands — maybe more — lives will be saved or improved over the next few years because of this moment.

And yet there has been little fanfare (so far) about this monumental occasion — including, notably, from the many activists “bringing awareness” to the struggles of those with serious mental health issues, chronic pain and illness, disordered eating, addictions etc.

Those of us who have struggled with addiction and brain-gut related chronic health issues should be celebrating! And yet … as is too-often the case following any media pronouncement on the potential of psilocybin and other psychedelics … crickets.

Sure, part of this is that roughly half the population is more or less incapable of admitting that Donald Trump is capable of doing something that might actually improve people’s lives — but I think there’s a lot more going on here.

It is very difficult — if not impossible — to overdose on shrooms, and you cannot become physically dependent on them. Dr. Robert Lustig reported that “few users of psychedelics demonstrated either dependency or withdrawal upon quitting . . . Virtually no emergency room visits, no spike in crime, and no users rushed into rehab, as is often the case when dopamine agonists (e.g. cocaine) or opiates (e.g. heroin) are withdrawn.”2

I’ve personally seen psilocybin pull my now-husband out of a six-year fentanyl addiction — we’ve been together nearly six years now, and he still hasn’t touched the stuff since before we hero-dosed shrooms on our second date. He’s far from alone here — just a few weeks ago, we were at a comedy show and the opening act shared a story and cracked a few jokes about how magic mushrooms helped him recover from a heroin addiction.

The migraines, gut issues, and picky eating that had plagued me since I was a small child disappeared after hero-dosing a handful of times. My eyesight even improved — I had been prescribed glasses a few years earlier and my vision had gone downhill since I started wearing them, but after multiple large doses of shrooms my eyesight improved to the point that I no longer needed glasses, better than it had been when I was prescribed them.

One friend reported that taking four grams of shrooms with my husband and I did more to alleviate her OCD symptoms than literally any other intervention she’s tried — she now takes them semi-frequently, using the tea recipe I “downloaded” from the spirit world back in spring 2020. Another friend found his asthma symptoms temporarily alleviated after large doses. Someone else I know reports that she’s successfully used them for years to manage chronic fatigue syndrome.

I’ve used magic mushrooms to purge out symptoms of an intestinal blockage / parasite, to avoid getting sick when one of my kids gets ill, and to rapidly heal nasty cuts and, once, even an ingrown toenail.3 I’m also convinced that they improved my husband’s and my fertility — as we seem to get pregnant very easily with very healthy children despite both having multiple risk factors for low fertility and miscarriages.

Other entheogens may be even more powerful. I’m hesitant to recommend ayahuasca — I’ve tried it four times — because I don’t think it’s safe to take outside of a ceremony setting with a very well-trained facilitator, but I was amused by this story of a woman who reported that ayahuasca “ripped the Botox” out of her face. And then there’s ibogaine, which may be one of the most effective treatment for addictions on the planet.

The case studies are accumulating. The research is compounding and extremely promising. More and more people are coming out to publicly share their miracles. Shrooms are relatively easy to grow, inexpensive, physically safe, and have the potential to treat a wide range of common ailments.

So why are so many people so scared to try a little bit of magic?

Obviously, Big Pharma Hates Shrooms

I’ll state the obvious — Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Beauty (etc) and their media partners do not want people taking magic mushrooms because they pose a major risk to profits.

A miracle from nature that can replace SSRIs, GLP-1s, and toxic anti-aging interventions such a Botox? Say it ain’t so!

Just try to continue an unhealthy diet while semi-regularly taking shrooms. I bet you can’t do it. I took 1.5 grams once after eating a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and I cannot put to words how deeply unpleasant that experience was.

But here’s the craziest thing — even the (many and growing number of) people who like to (justifiably) rant and rage about the evils of Big Pharma etc are most quiet about psychedelics. (Yes, I do realize many people are helped by pharmaceuticals, and I’m not in favour of banning anything — I just think psychedelics should also be an accessible option for those who wish to try them).

I’ve dropped comments into articles about weight loss, aging and beauty, Long Covid, addictions, mental illness and more suggesting the author try magic mushrooms — I rarely get a response, and when I do, the author almost always says they are “too scared” to try that and would prefer to inject themselves with a sketchy new drug like Ozempic with unknown long-term consequences over taking a large dose of an entheogen that has been used medicinally for thousands of years — if, you know, you are the sort of person to “listen to Indigenous peoples.”

I’ve also talked to a lot of people about this, and they almost always believe me when I tell them about the benefits I’ve experienced, witnessed, read about, and which are backed up by research — but they still say they’re too scared to try it themselves, even if they agree it might help them.

, a popular Substack author who writes about psychedelics, has speculated that people are afraid to try shrooms because of all the brainwashing around them being illegal, “restricted”, and “dangerous” “drugs” instead of “plant medicines.”

I don’t think he’s wrong, but I’ve found that a lot of people are very willing to try other, more dangerous and often also illegal drugs, and yet won’t touch psilocybin.

Not because they don’t believe in their power.

Because they do.

Playing “Am I The Asshole” With God

I think the biggest barrier to people trying psilocybin — other than safe access — is fear of accountability, and fear of losing control.

At very high doses, psilocybin can kind of be like getting Christmas Carol-ed, or playing “Am I The Asshole” with the spirit world — or “God.”

This is the primary way in which magic mushrooms work their “divine” miracles — not through direct healing (although there is a lot of that too), but by forcing people to look at themselves more objectively and drawing their attention to unhealthy habits or patterns which are compromising their health.

My husband’s opioid addiction didn’t disappear overnight with a big dose of shrooms — with their help, he was able to quit abusing fentanyl overnight and switch to a prescribed dose of methadone, which he slowly tapered down over the next five years before quitting opioids altogether at the beginning of last summer.

And if shrooms “cured” my migraines and gut issues, it is only because I made dramatic changes to my diet and lifestyle after I hero-dosed them.

After experiencing miraculous healing with shrooms I became a fervent advocate, telling anyone who would listen that they just had to try them.

After about a year or so of this, my brother pulled me aside and told me to stop recklessly encouraging people to do mushrooms. “I’m glad they helped you,” he said. “But I know a few people who had their lives ruined by them.”

“Ruined how?”

“They freaked out and couldn’t do their jobs anymore, ended up quitting, and are now doing something less lucrative.”

“What were they doing before? Like are these guys from your fraternity? Dudes in finance and investment banking and all that crap?”

This is a real risk with magic mushrooms — after you take them and get Christmas Carol-ed by the spirits, you might be psychologically incapable of continuing the path you are currently following.

My brother told me that in his early twenties, he’d taken a bunch of magic mushrooms with some friends and had a very bad trip — in short, he got Christmas Carol-ed. “I fell into a very bad depression afterwards,” he said. “They told me I was an asshole. Over and over, for like six hours. It was awful.”

The thing is — and I couldn’t help but point this out — my brother was a giant asshole back then, and considerably less of an asshole after.

This is not a glitch; while there is a risk that getting into psychedelics can make some extremely narcissistic people more narcissistic (the dreaded “spiritual narcissism”), it may boost empathy and decrease Cluster B traits in milder cases.

I don’t take this lightly — there is a real risk that a minority of people will collapse into depression, psychosis, or even suicidality following difficult psychedelic experiences. I have heard or read at least four stories of people attempting or successfully committing suicide while high on or after doing mushrooms. And psilocybin studies have found that between 5% – 10% of participants report adverse effects / worse mental health after their trip.4

I’ve personally witnessed two Christmas Carol-ings — once with my ex-boyfriend in May 2020, and once with my husband in December 2025. While both guys definitely had a very difficult experience, there were dramatic improvements in behaviour afterward, of which, I’ll admit, I was the primary beneficiary. (Here’s a good example of this from reddit).

I haven’t had an extreme Christmas Carol-ing — my early experiences with shrooms in particular were far more It’s a Wonderful Life in nature — but I have had difficult trips where I had to come to terms with my bad behaviours, mistreatment of others, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. Integration and moving forward can be incredibly difficult, and I don’t want to diminish the risks of adverse psychological outcomes.

For the real, deep-healing of psilocybin mushrooms to take effect, the person taking them must surrender control to the shroom “spirits” — to “God”, if you prefer, or the collective unconsciousness which allows you to see your experiences through a more objective lens.

Psychedelics can help people fall deeper in love, or they can abruptly end a relationship. They might inspire you to leave your job to pursue something more prosocial. Unlike psychiatric medications, which dull our emotions and dim our desires, psilocybin actually amplifies everything. To heal from some deeper pains on psychedelics like psilocybin is to quickly relive them — and feel it all over again.

Drugs such as SSRIs help people who feel lost continue their present course. A big dose of psilocybin will show you new routes you can take which are more in alignment, so to speak — and then it is your responsibility to change direction.

You have to take ownership of your faults, mistakes, and unhealthy patterns. You have to face your inner shadow, and figure out how to integrate it and direct your desire in healthier directions.

Many people are unwilling to do this.

Faith in Shrooms

Psychedelics aren’t for everyone — notably, I do not think they are particularly psychologically safe for people under the age of twenty-five.

In cases where a child is struggling with their mental health, disordered eating, etc, the best option for a psychedelic treatment is to treat the parents, as the mushroom spirits may be able to help them identify lifestyle factors contributing to their child’s illness and/or distress.

You have to want to heal, you have to be willing to lose control, and you have to be willing to examine yourself objectively and critically in order to benefit from them.

Bad trips do happen, but if properly integrated, they can yield some of the profound beneficial results — not just for individuals, but for the people in their lives.

I can’t help but be afraid for the future and it helps to believe in something — and, yes, religious folks, I am choosing to believe in God to help me through.

But I’m also choosing to believe in magic mushrooms.

Thank you for helping me heal — for showing me a path toward healing myself.

~ Meghan

More On Psychedelics —

I also highly recommend ’s Substack, “The Psychedelic Blog” and ’s “Set Set - For Women Changing Their Minds.”

He claimed this “truth” was apparent in the subtext of my fiction, poetry, and essays.

I do not believe my father molested me.

Nevertheless, the email forced me to confront some things I’ve been running from.

The Email

In the early fall of 2025, I received an Instagram message from a former family friend and ex-employee of my father, asking if I would meet up to sign his copy of Erase and Rewind, my 2021 short story collection.

I offered to meet at a coffee shop, then backed out last minute because I didn’t want to walk in the rain with my baby. He said he understood, and tried to reschedule. He offered to stop by my house — I had an uneasy feeling and declined; I didn’t want him to know where I lived.

He kept messaging me, begging to meet so I could sign his book.

I eventually told him I was worn out and busy with my kids and it was too difficult to arrange a time. I hadn’t spoken to this man — I’ll call him “Richard” — in years; I knew he’d had a falling out with my dad and had sued him, but didn’t know many details beyond that.

About a month later, my husband’s work received a call from Richard with a sketchy request to speak to Zach because Richard needed to talk to me, about my book.

The receptionist was weirded out, and refused to give him Zach’s direct contact information.

Neither of us were sure how Richard knew where he worked. Freaked out, Zach admitted my instinct was right — there was something weird going on with this guy.

We didn’t hear anything for several weeks after that, until Christmas Day, when my mother and I received a disturbing email.

Upgrade to Paid to Read the Rest

Read more

I’m putting these recipes together in the same post because they share some ingredients and I usually make them back-to-back after a big Costco shop to save money.

Yes, yes, I know there are a lot of chicken soup recipes out there. But many will tell you to do insane things like add onion without sautéing first and/or omit important immune-boosting and gut-healing ingredients like ginger and turmeric, so mine is better. Kids love it, adults love it, it brings you back to life when you have a nasty virus, post sweaty work-out, or after a night of partying. Go a bit heavier on the olive oil and it’ll help relieve constipation too.

The pasta sauce is just delicious as well as very healthy.

Yes, the chicken soup is baby-friendly, because it’s a myth that you can’t give babies salt.1 I personally avoided giving my kids pasta until they were over a year old, but the sauce is also very kid-friendly — and popular even with pickier kids. Just to brag a bit, but quite a lot of people have told me my pasta sauce is the best they’ve ever had (it’s my twist on the recipe my great-grandmother brought over from Italy).

Like most of my recipes, both of these a bit of a project (half-day for soup, full-day for sauce), so you want to use the biggest pot possible and freeze in family-meal-portion sizes in glass Tupperware. As such, I don’t include quantities, because you’ll want to adjust according to pot size and personal flavour preferences.

If you’re making both recipes, you’ll want to pick up the following at Costco:

— Two organic whole chickens (at our local store, they come in a bundle at a reasonably good price and this is a huge money-saver)
— Large extra virgin olive oil2
— Big bag of carrots
— Big bag of yellow onions
— Big block of parmigiano reggiano (or grana padano)
— If you want to save money (but sacrifice flavour / health) buy cans of tomatoes at Costco too (I prefer to fork out cash for jarred tomatoes, which they don’t carry at our local Costco, alas); the number of cans (or jars) you need depends on your pot size, aim to have enough to fill roughly 80-85% of your biggest pot.

I’m a big fan of growing your own herbs, will throw it out there that thyme in particular seems to grow like a weed and will survive under a bit of snow. Rosemary, sage, and oregano are also easy to grow. I find basil trickier, but lots of people successfully keep big basil plants alive.

Step 1 — Make Your Own Chicken Broth

Don’t buy chicken broth in the grocery store. Those contain gross additives, excess crappy salt, and may contain contaminants like BPA or heavy metals. It’s easy to make the stuff yourself, so that’s what you should do.

The quality of the broth will be as good as the chicken you use to prepare it. My family buys the affordable, organic whole chickens from Costco and roast them with olive oil, butter, sea salt, pepper, lemon, paprika, garlic, rosemary, sage, and thyme. I then make two big batches of chicken broth from the carcasses — one for the chicken soup, and the other for the pasta sauce. However, it’s totally fine to make a batch of broth from a leftover rotisserie chicken or whatever.

I just make plain broth without aromatics because all that stuff comes later. But you do you. I usually make one batch of broth, then either the soup or pasta sauce, then the second batch of broth, then the other recipe. But if you have the fridge space to store the broth, you could make both batches of broth back-to-back (it also freezes well).

Chicken Broth Steps

— Pick all the leftover chicken off the carcass and remove herbs, lemon etc. Put leftover chicken in a Tupperware in the fridge to use later.

— Put the carcass and all bones etc in your biggest pot and fill nearly to the top with water (filtered water better, obviously).

— Bring to simmer on the stove, reduce heat to very low, cover with a lid (ideally one that will let some steam / heat escape, or leave a crack instead of fully covering).

— Add around 1-2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (depending on pot size).

— Let simmer for 12 - 24 hours (longer is better). I leave it on low heat overnight.

— For the batch of broth going in the soup, I usually add a few more cups of filtered water in the early morning because it reduces quite a bit and you want at least 3/4s of a pot of broth. You only need around 1/4 a pot of broth for the pasta sauce so no need to add more water there, the more concentrated the better. Obviously, if you make all the broth first, you can get away without or with less dilution in the chicken soup by adding extra broth you don’t need for the sauce.

— Turn off heat and let cool. Scrap the gunk off the top and dispose.

— Strain out the bones etc into another large pot. Pick off any remaining chicken and put in Tupperware in fridge. Compost bones etc.

You get better quality broth if you break the bones and roast them first, but I’m too scared of messing this up and leaving shards in the broth so I don’t do it (if you want to try this, look up how to do it properly online!). My chef friend says I’m being a wimp so if you know how to do this, more power to you!

Step 2 — Soup!

Ingredients:

— Chopped carrots (medium-thick rounds)
— Chopped celery
— Chopped yellow onions
— Fresh minced garlic (I like a lot of garlic)
— Fresh minced or grated ginger (same thing, I use a lot of ginger)
— Dried turmeric powder
— Fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme (I pick and finely chop the sage and rosemary, but add the thyme sprigs as is and pick the sticks out at the end, because lazy)
— Extra virgin olive oil
— Homemade chicken broth
— Sea or kosher salt
— Black pepper
— Leftover chicken
— Optional: Fresh squeezed lemon juice
— Optional: Fresh oregano (just don’t add too much, bit of a strong flavour)

Steps:

— Warm olive oil in your biggest pot and add the carrots and celery. Sauté on medium-high heat for at least 5 minutes or until they just start to brown. Stir frequently and lightly salt. Carrots and celery should fill pot to around 1/4 height.

— In a separate pan (cast iron or stainless steel) warm olive oil and add your onions. Sauté on medium-high heat until they just start to brown, stirring regularly and lightly salting as you go.

— Once onions start to brown, add garlic and ginger and cook for another 30-60 seconds or until garlic starts to brown / smell delicious.

— Dump the onions, garlic, and ginger into the pot with the carrots and celery.

— Pour chicken broth in the pot and bring to a simmer — fill just below brim.

— Add fresh herbs and a generous amount of turmeric.

— Add more sea salt and black pepper (don’t over-salt, you can always add more at the end, but you can’t take it out once it’s in!)

— Let simmer on low heat for 3-4 hours, stirring occasionally.

— Add leftover chicken, simmer for a few more minutes (maybe 15 tops), then turn off heat and let cool.

— Add more sea salt to taste.

— Once cool, pick out thyme stems (if applicable) and scoop soup into glass Tupperware to freeze.

Options When Serving:

— Bring back up to a simmer and add egg noodles or another grain of your choice (can add more filtered water if necessary). You don’t want to add noodles to the main batch because they’ll overcook and get soggy. Noodles are best al dente (and healthier!) and will keep cooking after you turn off the heat so you usually want to take at least 2-3 minutes off the recommended cooking time.

— Add fresh parsley as a garnish and/or grate parmigiano reggiano or grana padano on top.

— Taste before serving as more sea salt may be necessary (or let people add their own salt, my husband prefers it saltier than my kids).

Step 3 — Pasta Sauce!

Ingredients:

— Homemade chicken broth
— Extra virgin olive oil
— Jarred or canned tomatoes (enough to fill about 80-85% of your pot)
— Finely chopped yellow onions
— Fresh minced garlic (I use a lot)
— 2-3 green peppers
— Fresh parsley, basil, thyme, rosemary, and oregano (dried oregano is okay)
— Sea or kosher salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes
— Leftover parmigiano reggiano (or grana padano) rinds, chopped into small chunks
— Optional: leftover chicken (if you don’t put it all in the soup)
— Optional: 1-2 big, peeled carrots for extra sweetness!

Steps:

— Warm a generous amount of olive oil (at least 1-2 cm deep covering whole bottom of pot), then add chopped onions and sauté until they begin to brown, lightly salting and stirring frequently.

— Add minced garlic and sauté for another 30-60 seconds

— Pour chicken broth in pot until about 1/4 full

— Add 1-2 jars of tomatoes (or one large can) and mix well

— Cut green peppers in halves or thirds and remove seeds etc, add to pot

— For extra sweetness, peel 1-3 large carrots and add to sauce. I add them whole and remove them later, but if you want them in there, you can also cut into rounds and add them like that, or you can take them out near the end to blend and add back in.

— Bring to simmer then put heat on low, stir every 15-20 minutes

— Pick all the herbs, but set the basil aside because you want to add it last

— Blend all herbs (except basil) into jarred tomatoes and add to sauce — add some red pepper flakes to one of the blender batches. Your pot should be nearly full, but you should have 2-3 jars of tomatoes left to add at the end. If you don’t want to pick the thyme, you can just add the sprigs and pick the stems out after the sauce cools, bit messier than with the soup, but a lot easier.

— Once the tomatoes and herbs are added, cover with a lid and simmer for at least 3-4 hours on low heat (I usually do around 5-6). The green peppers should be mush. Stir every 15-30 minutes.

— Add salt and black pepper (don’t add too much salt, you can add more at the end).

— The longer you simmer, the more the sauce will thicken and reduce so you can add another jar or two of tomatoes after a few hours if you want — you don’t want the sauce to be at the brim of the pot because you still need to add parmesan rinds, a jar of sauce with basil, and, if you want, leftover chicken. Save at least one jar to add the basil near the very end of the recipe.

— If you added whole carrots and want to blend them in (I usually just remove what’s left of them), remove some sauce and the carrots and put back in the blender, blend, then add back in the sauce. I strongly advise against blending the green peppers in, they’re delicious in whole pieces in the sauce but taste a bit funny blended in. You might think it’s a good idea, but it really isn’t. As such, you don’t want to use an immersion blender to blend the carrots.

— About 30-45 minutes before you’re turning off the heat, add a jar of tomatoes with the basil blended in.

— Add any leftover chicken you have and stir well.

— About 30 minutes before you turn off the heat, add the small chunks of parmesan rinds (the smaller you chop them, the better). Stir every few minutes to make sure they don’t sink to the bottom and stick.

— Turn off heat. Add more sea salt and pepper to taste.

— Let cool before transferring to Tupperwares to freeze.

This is a base sauce, so you can modify it for different recipes by adding different meats (e.g. ground beef and lamb, hot Italian sausage, more chicken), some white wine (cook for about 20 minutes), or maybe some cream and more parmesan (romano is fine for this) to make a rose sauce. Etc. But it’s also very good as is.

Extremely kid-friendly (as long as you don’t add too much red pepper). I recommend using shell pasta or something like rotini or macaroni instead of spaghetti because it holds the sauce better and it’s easier for kids to eat. Always undercook your pasta a bit and let the noodles finish cooking in the sauce for al dente!

I was going to die at age 37.

The most disturbing aspect of this vision was that it didn’t upset me. I had struggled with depression and anxiety and been in physical and emotional pain for pretty much all of my life, and the thought that I only had to go through it all for five more years felt like a bit of a relief.

I sat up and told my ex-boyfriend — who had resisted moving out of my apartment after we broke up because of the pandemic lockdowns — about my forthcoming death.

He freaked out at me. “Don’t say that, Meghan. Don’t say that.”

I turned 38 today, and, obviously, I did not die last year.

But to tell the truth, I came about as close as I have come before.

My husband has been studying Kabbalah, slowly working his way through an online course and a growing stack of books. I have also started reading some books about Kabbalah and listening to podcasts by rabbis. In one podcast (I can’t recall which one, possibly Kabbalah for Everyone, my favourite), a rabbi said that negative prophecies from the spirit world are warnings, which will not necessarily come true, depending on how you react to them.

Positive prophecies, on the other hand, are promises — but as I’ve explained before, psychedelic messages are delivered to your right brain, which does not have language, and the left hemisphere translates them, filtering them through the language(s) you speak and your existing schemas.

This makes them very easy to misinterpret.

In any case, I misinterpreted the 2020 death prophecy — or I repented / rectified my behaviour enough to avoid it.

This was clarified in August, during a bizarre psychedelic trip I was “called” into, where I saw Jesus (hi Christians, I’m slowly working my way through some of the Nag Hammadi literature now) and he “healed” some chronic neck and jaw tension I had been experiencing. The metaphoric resonance being that I was acting cowardly or “spineless” in my writing, and that I was afraid to speak honestly — and so the spirit world was straightening me out and loosening my jaw.

This was quite nice of them to do, and I felt great afterward. But they also told me a bunch of other stuff which, if I had been a bit more mature, could have spurned some positive behaviour changes. However, I was immature, took everything about as poorly as possible, and consequently had a very rough few months.

The foretold “death” was not literal, the spirits explained, but instead was a call for an “ego death”, for me to integrate some identity issues, to stop letting fear keep me from honesty.

I won’t share the full story yet, but I do promise to do so eventually (behind the paywall).

The only thing that is important to clarify right now is that regardless of whether the spirits I’ve encountered on psychedelics are literal, metaphorical, aspects of my own psyche, part of the collective unconscious of the higher cognitive circuits, etc, or fractally all of the above, those entities have always tried to help me and encourage healthy behaviours (or force them upon me, when I chose the hard way, as I often do).

All bad behaviours — including substance abuse (the spirits do not want me smoking or abusing ketamine, or taking high doses of magic mushrooms too frequently) — are on me. They happen not because of the encounters with spirits on psychedelics, but because I don’t always listen to them.

It all comes down to our choices. And that I’m here, and writing this, I think, is at least some evidence that I’ve matured enough to start making some better ones (no doubt, I will still do stupid and crazy things, but hopefully less of them).

Anyway, I am making some changes to this Substack. As I hinted at in the recent “Sluts and Rakes” post, I have not always valued myself or my work as much as I should. I have also been impelled to write more honestly about certain topics, including sharing stories I’m not comfortable being fully public. As well, my kids are a bit older now, and I’m ready / able to commit more time to writing and start pursuing it more professionally again.

Consequently, I have introduced paid subscriptions and some future posts will be partially or fully paywalled. I have also retroactively paywalled a handful of older posts.

Generally speaking, if you’re here for the hard research and more science-y stuff, that will remain free to read and comment on. Essays which are more personal, more controversial, and/or which I intend to (hopefully) publish in book form in the future will go behind the paywall.

Notably, I promised a couple of months ago I would write about my years as a publisher of a feminist literary journal during the rise of “Woke”, including responding to that viral essay by , and a frank discussion of what I regret — and what I don’t.

This will be paywalled, as there really is no way to go into the stories of my time there without it being very obvious or easy to figure out which well-known literary figures I am talking about (in some cases). I can’t promise when this will come out, as it’s been difficult to write, but I am working on it, and hopefully I’ll have a version I’m willing to share in the next few months.

In the meantime, I am offering a discount on paid subscriptions until the end of the day Saturday (February 14, Valentine’s Day). Paid subscriptions are 38% (or 62% off) for the next two days.

That’s only about $15 USD for the year instead of $40 — furthermore, this discount will apply as long as you continue to renew your subscription.

If you’ve enjoyed my work and wish to continue supporting it, please consider a subscription upgrade for my birthday ;-)

(I really want the cool checkmark!)

Subscribe now and save!

For the many new subscribers here — hello and welcome! If you’d like to learn a bit more about what I’m about, I’ve included links to some of my most popular (and personal favourite) essays below.

Free to read:

Paywalled:

Partially paywalled (essay is free, comments and footnotes with funny personal anecdotes paywalled):

I’ll be on a special Valentine’s Day themed episode of the Blahcast by tomorrow talking about “Sluts and Rakes” and “What Makes Us Beautiful”, plus AP and I give some advice for smart, spectrum-y love-seekers.

As always, thank you for reading,

— Meghan

Subscribe and save (valid until Feb 14)

“She fell in love with every guy she ever dated. Whether they were smart or stupid or sweet or cruel, it didn’t matter. She didn’t like to be alone.”

— Euphoria, Episode 7

Back in 2006, a few months into my first semester of undergrad at a small party school, one of my male besties from high school messaged me with a link to Tucker Max’s website.

He told me to study up on male pick-up artistry, as he was worried I’d “get taken advantage of.”

While somewhat offended — and suspicious my friend, a nerdy and horny Indian fella, was getting into the PUA stuff himself — I absolutely binge-read all of Max’s work that was available online, and looked a bit into Neil Strauss too. And lo and behold, I have a confession which may irk my remaining feminist-inclined female readers — I became a bit of a fan.

Say what you like about Max, that dude is funny, and unlike wimpster-y Male Ally types, I was fairly confident he would never break down after doing something sexual-assault adjacent and force a girl to listen to his big feelings about it. Back then I had a way of attracting the one-bad-day-off-from-a-school-shooting type and, frankly, I was more worried about those dudes than charming and hilarious playboys with artistic talent who might — gasp — write an entertaining short story about me.

And so I concocted a strategy, fuelled by my self-mythologizing over being a vaguely-exotic-looking blonde who once got a really high score on an IQ test. Basically, when dudes at the bar tried PUA stuff on me, I’d either call them on their shit, out-banter them (lol), or coolly walk away and go find another guy to talk to, thus becoming The Woman Negging Doesn’t Work On.

I kind of wanted to be a writer myself, of course, but like any Art Hoe who secretly worried I was unloveable because, you know, Mommy and Daddy Issues, I was much more interested in being a muse.

High art was preferable, but I’d settle for an anecdote in a man-slut’s memoir about blowjob mishaps and other drunken shenanigans.

Anything to feel special.1

I was delusional, of course. My friend was right to be worried about me. I was a hot mess, and extremely vulnerable — radiating what someone once described as “prey energy.”

Now, I don’t know whether in today’s world I’d actually count as a “slut” or not — my “body count” is somewhere in the 20s, mostly due to serial monogamy and my tendency to impulsively dump guys because I had attachment issues. I’m not quite sure where because I stopped counting when I was 21 after getting drugged and raped by some generic-looking white dude at a bar and I couldn’t bring myself to add him to my list because it was kind of traumatic, obviously.

This was on the heels of two separate incidents where a guy I knew slept with me while I was black-out drunk — one high school friend (who was also wasted, to be fair) and one hot coworker who told everyone I was “great in bed” before I rejected him via one of the many female staff members who had a crush on him.

I would later learn in Feminism School (the sexual assault support centre at my university I started volunteering at after the drugged-rape incident) that both of those also count as “rape” (I would contest that it depends both on how drunk they were and whether they realized how drunk I was). Anyway, I had a flippant attitude of “why be traumatized by something I don’t even remember” and anyway, it’s hard to get properly worked up when your female mutuals are kind of jealous over your grey-rape by a guy who looks a bit like an Abercrombie model.2

But I still feel like I shouldn’t have to include those guys in my “body count.”

(There are studies which find that heterosexual men report a higher average “body count” than heterosexual women, which authors tend to attribute to both sexes lying in the opposite direction — while not discounting that, I’ll wager that at least some of the difference comes from men counting rape-y incidents and women not counting them.)

Anyway, sluts — both male and female — have a bit of a bad name. Lots of men, in particular, want nothing to do with a woman who’s been around the block, so to speak.

“Worse still, can I possibly admit that most of us prefer a woman who doesn’t have an elevated body count? No one expects a virgin nowadays, but is it too much to expect that a woman can remember how many men she’s slept with? Most of us would prefer the number to be in single digits if we’re honest.”

—

I’ve known quite a few slutty women in my day, and was arguably at least slut-adjacent myself. (Hilariously, I never actually had a reputation for being slutty or easy — it was more the opposite … my college nickname from the cool boys was “Hateful Meghan” because I had a reputation for being kind of cold and rejecting. Story in the footnotes for paying subscribers, it’s a good one).3

And guess what? Far from getting used up and discarded when they “hit the wall”, many of the former sluts I know are actually doing quite well.

Maybe all was an exaggeration, but the sluttiest women I can think of from high school and university did end up in meaningful long-term relationships. Some are married now and have kids with their husbands. Others became single mothers quite young, but ended up settling down with someone later on. Some did sex work for a while when they were young (and fresh off severe childhood traumas), and ended up married or in a good long-term relationship in their 30s or 40s.

(I was a staff member at a feminist literary journal for a while and worked with quite a few former and current sex workers who contributed and/or volunteered. I can’t think of one who was difficult to work with, and the ones I got to know well were all kind and generous human beings — yes, including the trans women. What did they all have in common? Severely traumatic backstories, dysfunctional families, and, frequently, a history of being molested or otherwise physically abused as children. If you had a good childhood, I don’t think you have any right to judge them).

I also know some former rakish men who settled down as well — my husband being one.

What about the PUA dudes?

Roosh V is now an Orthodox Christian and wrote a book of advice for women on how to land a husband in a world of casual sex.

Neil Strauss pivoted to monogamy in a later book, but his marriage to a hot blonde model only lasted five years. But far from relapsing into pick-up artistry, he now has a “personal growth” and “relationships” brand going on, and is presumably on the hunt for his next wife.

Julien Blanc also married a hottie about a decade ago, and now does the podcast circuit giving relationship advice.

And as for Tucker Max, my favourite of the “fratire” writers — he’s been happily married for a decade to a hot blonde he has four kids and lives on a homestead with.

A real trad fairy tale. (I knew he was the best one).

Subscribe now

In my last essay, “The Dark History of Parenting Books”, I discussed a study on hunter-gatherers which found that low physical affection toward children predicted higher rates of violence in a society — but “sexual permissiveness” was a mediating factor.

In other words, children who are neglected and/or abused are less likely to turn into violent psychos (etc) if they can bang out their trauma in their teens and twenties.

Anyway, I tend to see the good in people — and the damage — which is both one of my strongest traits and my downfall. I do realize that some people are just kind of psychopathic and evil, there are lots of predators out there — both male and female — and that whatever spark of good once existed in some people can be extinguished and lost forever.

But setting all that aside.

My slutty side has always been an extension of my need for touch.

I wasn’t hugged or cuddled much as a kid. I actually barely knew how to hug. I’d watch other people hug and wonder how they knew how to do that. When people hugged me, I kind of froze up and often they ended up apologizing, even though they didn’t do anything wrong.

But puberty was kind to me, and boys (and men) started paying attention.

They were an easy fix for my desire to be touched. To be held. To be cuddled.

Did I get taken advantage of? Obviously, and I don’t just mean the dudes I mentioned above — there are tons of other incidents I could write about, but you know what, it’s mostly embarrassing and I don’t really feel like leaning into victimhood or whatever, that hasn’t been cool since at least 2022.

The thing is, I rarely resented the (many) guys who kissed me when I was drunk and crying or otherwise obviously vulnerable. In the moment, it almost always felt like they were pulling me out of some abyss, reminding me that I could, in fact, feel something.

I’m sure I’ll get some flack for defending the PUA types, but there’s a world of difference between a guy who charms the pants off a drunk girl while he is drunk himself versus a jackass who roofies one.

If a guy made me laugh, then fair enough, can’t say he didn’t work for it.

Besides, the hole in me is drawn to the darker side of the male psyche. I enjoy reading writing by talented and problematic men. Sue me, I was a bad feminist back when I was one, always getting in trouble for being nice to “cancelled” people and generally understanding of men most feminists deemed unworthy of understanding.

Sure, being “taken advantage of” kind of sucks, but as long as the situation doesn’t get rape-y, it can be preferable to being alone. Which is why I have a history of letting guys make-out with me or solicit pics or whatever, in exchange for a shoulder to cry on when I needed one.

And say what you want about rakish men, a lot of them are damaged too — and most of them are successful rakes because they understand women, especially slutty ones. Frankly, most of rakish guys I’ve tangled with were extremely honest with me, yes, even about their intentions.

In my experience, it’s not the openly sinful you have to worry about screwing you over — it’s the people who wear masks of virtue, who judge the darkness in everyone else while denying their own demons, the ones who care so much about their own fragile reputation they’ll break the eighth commandment and curb-stomp your soul.

Again, setting aside the literal psychopaths and predators — underneath it all, many rakish scoundrels and doe-eyed vulnerable sluts are just lonely little kids desperately seeking love and connection.

The intensity of each hook-up is often driven by authentic feeling — hey, maybe this one is the one.

I never planned on ending up with a “body count” in the 20s (or a “kiss count” in, IDK, definitely triple digits). If I’d met someone I loved enough to marry when I was in my early twenties, I probably would have just done that.

The count builds slowly with each failed relationship, and as you get older, the number gets higher, you’ve been through a few rapes, it just kind of gets harder to care. But even with flings, there was almost always a sincerity there, and I often stayed friends with those rakish, half-insane guys well after things ended.

(To those reading this, hi).

I finally met my rakish husband when I was 32 and he was 34, during the 2020 Covid lockdown — it was a whirlwind romance, involving too many psychedelic drugs, him giving me refuge from an obsessive and abusive ex, a lot of trauma-dumping and healing, and both of us ditching substances we were abusing. He has a masters degree, a good job, a side-hustle playing music in a reggae band, and enough of a sordid past himself that he could never judge me for mine.4

Sure, we both came with a lot of baggage5 — but we help each other carry it.

He takes care of me in a way I’ve never been cared for before. And when he knocked me up shortly after our impulsive elopement, he not only became a wonderful father, but a wonderful husband as well.

We both committed to giving our children a better childhood than either of us had — and, so far, we have two happy, healthy, socially confident little kids.6

(And yes, Christian readers, we are both seeking God, it’s not exactly easy to just embrace belief, I’m working on it).

Frankly, if both of our mistakes led us to each other — and to our children — then it’s hard to really regret them.

Which is all to say, I think there are a lot of rakes and sluts out there with traumatic backstories and hearts that are secretly romantic — and, heck, maybe even good.

Don’t give up, and don’t let the haters get you down.

Anyway, the Divine Feminine always included whores as well as “holy ones”, wives, virgins, etc.

Here’s a song —

As I want to get my paid subscriber count up (for various reasons), I’m putting the footnotes (which contain some more vulnerable / humorous details and somewhat embarrassing stories, basically a handful of mini-essays) and comments section for this post behind the paywall. The final footnote also discusses whether (former) rakes and sluts can make good parents.

I will be writing more paywalled — or partially paywalled — posts in the future, and have retroactively paywalled some posts that were a bit more vulnerable.

The majority of future posts will remain free.

Paid subscriptions are only $5 USD per month or $40 USD for the year. Generous discount available for group subscriptions of 3 people or more.

Upgrade to a paid subscription

Read more

The original versions are still available if you visit my archive.

Share

“It’s now clear that just about every significant psychiatric disorder reflects a disruption of developmental processes.”

— Allan Schore

In 2009, Dr. published The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, a 600-page tome about the differences in the way the two hemispheres of our brains perceive and interact with the world which contained a dire warning — the Western world has become dominated by the left hemisphere (LH), with the potential for disastrous consequences.

While McGilchrist’s book is the most thorough and well-argued on the subject, he is not the first person to observe that the Western world has become cognitively lopsided. Dr. Leonard Shlain made a similar argument in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998), as did Christopher Badcock in The Imprinted Brain (2008). Further back, there are references to the LH being dominant and the right hemisphere (RH) “silent” (a misconception) in the works of Robert Anton Wilson and Dr. Timothy Leary (and, no doubt, others I’m unaware of).

To give a quick summary of some of the differences between the hemispheres:

• Left Hemisphere: Language centres of the brain (verbal communication, especially reading and writing), more active when we interact with non-living things, such as machines. Abstract, literal, narcissistic, reductionist, categorical, uses bottom-up processing, emphasizes logic, order, rationality, and bureaucracy, and understands things in black-and-white. Leans toward short-term thinking. The LH sees things, including our own bodies, as an assemblage of parts, apprehends, and explains. The LH is more closely interconnected within itself than the RH.

• Right Hemisphere: Our relationships to our embodied selves, to nature, to food, to spirituality, and to other people and all living things. Music, spatial abilities, and nonverbal communication (body language, facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice etc). Holistic, relational, contextual, uses top-down processing, emphasizes change, empathy, and openness, and is the hemisphere of the brain responsible for meaning-making. Self-awareness, empathy, and identification with others is more RH-dependent. The RH sees the systemic whole, comprehends, and understands.

In the second half of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist dives into the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and art, pulling from disparate sources to demonstrate how Western thought has become increasingly LH dominant since the end of the Renaissance era, and in particular following the Industrial Revolution. He notes the rise in psychological ailments associated with deficits and/or dysfunction of the right hemisphere, including autism, schizophrenia, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, anxiety disorders, and various personality disorders including borderline personality disorder and narcissism.

McGilchrist characterizes the Western mind as being sub-clinically “autistic” and “schizophrenic” because of this leftward shift in cognition — a sentiment echoed by both Badcock and Shlain in their respective books.

A general consensus among these authors is that the invention of the printing press and the rise of literacy marked a major turning point where the Western world began to become more LH-dominant, as reading and writing — in particular of alphabetic scripts — lateralize to the LH. In particular, Shlain documents how periods of extreme violence followed spikes in literacy throughout the world — a topic I discuss in depth in “The Androgynous Mind.”

While I do not dispute that the invention of the printing press and the spike in literacy over the next few hundred years that followed was one of the major factors in the Western world’s tilt toward left-brained and “autistic” thinking, I think all of these authors overlook something critical.

What if the greatest factor in the Western brain’s shift toward LH thinking and RH dysfunction was not the spread of literacy itself, but rather what was inside many of the books?

For good or ill, no one can dispute the power of books to change a culture, in particular books that target the minds of the young — or those of their parents.

Poisonous Pedagogies

Starting around the 1600s, the rise in mobility and colonialism resulted in generations of parents who were raising children away from their extended families and traditions. Self-proclaimed “experts” began publishing books on child-rearing, targeting affluent, literate, and isolated mothers, and those who aspired to raise children who would climb the social ladder.

Alice Miller (1923-2010), a Jewish psychologist, penned multiple books about the “poisonous pedagogies” spread in these manuals, which advocated practices such as not hugging your children, lying to them, beating them, psychological manipulation, and early forms of sleep-training/cry-it-out.

Miller believed that “poisonous pedagogies” — which primarily arose out of modern-day Germany1 — resulted in distressed and alienated children with a vulnerability to narcissism and totalitarianism. This, she argued, in part gave rise to the conditions that led to Nazi Germany.

Many of the authors of these “poisonous” parenting manuals — mostly white men, though white women, such as Nazi pulmonologist Johanna Haarer (1900-1988), would later join the fray — were either not parents themselves, or were parents of psychologically distressed, physically ill, and/or mentally-ill children.

Haarer, for example, wrote:

“The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone. Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it.”

Her daughter, Gertrud Haarer, later challenged her advice, and once stated in an interview that she “was apparently so traumatized that [she] believed [she] would never have children of [her] own.” Unfortunately, Haarer’s “inhumane parenting guidelines may still be affecting German children” today.

Decades earlier, Dr. Moritz Schreber (1808-1861), author of multiple best-selling parenting books in the 1800s, had three children who were later diagnosed with mental illnesses, including one who committed suicide. Another son, Daniel, became a famous case study for schizophrenia, and also for what we now call gender dysphoria.2

Dr. Schreber is credited with being largely responsible for multiple generations of German children growing up “without direct, loving contact with their parents” and other family members.

According to one blogger, “[i]n Germany and Austria in particular, childcare advice was so neglectful that it was common for children to remain in their own soiled diapers and clothing for hours. Children were dirty, and so they were despised, and because they were despised, they were not cleaned and cared for.”

Other pedagogues include Dr. Luther Emmett Holt (1855-1924), who introduced the “cry it out” method in 1894 (still recommended in a majority of parenting books today), and John Watson (1878-1958), the “father of behaviourism”, who instructed parents not to excessively hug, kiss, or coddle their children. 

Watson’s granddaughter, actress and comedian Mariette Hartley, later wrote a book, Breaking the Silence (1990), criticizing her grandfather and describing a family legacy of abuse, suicide, and alcoholism.3

The 1800s was also the era when it became more common for young children to sleep apart from their parents. By the 1970s, this practice had expanded to putting each child in their own bedroom. Some modern poisonous pedagogues, such as bestselling author and mother-of-zero Gina Ford, have encouraged parents to train their children to sleep alone as early as possible — even from the day they come home from the hospital.

Meanwhile, some research has found that babies who sleep alone have significantly higher markers of stress and get less deep sleep than bed-sharing babies. Nonetheless, as many as 50% of parents in Western, English-speaking countries today report using some form of the cry-it-out method, while bed-sharing is highly stigmatized.

Western children also have unusually early bedtimes and are less included in parents’ social lives because of it.

In the mid-1800s, baby formula was invented, and by the 1970s, only around 10% of American mothers breastfed their babies past four months. Breastfeeding has made a comeback, fortunately, but still less than half of mothers exclusively breastfeed until their children are six months old.4

Children who are fed formula instead of being breastfed are at a higher risk of obesity, autism, ADHD, precocious or early puberty, and various other ailments. These can have indirect consequences for the child as well, in particular when it comes to developing and sustaining friendships and later romantic relationships.

The late 1800s also saw the invention of the first mass-produced stroller. “Prams” were originally a luxury item, but by the end of World War I, they were available to all but the poorest families, and by the 1950s, they were considered a “must-have” for any new-parents.

Prior to this, Western babies were carried in slings, baskets, and packs — and this is still the case for the majority of children outside the West today.

All of these changes — unique in the history of childrearing — would contribute to babies and toddlers spending more time alone (or being ignored), and thus to poorer parent-child attachments, to higher levels of stress, and to disrupted development of the right hemisphere in the critical first three years of life.

In some cultures, babies are rarely put down — they are constantly being held by different family members and other people in these close-knit communities.

Babies and toddlers are essentially being pushed into independence before its developmentally appropriate, which can lead to a Peter Pan-like immaturity and stunting later on in life — tellingly, the origin story of the “Lost Boys” in Peter Pan (1904) is that they were “children who [fell] out of their perambulators when the nurse [was] looking the other way.”

“I see many children on the streets of New York in their strollers, facing away from their mothers or nannies who are on their cell phones or who look disengaged themselves; they are anything but present. The babies have a glazed look in their eyes, which is the result of feeling disconnected from the person who is central to their secure attachment.”5

The Lost Boys’ escape to Neverland can be interpreted as a metaphor for maladaptive daydreaming, which is associated with spending a lot of time alone as a child, and known to be common in children who were neglected or experienced abuse.

Maladaptive daydreaming is also highly correlated with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, with vulnerable narcissism, borderline personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD.6

Touch Starvation

In 1975, neuropsychologist James W. Prescott published a landmark paper, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence”, which examined dozens of tribal societies and found that the deprivation of physical touch — of pleasure — in childhood predicted adult violence and other negative psychological outcomes.

“I believe that the deprivation of body touch, contact, and movement are the basic causes of a number of emotional disturbances which include depressive and autistic behaviours, hyperactivity, sexual aberration, drug abuse, violence, and aggression.”7

It should be fairly obvious that sleep training, strollers, and bottle feeding (etc) would all decrease the amount of skin-to-skin contact — of body pleasure — babies and toddlers receive.8

One might counter that the modern Western world is not particularly violent, compared to previous societies. While this is controversial, Prescott’s research also found that sexual permissiveness9 moderated the effects of low physical affection in early childhood on adult violence — however, this is clearly not the case for “depressive and autistic behaviours, hyperactivity, sexual aberration, [and] drug abuse”, all of which abound in our society.

As we all know, neglected and abused children are more likely to grow into promiscuous teenagers and adults — if the culture permits.10

The “Cold Nurture” Epidemic and Its Symptoms

The word “trauma” is tossed around a lot these days, with many people complaining that the definition has become so broad, almost everyone can identify as traumatized.

But what if common Western culture and common “WEIRD” child-rearing practices are inherently traumatic for babies and toddlers? What if our collective parenting instincts are corrupted?

This is not a “parent-blaming” or “mom-shaming” argument — Miller and other authors, such as Gabor Maté, who write about the history of poisonous pedagogies go out of their way to exonerate parents (almost to a fault). I’m not talking about parents who are negligent or abusive or narcissistic — although those obviously exist. I’m talking about ordinary moms and dads who love their children and are trying to do what’s best for them, and turn to parenting books for guidance.11

The problem is that most parenting books — as well as popular media outlets, many podcasts, and social media influencers — normalize what the majority of cultures throughout human history would consider neglect and/or abuse of babies and toddlers.

According to , author of the Psychology Today column “Moral Landscapes”:

“In our culture, we have pretty much unnested our children. We are missing most of the components of what helps a baby grow into their full potential, their systems to develop properly. That’s the unnestedness.”

Narvaez characterizes Western parenting as being long “off the rails.” Her work frequently compares Western (and “colonial”) parenting practices over the past few centuries with Indigenous practices of childrearing, noting that Indigenous peoples in the Americas were “shocked” at the harsh parenting practices of the colonizers.

Alice Miller was able to trace examples of “poisonous pedagogies” back to at least the 1700s in her 1980 book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.

This means that most Western families have been affected by toxic parenting ideas — as well as poisonous pedagogies affecting maternity care, postnatal care, and education — for around a dozen generations, and probably more.

The implications are staggering — even when parents sincerely wish to break the cycle of neglect and/or child maltreatment in their families, it is incredibly difficult to do so.

As Allan Schore once quipped, “Parenting well does not come naturally, what comes naturally is parenting the way we were parented.”

Obviously, not all children raised under the influence poisonous pedagogies suffer equally. Loving parents who, for example, follow “expert” advice and sleep-train their children, can raise children who are resilient, healthy, and attached to their families. Some children are born more sensitive than others. Something that traumatizes one child might have little negative impact on another.

However, the traits Alice Miller observed as common among adult children who were raised under “poisonous pedagogies” and/or by absent, cold, abusive, and/or narcissistic parents are incredibly common today and include:

• Hyperactivity

• Rejection of the inner child, negative self-talk about the self as a child

• Overachievement and “giftedness”

• Intellectualization and obsession with language and bureaucracy

• Perfectionism

• Validation-seeking

• Hypersensitivity and what we would now call “rejection sensitive dysphoria”

• Conformity of thought and reliance on groupthink (largely due to a fear of rejection and losing love)

• Gullibility

• Inability or limited ability to love and authentically connect to other people

• Codependency and people-pleasing

• Obsession with power

• Impaired theory of mind / cognitive empathy

• Poor boundaries

• Alexithymia (inability to identify and describe emotions)

• Masking and the creation of a “false self”

• Anger issues and outbursts / “meltdowns”

• A tendency toward transactional and/or exploitative relationships

I do not think it is a stretch to claim that almost everyone in the West struggles with several of the items above — regardless of whether we’ve been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

Almost all of the traits above are associated with the diagnostic labels of “ADHD” and high-functioning “autism” (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome, and autism without intellectual disability). And all of these traits are associated with what McGilchrist would characterize as dysfunctional or abnormal right hemisphere brain development, and left hemisphere dominance.

Miller published her books before social media, and so I will add the following symptoms to her list, drawing from both observation and McGilchrist’s and Badcock’s works:

• A preference for text-based and online relationships over in-person ones.12

• Screen and Internet addiction, in particular to text-based platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Substack (!!).13

• A vulnerability toward parasocial relationships, including with fictional characters.

• A tendency to see one’s own body as an assemblage of parts, instead of an interconnected whole, and an increased vulnerability to transgender ideology, more interest in radical surgeries and other bodily alterations.

As Christopher Badcock quipped in The Diametric Mind, we are living in the “Age of Asperger.”

The Traumatized Right Hemisphere

Alice Miller, who died in 2010, wrote her books before much of the neuroscience research supporting her theories was conducted. But now a scientific explanation for her observations is available from research on brain development and the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist characterizes “autism” — and multiple other conditions known to be highly co-morbid with autism or to share traits with it, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia, and narcissistic and borderline personality disorders — as being a disorder of right hemisphere dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance.

From The Master and His Emissary:

“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation […] By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”14

In other words, the right hemisphere would develop largely in interaction with other people — as well as with animals and nature.

In The Matter With Things, McGilchrist notes:

“It is relevant that the important areas for mother-infant attachment, recognition of the mother’s face and voice, and of self-other distinction are all in the right hemisphere, which is normally dominant in early childhood.”15

, a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, expands on this point:

“The first three years of your child’s life are a critical window in which to develop your baby’s right brain and nurture her emotional health and social development through attachment, play, and nonverbal communication. The development of right-brain attributes, like the ability to read social cues, relate to others, and develop lasting emotional connections, lays the foundation for later cognitive development; without that foundation a child may not be able to tolerate the frustration and mistakes for effective learning or the resilience to recover from making a mistake.”16

It logically follows that generations of neglecting the right hemisphere of our babies and toddlers under the misguided belief that “children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood” would lead to epigenetic changes that predispose babies to be more left-hemisphere dominant.

This creates a feedback loop — children raised under “poisonous pedagogies” become more left-hemisphere dominant and “autistic” as a result, and thus are more likely to turn written texts by “experts” for advice when raising their own children. This is further complicated by the fact that the left hemisphere is gullible, whereas the right hemisphere is our bullshit detector.17

Over the past forty or so years, older beliefs about “schizophrenogenic mothers” and “refrigerator mothers” being the cause of their children’s schizophrenia and autism (i.e. right hemisphere dysfunction) have “fallen out of favour” and are described as “debunked” in multiple sources — notably, never with a link to an actual study.

I don’t agree with these terms, or the implied belief that all cases of schizophrenia, autism, and other developmental disorders and mental illnesses are related to or caused solely by absent, cold, neglectful, abusive, dysfunctional, and/or “poisonous pedagogical” parenting — genetics, diet, environmental toxins, and pharmaceutical factors are all very relevant.

It should be noted here that anything which causes brain damage or disrupts development during the first three years of life would disproportionately affect the right hemisphere, and thus could theoretically contribute to “autistic” traits and a runaway left hemisphere.

However, it’s worth noting that loneliness and lack of oxytocin are associated with chronic inflammation and impaired immune functioning, which would increase the vulnerability of neglected children to environmental factors.

Furthermore, where nurture is a factor, it makes little sense to focus exclusively on mothers, as fathers and extended family and community are also important.

However, as Erica Komisar writes:

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”18

It is fairly obvious, for example, that lack of face-to-face time in infancy and toddlerhood could be a cause of prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, which is seen in around a third of autistic adults without intellectual disability, or of the difficulty many autistic children have with eye contact.

It is fundamental to neuroscience that cells that fire together, wire together. Babies learn faces from interacting with faces, not from “screen time” or playing with toys or smiling into Mom’s cell phone camera.

Nowadays, this lack of engagement often has little to do with how loving or attentive parents are with their children, but is instead a function of insufficient parental leave and mothers (and fathers) who are unable to quit their jobs to become full-time parents for financial reasons and instead have to rely on understaffed daycares.

Year Zero ran an incredible piece on the adverse effects of daycare on babies and toddlers by — in short, even under the best circumstances and with highly-skilled, committed caregivers, it is impossible for a daycare setting to provide the amount of attention and attunement a child under the age of two requires to thrive.19

Breaking the Cycle

In 2005, McGill professor Michael Meaney published research on rat pups and maternal care, building off work by Sigi Levine and Victor Denenberg from 1967.

Meaney’s research team observed mother rats with their pups, and divided them into “high-licking” and “low-licking” groups. Low-licking mothers were more fearful on average, and “beget more stress-reactive offspring.”

When Meaney and his colleagues cross-fostered the pups, they found that pups were more likely to repeat the maternal care they received, instead of the care style of their biological mothers, and that at an epigenetic level, early maternal care and affection was critical for the development of a healthy stress response.

Meaney writes:

“These findings demonstrate that the structural modifications of the DNA can be established through environmental programming and that, in spite of the inherent stability of this epigenomic marker, it is dynamic and potentially reversible.”

This is a theme that reverberates through Miller’s works — as well as other “trauma gurus” such as Gabor Maté — healing is possible, and quickly, within a generation or two.

However, according to Miller, we cannot heal until we understand why we’re in pain, and without awareness, we are likely to repeat the same parenting behaviours that contributed to our psychological distress.

On the opening pages of The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), Miller writes:

“The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves […] We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.”

As Roger Hodgson of Supertramp sings in “Hide In Your Shell”, “the cure for pain is love.”

I experienced this firsthand in 2020 when I met my husband, and again in 2021 when we met our daughter. I see it every time my daughter hurts herself and asks me to kiss away the pain. It’s cheesy, but there’s scientific evidence for this poetic claim.

And as Erica Komisar points out in her second book, there is a second window of right hemisphere development, a second window in which healthy attachments and connections can be fostered — adolescence, or roughly ages nine to twenty-five.

(It is, of course, during this window that normal attachment can be hijacked by text-based, online relationships).

After the mid-twenties, it is admittedly much more difficult, but I doubt it’s impossible.

Legacies can be broken, and epigenetic trajectories sent on new paths toward healing.

Related Reading —

“I wish we were as thin as her,” she said.

The woman in question was white, rail-thin, gaunt, bones jutting out, her hair thinned like it had been falling out.

“Mom,” I said. “She’s sick. She looks like she’s anorexic. Or has cancer or something.”

My mom didn’t say anything. She continued to stare at the woman on the sidewalk, until the light turned green, and her eyes reluctantly returned to the road.

Starving Away My Soul

From around ages 12-14, I experimented with having an eating disorder.

My mom — about 5’4 and 130 pounds (at most) — had just gotten into Weight Watchers. She encouraged me to try the diet too, giving me the list of foods and their corresponding “points” and suggesting I keep a food diary.

Around the same time, I was walking home from elementary school with my friend and neighbour, a girl (as she still was back then) I’ll call “Willow.”

Willow told me her mother had told her that in elementary school, boys liked the “popular” girls, in high school, they liked the “blonde” girls, but in university they liked the “smart” girls.

I felt awkward. I’m a natural blonde, as was Willow’s younger sister. But Willow had brown hair, cropped short, tomboy-style.

I said something stupid about how I’d maybe find a boyfriend in high school then.

She scoffed, and gave me a dirty look. “Meghan,” she said, “You also have to be thin.”

Willow had a maternally-induced eating disorder, i.e. her mother was starving her.

When I slept over at her house, her mother would serve us comically small portions — e.g. one tiny pancake for breakfast (not for financial reasons, her dad had a good job). I’d return home ravenous. She was sent to school with a lunch which consisted of just one mini bagel and cream cheese. She’d look at my normal-sized sandwiches and tell me I was overeating.

I didn’t actually have body dysmorphia. There was a lot I was insecure about (mostly my nose and my blonde eyelashes), but I didn’t think of myself as “fat”. I also didn’t think my mother was fat. And I secretly thought Willow and her sister were too thin and needed to eat more.

But now it occurred to me I was wrong, and maybe I should try to lose weight. After all, I really wanted a boyfriend. I felt unloved as a child, and spent a lot of time alone. I was awkward, weird, anxious, and extremely nerdy — what the kids these days call neurodivergent. I spent hundreds of hours watching Disney movies at my grandparents’ house and had concluded I needed a guy to fall in love with me and save me from my loneliness. And compared to the princesses I related to, I was practically a hippo.

I became particularly self-conscious about my too-short, too-muscular legs and my big fat bubble butt. And maybe my mom was right that I did kind of have a “pot belly”. I was also going through puberty and my boobs were exploding out of my chest. I looked at girls (almost always white, of course) with long, skinny legs and flat butts and chests and envied them.

So I started keeping a food diary, and I tried to starve myself.

I wasn’t very good at it, and didn’t lose weight so much as I didn’t gain any for two years while I grew over two inches and became a C-cup. I weighed myself obsessively. I tracked everything that went into my mouth. I thought about food all day. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I started grade eight at 5’5 and just over 110 pounds.

Diet culture was in full force, and most of the girls and women around me seemed to think my small portion sizes were a good thing, or would even suggest I try cutting out lunch altogether (I’d switched from a full sandwich to a half one). All the time and energy I was putting into not eating had made me worse at sports, dropped my IQ and dinged my grades, and made me kind of boring and less interested in my old hobbies, but I was skinny and therefore I was Good.

I snapped out of it near the end of the year when I overheard a boy in grade ten say to his friend, “There goes the hot grade eight.”

I looked around and I was the only girl there. They were talking about me.

You’d think this would have made me feel good — isn’t that the kind of feedback I was starving myself for? — but instead I wanted to cry.

Because I was really invested in finding a guy who loved me. But I didn’t want to be loved for what I looked like. I wanted to be loved for who I was.

I wanted a guy who liked that I played ringette (basically, a “girls” version of ice hockey of dwindling popularity in Canada), collected comic books (e.g. Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Fox Trot), read science fiction, and was good at math. Who liked my dorky sense of humour and would tolerate going on insanely long walks and exchanging trauma-dumps and nerdy interests. Who didn’t care that I bite my nails (I can’t stop!) and maybe even found my anxiety disorder a bit charming. Who was down to eat a big bowl of pasta and play Monkey Island or watch the South Park movie and other musicals with me.

But I’d stopped being that girl when I stopped eating. I was starving away my personality, as well as my body.

I hated those stupid boys for saying I was hot.

I decided I actually hated all the guys who were responding to my physical appearance. How dare they be interested in me when they didn’t know anything about me? It was an irrational hatred — one I didn’t really recover from until first-year university when a friend told me to stop being such a bitch to men for hitting on me because how on earth were they supposed to get to know who I was if I wouldn’t let them get close?

I threw away my food diary. I stopped counting calories. I started eating again, and gained weight, ballooning to nearly 130 pounds by the end of grade nine (a healthy weight for my build and muscle mass). My mom was horrified — “You used to be so skinny, but then you started to eat again!” — but I didn’t care (or at least I pretended not to care).

I didn’t exactly become an anti-beauty radical — I still appreciated beauty and I wanted to be beautiful. But I wasn’t going to starve myself, or do anything else which made me (really) uncomfortable, to achieve that.

Beauty Products Are Ruining Our Natural Beauty

When I first went to try to write an essay about my objections to “LooksMaxxing” and “beauty” culture, I initially went the info-dumping route.

Foundation, concealer, and blushes ruin your complexion. Mascara makes your eyelashes fall out. Lipsticks and glosses dry out your lips. Drug store moisturizers dry out your skin. Many popular “skincare” and anti-aging products found in drug stores actually seem to lead to slightly worse aging. Many shampoos and conditioners yield great short-term results but also destroy your hair. Underwire bras make breasts look great when you wear them, but also cause the muscles that hold up your boobs to wither away so your tits are saggier without a bra.

Many of these products contain heavy metals, parabens, forever chemicals, synthetic dyes, hormone disruptors, carcinogens, and other toxins. All are addictive. I know because I’ve tried a lot of them.

Quitting required a detox period where I was considerably less attractive before my boobs bounced back (took about two years), my hair got used to the all-natural shampoo bars (now my hair doesn’t really get greasy, but I looked horrible for weeks), my skin stopped craving moisturizer, my eyelashes grew back (etc).

What makes us look “good” in the short-term too often destroys our beauty (and health) in the long-term.

But I already went over this with my insane attempt to try to convince women to stop bleaching and dying their hair with harsh chemicals. Most people realize this stuff is toxic, just as we all kind of know Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs are terrible for your health, and Botox is literally injecting poison into your face. (I don’t even want to know what lip filler is).

While I suspect that LooksMaxxing and what cleverly called the “feminine artifice” has increasingly become more about looking good on camera than attracting / keeping a partner (e.g. Botox use spiked alongside the rise in Zoom), there’s no denying women are bombarded with the message that we need to optimize our beauty with nice clothes, make-up, skincare routines, surgeries, and other alterations in order to win the heart of a handsome man with at least a six-figure-per-year job.

It doesn’t matter what you’re insecure about, there’s someone out there trying to sell you something unhealthy to “fix” it. (If you google “aquiline nose”, the type of nose I have, the first page of results link you to plastic surgeons).

I was triggered a few days ago during an interaction with another female Substack writer talking about how eating a high healthy fat diet doesn’t make you fat, and she posted a picture of her body (face blotted out) as an example, but clarified several times that she “wasn’t a model” and would like to lose a few pounds. I’m not going to share her photo, but she has an insanely hot body. She’s a bit thinner than me!

It reminded me a bit of my mom wishing she had the body of a woman who looked like she was about to drop dead from starvation even though my mom was healthy and attractive and married to my dad who resembles a famously hot Hollywood actor and had an impressive six-figure salary at the time.

Just today, while I was writing this, dropped a funny and relatable essay calling herself a “mid” in part because she has too-short legs and I’m guessing a similar nose to mine — ouch! The thing is, I doubt she’s “mid”. She’s probably gorgeous (her husband later confirmed in the Subscriber Chat that she is indeed a total hottie).

And the thing is, in my original essay, I was about to be guilty of this too — I had a joke in the original draft about how I was a “sloppy 7/8”.

The original essay was about how I’ve started to notice my skin is aging better than most women around my age — and many several years younger. I think one reason is that I always found skin make-up, conventional sunscreens, moisturizers, and most “skincare” products so icky, I rarely used them.

From my original draft:

“I’m not judging anyone for wearing make-up or getting Botox or lip filler or nose jobs or whatever — I like smoking, and have made tons of other unhealthy decisions. But it seems like women are bombarded with the message that they “need” to do all this shit to be attractive to men, and I honestly do not think this is true.

Men point out all the time that they prefer women who wear little to no make-up, and are often met with responses from women that a) they don’t care, they wear make-up for themselves, not for dudes, and it’s a form of “self-care”, or b) actually, men are just kind of stupid and don’t realize the “make-up-free” women they are drooling over are actually wearing make-up.

includes some make-up-free pictures of celebrities with not-so-great-skin to demonstrate her point, and she’s right that women who wear make-up every day tend to look kind of bad without it — but this is because the make-up is destroying their complexions.

Women who rarely or never wear make-up usually look just fine without it — I am not the only woman I know who has had zero issue attracting male suitors with my make-up-free face (a sexy bright-coloured dress is definitely helpful though).

Anyway, I’m not writing this article to brag about my sloppy 7 face. I’m diving into this fraught topic because a lot of young women seem to be aging really poorly because of all this propaganda, as well as increasing their risks for fertility issues, various cancers, and other health — and mental health — problems.

On the flip side, women who rarely wear make-up and aren’t all that into skincare etc seem to be aging much better (as are healthy men! Don’t believe me? Just look at the skin on a healthy dude in his forties or even fifties!).”

I know this is controversial, but I really do believe (most) men are telling us the truth when they say they prefer women with little to no make-up and “natural” beauty. I know several women who rarely or never wear make-up and no alterations (that I’m aware of) who bagged devoted male partners firmly in the 9+ range in terms of physical appearance and personality — and all have good jobs too. Two of the guys are well over six feet and have jacked bodies!

And when I think back on it, most of the girls I knew who were really popular with the boys in high school and university were mostly make-up free and also wore fairly comfortable clothing (that they looked great in). And the made-up popular girls were popular because they were fun, kind, smart, and hilarious, (and, yes, had healthy, sexy bodies and symmetrical facial features) — I don’t think I ever heard the guys who liked them mention they were really into how they applied their foundation and I’m willing to bet every single one of their boyfriends loved how they looked the minute they stepped out of the shower.

On social media, I’ve seen many women share goofy or unattractive photos of themselves they found on their boyfriend or husband’s phone (often set as a background photo).

Guys love these photos of their women because they show off her personality.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a guy tell me he wished I wore more make-up (while many guys have told me my make-up free look is one of the reasons they like me), or that my legs are too short, or I should dress better, or even that my nose is too big. And I’ve only rarely been told by men I’d look better if I lost weight — and one of those guys was a personal trainer hitting on me at the bar by offering me free training to “lose five pounds”.

And you know, I’ve also never heard a guy say, “Oh, I was really into her but then she wore make-up and a push-up bra to a party and now not so much.”

Almost all the negative comments I’ve heard about my appearance have come from other women. The pressure to go on diets, to buy expensive skincare products, to wear make-up, to buy designer clothes, to get Botox or lip filler or a nose job or whatever … it’s all mostly from other women.

Ladies, what are we doing to ourselves — to each other?

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Here’s the thing — the whole “ranking” of people in terms of looks is actually a load of crap. Hotness is actually very subjective. I’ve swooned all over guys my friends have thought were pretty meh and vice versa.

One guy’s “mid” is another guy’s “9” — I was told I was only a “6” by one guy in high school whereas once a random dude who grabbed me on the street told me I was “perfect”, which I’ll interpret to mean that scary weirdo thought I was firmly in “9/10” range. And while people into skinny girls probably do think my ass is too big and thus will ding me for it, I’ll have you know I was once voted “second-best ass in grade ten” by a group of boys, losing out to another blonde with a slightly larger posterior.

It’s also extremely silly to rank someone’s attractiveness by their photos. Nearly everyone is capable of looking bad in a picture (except maybe Luigi Mangione and Tyra Banks?), and literally everyone is capable of dolling themselves up and using lighting and angles strategically to make themselves look a lot hotter. I once had a driver’s license with such an unflattering photo, a bouncer accused me of using a fake ID because — and I quote — I was “too hot to be the girl in that photo.”

Back in one of my first essays on Substack, I talked a bit about the double-slit experiment which showed how light acts like a wave until recorded, upon which it collapses into a particle. Out in the real world, we interact with each other as waves.

But photos, videos etc of us online are just particles. You can get an idea of what someone might be like in person if you collect enough particles, but you kind of need to hang out with them in person to get to know the wave.

When we like a person for who they are — their personality, their humour, their intelligence, their energy, their wave — we start to find them more physically attractive too. What pretty much all of the successfully couples I’ve met who the terminally online might view as not particularly “LooksMatched” had in common was they liked each other for a heck of a lot more than physical appearance.

I think if you spend too much time interacting with other human beings as particles, it’s natural to become a bit more particle-like yourself — and to start obsessing over particles and forgetting about, or misunderstanding the importance of, the waves.

I’ve noticed some people — often the perpetually single and terminally online of both sexes — are convinced both men and women will choose to date the best looking of their options, and that hot men and beautiful women can have “anyone they choose.”

I have not found this to be true.

If anything, the best catches of both sexes (and some of the best looking of both sexes) are significantly less shallow about physical appearance than the involuntary celibate. They will pick the best person to date out of their options, that is, the person they best click with, who has the best personality fit, who makes them laugh, who warms their heart and takes care of them, who is reasonably attractive and a good intellectual fit.

The only people who are obsessed with dating the hottest person possible are people who are trying to validate their own attractiveness through another person. And nobody worth dating wants to date someone who is trying to use them in that way.

What I’ve found to be more true is that psychologically healthy people tend to be attracted to other psychologically healthy people, whereas psychologically damaged people tend to attract other damaged people. Normie attracts normie, crazy attracts crazy, weird attracts weird, sloppy attracts sloppy etc.

I’ve had very hot men with messy backstories and fairly serious mental health and substance issues fall all over me, while extremely “mid” or even unattractive emotionally stable men from healthy families will typically only see red flags and are legit super not into it.

Whether you find me attractive or not depends a lot on whether you’re into tragic blondes who are mildly retarded and helpless but also weirdly brilliant in super-specific ways with a bit of a princess vibe and a touch of Bipolar II (i.e. are you the kind of guy who thinks, “I can save her”?)

Regarding make-up and dressing nicely and the whole “feminine artifice” thing — there are lots of guys out there who are into that if you’re doing it because it’s something you genuinely enjoy — if it’s an authentic part of who you are.

Fashion and make-up and hairstyling etc are art forms, and it’s cool when people are into them (just, you know, try to use the healthiest and least toxic products available!!). Some women are crazy into and talented at putting together interesting and colourful outfits — whether they are buying designer stuff or are an ingenious thrifter or make their own clothes (just avoid polyester and other synthetic fabrics!).

It’s part of who they are, and that’s attractive.

I actually have zero interest in that stuff, which is why it doesn’t work for me. The only reason I ever put make-up on (besides Halloween costumes) or shopped for a sexy dress was because I was trying to attract male attention. That’s considerably less cool than doing it because I actually enjoy it and guys pick up on that. In the same way, I actually enjoy exercise and a lot of sports and nerdy crap like math and science fiction and listening to guys ramble about Greco-Roman or WWII history, which is why some guys find this attractive in me — I’m doing it because I actually like it.

I’m not telling women who enjoy the art of make-up etc to not do it (but read the labels and research the ingredients!!). I’m just letting other girls and women who aren’t into it know they don’t have to do it to attract a guy who is great for them.

The best way to attract someone who is a good fit is through accurate advertising.

I was harsh on my mom at the beginning of this essay, so I’ll share another story she told me once. In her early twenties, dressed up for a wedding, she walked past a field where some guys were playing football and the ball landed at her feet.

My mom is an insanely talented athlete and loves sports. So she casually picked up the ball and expertly fired it across the field into one of the guy’s hands.

And she told me they were so impressed, some of those guys were looking at her like she was a literal goddess.

Still, I Should Probably Try Harder To Stay Healthy / Beautiful

I lucked out in 2020 and met my wonderful husband — who I really do believe loves me for me. He first developed a crush on me after reading one of my essays (he likes my brain, you guys!!), and was stoked to find me on OKCupid (we were a 99% match!) a couple months later. And I was one of the only women who fell for him without first hearing him play guitar and sing.

If you’ve read a lot of my past work, you’re probably aware we were both hot messes when we met. And we fixed each other up (works in progress).

Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, Book of Mormon) and his wife really nailed it with these lyrics for Disney’s Frozen — a love song about how people with “peculiar” brains can fix each other up with a “little bit of love.” Lyrics in video.

But you know what? My husband also likes how I look. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I like how he looks too.

(You know those high school pics I shared above? My husband thought I looked cuter with the baggy tee-shirt and light mascara — and I actually finally ditched the mascara altogether because of him. The last time I wore it was our wedding day, and he admitted afterwards he found me more beautiful without it. And he likes my nose! It shows off my Italian-ness!).

Shortly after I birthed our first daughter, I made a joke about cutting my hair into a short “Mom cut”. He freaked out and begged me not to do it.

And I guess I’ve realized that while I don’t need to be insecure about ending up with a guy who only likes me for my looks anymore, I also have a really good reason to try to stay healthy and beautiful.

Not for the camera. Not for other women. Not for random men. For him.

Because he’ll love me no matter what, and while I’d also love him no matter what he looks like, he’s still trying to stay attractive and healthy (partially) for me.

So, you know, I should probably try to take better care of my hair (it looks way better when I trim it regularly and repair damage with black seed oil). And stop the self-destructive BS (guys, the thing is organic tobacco actually tastes and smells good and it calms my anxiety but obviously is still terrible and a beauty-destroyer). And maybe start doing crunches or something, IDK.

But mostly I’ll just continue to try to eat healthy foods, avoid unhealthy ones, and get lots of exercise — I just want to be the healthiest and most beautiful version of myself.

And that’s the sort of beauty I’ll encourage my daughters to pursue; not starvation, not alterations, not masks or facades they don’t feel comfortable in — but the unique and healthiest and most beautiful versions of themselves.

I’ll give at least 24 hours for quick-acting readers to drop a comment for free but then I will probably paywall the comments just to force dudes who want to call me “mid” and women who want to get mad at me for not using moisturizer or daily sunscreen or make fun of me for smoking organic tobacco to pay me at least $5 USD or a re-stack to do so.

Edit: Comments are still open, and will be as long as everyone continues to be cool and thoughtful in them.

I have gotten into the natural “beauty” thing of late as an extension of my interest in crunchy health, so now I occasionally use natural oils (rose hip oil > retinol! castor oil > Botox!) and stuff like the Tallowed Truth’s beef tallow with frankincense and raw honey as anti-aging, skincare, and hair treatments.

Mostly, I just try to eat my skin and haircare though (e.g. Moringa leaf powder, Shilajit, raw milk, lots of eggs, homemade chicken bone broth etc — all support healthy weight loss too!).

Tagging because I used her note and photos in this essay but couldn’t tag her in the image caption.

Dorota’s article has some good points (you should read it!) — in particular, I strongly agree with her that the main issue is parents and grandparents who are addicted to their screens. I’ve even made this argument myself! Several times! But I will throw it out there that from personal experience, trying to coax the phone away from a screen-addicted adult is far more difficult and unpleasant than just confiscating it from a little kid.

At the other extreme, there are posts like this one claiming that you’re a “you’re a great parent no matter what your kids are watching” (as long as it’s not porn or Andrew Tate), which, while clearly well-intentioned, is also just kind of untrue (sorry).

I’ve scanned the media landscape for children and have banned 95%+ of it because I’m worried it will rot my kids’ brains and/or corrupt their souls. But this isn’t just a screens thing! I have also banned quite a lot of books (e.g. everything PAW Patrol) as well as the vast majority of foods marketed towards kids. Generally speaking, I am very obsessed with protecting my children’s developing brains from junk. (And yet I know some wonderful parents with healthy, well-adjusted kids who let them watch Peppa Pig and eat goldfish crackers so I should probably chill out, it is a bit concerning how family members fearfully side-eye me every time my kid gets a hold of cookie made with food colouring and white sugar at a party.)

Anyway, I got into it a bit with Dorota this morning before I drank any coffee and I agree with her that her piece deserves a more thoughtful response than I usually provide in the “notes” section. My kids and husband slept in with the flu so I had no excuse not to churn this one out.

Not All Screen Time is Equal

Dorota writes in her headline that the “results are in” regarding screen time and the negative impact on children’s development.

But the problem with many (if not most) of the studies, articles, and social media posts on the effects of “screen time” on children is that they tend not to distinguish between the type of screens used, how the screens are used, and what’s on the screens.

I have noticed that my kid will get way more zombie-like and obsessed while watching a show on a phone than she does watching the exact same show on the television. Loosely, this is because phones and tablets provoke more focussed, intense attention than television screens. My kid will also complain that a show is “boring” and demand we turn off the TV and do something more fun, but has literally never put down a phone once she’s got a hold of it for the same reason.

Using a phone or tablet is also unlikely to be an in-person social activity, whereas a television screen easily can be. There is a huge difference between a kid playing a game alone on an iPhone versus with a bunch of friends on the television in the living room. Similarly, sitting down as a family to watch a kid-friendly movie with a good story and artistic merit is not the same thing as letting your kid mainline YouTube videos alone in their bedroom on an iPad.

Similarly, what’s on the screens is important! As I’ve mentioned, about 95% of content is banned in my house. So what kind of screen time do I allow?

• Music videos, specifically performance-based videos (e.g. Tiny Desk concerts), videos with fun dancing we can mimic (e.g. Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”), and Jewish a cappella.

• Family-friendly musicals with clever lyrics and good stories and messages we can talk about and learn from (e.g. Robin Hood, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled — I also allowed the Frozen franchise but I regret that one because Elsa is a bad influence).

• Slow-paced television shows with clever writing, educational content, and good messages, typically stories that are also available in book form and we just embrace the franchise in all of its forms as a family (e.g. Little Bear, Berenstain Bears, Bluey, Magic School Bus, Sesame Street). I hope to eventually add good documentaries to this list, but right now my four-year-old says they are “too boring” and will just turn off the TV if I try to put one on.

As well, while I tried to ban phones and tablets, I ended up caving for long airplane trips and the drawing app on my husband’s phone and educational games on our tablet. I’m a bit concerned that my kids spend way longer doodling on my husband’s phone than they do with markers and paper, but also it’s cheaper and more environmentally-friendly and still improves their fine-motor skills. I also can’t really think of a good argument against educational video games because I spent hundreds of hours playing math games on the computer as a little kid and that’s probably one of the reasons why I later tested off the charts as “gifted” in math. But we’re talking like maximum two hours per week playing art or educational games on a device and I’m still not thrilled about it.

Overall, the effects of all this “screen time” on my kids appears to be:

• Slightly improving their vocabularies (those bears are very articulate).

• Inspiring them to try new high-imagination games — from talking to other parents, this is basically the Bluey effect. Our kids will watch an episode of Bluey, and then spend hours destroying our homes by building forts everywhere, enlist us as characters in some pretend-play drama, or demand we play a game of “Keepy-Uppy” for forty-five minutes with a balloon.

• The Jewish a cappella videos are teaching them about their Jewish heritage and how to sing some songs in Hebrew.

• Some minor improvements to fine motor skills, math, and reading skills via the drawing app and educational content.

• Inspiring them to sing, dance, and try to learn how to play the various musical instruments scattered around the house (my husband and his mom, who lives with us, are both professional musicians). I noticed that one of Dorota’s links she claims is about the adverse effects of screen time was actually about the adverse effects of physical inactivity (a bit deceptive there, Dorota, that was one of the first links I clicked and you misrepresented what it actually said), which suggests to me that dancing to (family-friendly!) music videos with your kids is just fine.

I should clarify — I’m not talking about a few hours of week of screen time here. We’re more in the territory of a couple hours per day, especially on rainy, miserable days (common where I live — other days, my kids get zero screen time. It’s all circumstantial.). But my kids rarely stare at the TV like zombies. Most of the time, it’s basically just background noise while they play (or dance and sing along).

If all this “screen time” has had an adverse effect on my kids’ attention spans or development, it is not (yet) apparent — they’ve hit every milestone on time or early, and the only feedback I’ve heard from other adults is that both my kids have unusually good attention spans. I also constantly hear how well-behaved they are, especially in public. They also play well with other kids — my four-year-old in particular has some pretty big Popular Kid energy.

I know it’s annoying and other moms don’t really want to read about kids who are Doing Just Fine, but my point is my kids have probably watched every episode of Bluey at least five times by now and so far absolutely none of the supposed negative effects of screen time have manifested. (My older daughter will sometimes throw a small tantrum when told she can’t watch something, but she has thrown similar tantrums over not being allowed to eat a bunch of fruit right before dinner, not being able to go to the playground because it’s pouring rain, or my husband telling her he can’t immediately take to her library — and yet I have not banned blueberries, going outside, or library visits just because my daughter occasionally throws a fit over being denied them).

The Bluey-inspired forts are a bit of safety hazard, to be fair, but so far no serious injuries (knocks on wood).

This is my main quibble with Dorota’s post and similar arguments, but the stars have aligned to give me lots of kid-free time today so let’s dig in a little more —

It’s Not Just the Screens, Stupid!

Dorota repeats ’s argument that the youth mental health crisis is mostly caused by screens.

Absolutely, yes, screens have had an overall adverse effect on mental health. But this is obviously not the only factor at play.

I think is a bit more on point with her take that screen addiction is typically a symptom of other problems, not The Problem in and of itself.

Other relevant factors in declining youth mental health include:

• Higher processed food consumption, leading to brain-gut disruption, junk food addiction and disordered eating, and nutrient deficiencies which negatively affect mood, resilience to trauma and other stressors, energy levels, emotional processing, attention etc.

• More social isolation, the breakdown of the extended family (i.e. the “village”), and over-reliance on paid childcare workers. More kids raised by single parents, more kids raised by divorced parents, more kids raised away from grandparents and other extended family members and/or without siblings and/or cousins to play with. More kids raised by highly-mobile parents who will uproot them and move to a new city or new country. (Lack of a “village” is also why so many parents use screens. Yes, we’d all love it if we had other family members and other kids around to entertain ours while we cook, clean, and juggle other responsibilities but a lot of us don’t, and if Bluey stops my older daughter from running into the bedroom while I’m trying to put her baby sister down for a nap, then I think it’s worth it — sorry, Dorota, I’d rather not risk her stuffing my oven with toilet paper while I’m breastfeeding the baby into a slumber, to borrow an example).

• More exposure to various environmental and pharmaceutical toxins and other poisons which may disrupt hormones and brain development.

• The sun was vilified and sunscreen use became more widespread, leading to Vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with nearly all common mental health conditions. Sunlight is important.

• Exposure to EMFs (electromagnetic fields), microplastics, mould, and more has dramatically increased (this is why I demanded my husband hook our TV directly up to the Internet instead of using WiFi).

• It is possible that more children are being born who are genetically very sensitive, which increases the likelihood of adverse outcomes in an unhealthy environment.

• Rates of narcissism have been steadily rising since at least the 1970s, according to social psychologists. This means there are more narcissistic parents — and grandparents — today than in previous generations. And one of the biggest predictive factors of poor mental health according to the therapy literature is having one or more narcissistic parents and/or otherwise disrupted attachment.

I was a pretty lonely child — but I never had a problem with screens, despite being allowed to watch some shows and movies and play a few games. I did, however, develop an extremely unhealthy addiction to reading books. Does this mean reading is inherently unhealthy? Of course not. My unhealthy relationship to reading was a symptom of my loneliness and attachment difficulties — similarly, as Lila correctly points out, screen addiction is usually a symptom, not the underlying cause.

It is not, in fact, significantly healthier to spend hours alone in your room dissociating into novels than it is to spend hours in your room binge-watching a favourite TV show — and a well-written TV show might actually be better for the brain and personality than poorly-written, ideologically-driven reading material.

For some related ramblings on why books / reading are not inherently Good For You (in brief: it’s what inside the books that counts, reading is not an inherently superior way of consuming stories, and there are better ways to develop your toddler’s language skills than reading books to them).

That Being Said, I Mostly Agree with Dorota

Dorota has some pretty good advice for cutting down on screen time at the bottom of her essay and makes some very solid points about the prevalence and dangers of screens being almost everywhere (it’s scary that people apparently average 4.5 hours of scrolling per day). My one quibble is her recommendation to rediscover your own reading practice — not because I’m against reading, but because my kids are just as annoyed when I ignore them to read a book as they are when I ignore them to do something on my laptop or phone. As well, she talks about getting a landline instead of using a smart phone, but my kids actually hate it MORE when I talk on my phone than when I text message or scroll, because talking in real time to another person makes it significantly more difficult to put the phone down to pay attention to them.

My point is that it is possible to have a healthy relationship to screens, and they can be incorporated into a child’s life in a way that benefits their development.

I’m a huge musical theatre nerd. I would LOVE IT if I could take my kids to musicals on Broadway every week. Obviously this is not realistic, but the good news is that now we can watch a lot those musicals together on TV. I would also love it if my husband could just play guitar all day or if we could go to concerts all the time, but that’s not going to happen, so it’s pretty cool we can watch and listen to some of our favourite musicians on YouTube. Bluey has done more to inspire my older daughter to use her imagination than I ever could. It would be great if we could read her Berenstain Bears books to her heart’s content, but I’m not convinced it’s considerably worse to let the TV read her favourite stories to her while I’m prepping a healthy snack or whatever. I think good storytelling has a lot of value, and screens can be a useful medium for that.

Jury’s out on the educational games and the drawing app. I’m not convinced, but I do like that I don’t have to worry about the baby putting a felt marker tip in her mouth when she doodles with an electronic pen on my husband’s phone.

While I’m going to hold out on letting my kids have their own iPhones for as long as possible, screens are sort of like junk food in that you really can’t protect your kids forever from them and you don’t want it to become a forbidden fruit. My alternative plan is to try to model and teach my kids to have a healthy relationship to screens (and to junk food!).

And maybe I’m sensitive to all of this stuff because I actually wish everyone in my household — young and old — would spend less time on their screens. I wish for a lot of things, but as it is, I have reality to deal with.

If all the screens in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of my family’s problems would remain (I would probably get more attentive grandparent support though, which would be cool) and the Western world would still have a significant mental health crisis.

In many ways, the loss of screens would actually make it more difficult to raise healthy children today. I’ve learned A LOT about nutrition and attachment parenting and how to reparent yourself after a difficult childhood (etc) from reading articles on the Internet, and most of the good books I’ve read on these topics I first learned about online. Screens have also made it possible for many parents to work from home, and thus have more time with their kids. And while obviously it is healthier for kids to hang out with friends in-person instead of online, there have always been very lonely kids (and adults!) out there — and now many of them are able to find community online. Those online communities may be toxic as hell, but the loneliness is the underlying issue, not the screens lonely kids turn to for support.

Yes, screens have created or exacerbated quite a lot of problems. New technologies tend to do that before we collectively figure out how to live with them in a reasonably healthy way. Historically, there were also enormous surges of violence following spikes in literacy (Europe was basically a bloodbath following the invention of the printing press) and plenty of people, myself included, have spiralled into mental health crises following periods of excess book-reading. And yet I don’t see people advocating for limiting access to books during childhood.

I have a salad to make for a family party so I’m going to wrap this up. Funnily enough, the only person who spent any time on a screen today in my family was me, typing out this essay. The flu seems to have passed and the sun was out and my husband spent most of the day outside with our kids. And I’m grateful to my laptop for making it much easier and faster for me dump out my writer’s brain than a typewriter or pen and paper would have.

C’est la vie. I’m a far cry from a perfect mother. But when I weigh it all out, I think overall the existence of screens has helped more than hindered my journey toward trying to become a “good enough” one.

All the best and have a wonderful holiday (with or without the TV!)

Note for subscribers — while I still intend on publishing posts without a paywall, I have decided to retroactively paywall some older posts which are a bit more personal and less academic in nature. If you’re a free subscriber and really want access to an old post I added a paywall to, just shoot me a message.

Also, if any parents out there are looking for a Christmas present that will help you cut down on screen time, my kids love their Tonie Box (alas, I am not sponsored by them, but it is a great toy).

Spirited, the 2022 Christmas Carol-style musical flop starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynold is finally having its moment this December, becoming a worldwide streaming hit. And I am here for it.

Spirited has everything I love in a musical: campy one-liners, over-the-top dance sequences, songs that go on a bit too long, a hopeful message about the healing power of love and human connection. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it (December only!) since it first came out; at this point even my one-year-old is attempting to sing along with the songs.

(Warning to parents, it’s not really a movie for little kids (it’s PG-13), I’m just enough of a Bad Mom to let some colourful language and sexy jokes slide in a fun flick with a good message, especially if it’s a musical).

The ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell), and Yet-To-Come (Tracey Morgan!!) are back in a modern-day retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and along with Jacob Marley and a team of Dead Sinners in the Afterlife they are trying to redeem an “unredeemable”, the most extreme case the team has had to deal with since Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

The “perp” in question is Clint (Ryan Reynolds), a fast-talking PR executive who has made himself rich and powerful by exploiting the worst aspects of the human psyche. His trip with the Spirits gets off to a rocky start after he pisses off Jacob Marley and seduces the Ghost of Christmas Past, leaving Christmas Present (Ferrell) to take over the haunt.

Clint is a tough nut to crack — he’s cynical, he sees the worst in people, and he ardently believes that people cannot change. Worst of all, he has an insanely high verbal IQ and talks circles around the Ghosts, eventually manipulating Christmas Present into revealing that he used to be Scrooge when he was alive, and that his obsession with “redeeming” Clint comes from an insecure belief that he never really changed himself; after all, Scrooge died only a few weeks after his own infamous haunt.

Like so many wounded healers, Present/Scrooge is motivated just as much by his own ego and desire for redemption as he is by changing his yearly “perp” for the better. Clint’s ability to rationalize his own behaviour and turn anything into a joke makes him immune to the whole “cosmic social worker” routine, but once he triggers Scrooge’s mask to slip, Clint’s redemption comes in an unexpected way as the two “unredeemable” men bond and become genuine “bros”.

Two sinners, after all, tend to have far more chemistry than a sinner and a saint.

Some spoilers follow, if you haven’t seen the movie and plan on it, I recommend going and watching it before returning to this essay. Put the subtitles on if that’s your thing and/or you have some trouble following lyrics on the first listen.

Subscribe now

Read more

For more on this, I was on ’s podcast — which you can listen to here.

Ancient Problemz

Half bush in blond(e) w/ Meghan Bell

Today Meghan Bell returns to discuss her latest article on blondes both natural and enhanced…

Listen now

a year ago · Ancient Problemz and Meghan Bell

I also discussed this topic on ’s podcast —

The Walt Right

Discussing Blonde Women

On today’s episode of Walt’s Right Perspectives I interview fellow Mischling Enjoyer Meghan Bell about her recent piece The Toxic Obsession With Blonde Hair…

Listen now

10 months ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Walt Bismarck and Meghan Bell

And now, on to the (revised) essay —

“I see so many beautiful, blonde-haired girls. So many beautiful blonde-haired girls walking around everywhere. In your revealing shorts. Your cascading blonde hair. Your pretty faces. And I want one for a girlfriend.”

— Elliot Rodger, Santa Barbara Shooter

Read more

I took a bit of a writing break this summer due to lack of childcare and beautiful weather that demanded I spend my free time doing stuff like yoga on the deck instead of hammering away at my laptop. To those subscribers who have been with me for a while, thank you for your patience — I have a few bigger pieces in the works, on topics which have surprised me with their complexity, and which I hope to share with you soon.

Dozens of new subscribers have joined over the past three months, and I wanted to take a moment to welcome you all. Thank you for your interest in The Cassandra Complex. To briefly introduce myself, my name is Meghan Bell, and I’m a writer and mother of two small children from Vancouver, Canada. My work primarily concerns brain development, “neurodiversity” (e.g. autism, ADHD, personality disorders, giftedness, etc), Western history (in particular the history of Western parenting practices and “poisonous pedagogies”), the impact of literacy, psychedelics and plant medicines, and spirituality — and the intersection of these topics. I draw largely from the work of and his theory of brain hemispheres.

I occasionally meander into other subjects as well, but generally everything I write about will link to one or more of these themes. I weave in personal narrative, but for the most part stick to critical analysis of scientific research and clinician anecdotes.

There are many reasons why I am interested in these topics, many of which have to do with my own family history (details of which I am saving for a book, see below). But perhaps the main reason is that I fell off (not down, there was no railing) a staircase when I was one and landed on my right parietal lobe — I suffered brain damage, my head swelled up, and I have a permanent bump on my skull from the accident. Consequently, I’ve always been a tad odd, and have had chronic pain issues for most of my life. I experienced insane healing with high dose magic mushrooms, and my mental health and pain levels have dramatically improved over the past five years because of them (and because of my wonderful husband and children).

The name of this Substack is a nod to Cassandra of Troy (as I am also somewhat of a mad princess who fears not being believed — though my parents are “new money”, and I am mostly descended from dirt-poor and working-class Southern Italian, Irish, and Scottish folks) and to “Cassandra Syndrome”, a folk diagnosis describing the distress of people who are in romantic relationships or familial relationships with high-functioning autistics (with overlap of narcissistic or borderline traits, see below) due to chronic emotional neglect, communication failures, “masking”, and meltdowns.

A Bit About My Approach to Research and Writing

I employ a strategy I refer to as “reality tunnel collage” for this Substack. This means that I read widely across academic disciplines and political ideologies; just because I cite someone positively doesn’t mean I endorse all of their opinions, and just because I cite someone critically doesn’t mean I don’t think they are correct about other things.

My goal is to dive into different “reality tunnels” to examine overlap and attempt to discern meaningful patterns. This means I will not shy away from controversial material and authors.

For more on this, please check out the longer introduction to this Substack, “Particles and Waves: On Changing Your Mind”.

As well, as I confessed in a rather weird series last winter (“Talking to God on Psychedelics”), I am a user of magic mushrooms, marijuana, and ketamine — controversially, the “downloads” of information I receive on psychedelics — typically while combining them with high-intensity yoga — are guiding my research.

This is not an unusual experience — according to Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger series, it is rather common for researchers and writers who start dabbling in psychedelics and/or mystic traditions such as Kabbalah to begin to feel as though they are being guided by some sort of spirit or spiritual forces.

When you begin to notice the spirit world, the spirit world begins to notice you.

This process has made research unusually easy for me — obscure sources seem to almost fall into my hands. Google makes it quite simple to find sources to back up ideas given to me by the spirit world.

I realize this is very strange, but humour me — I (typically) only share information from these “downloads” after extensive research to back them up, and I cite all my sources (to the best of my ability, occasionally I’ll lose track of one).

I also maintain a healthy sense of agnosticism — I do not presume that my interpretations are correct, and I will do my best to publicly address any mistakes on my part and fix them. For example, an upcoming essay will expand on and correct some mistakes and omissions from my essay “The Androgynous Mind” published last year. If you haven’t read this one yet, I highly recommend doing so over the next month before I release the follow-up.

Introducing Paid Subscriptions

In the coming month, I plan on turning on paid subscriptions — thank you to those who have pledged. I am doing this in part because I may be getting dinged by the Substack algorithm for only having free content and I want to reach a larger audience.

After some thought, I’ve decided that all content on this Substack will remain un-paywalled and free for everyone to read. Paid subscriptions are appreciated, but entirely voluntary. Your paid subscription will go to subsidizing the insane number of (often expensive) books I buy for my research, and to paying for my own Substack subscriptions.

If any subscribers have ideas for paid subscription perks you’d like me to introduce (other than paywalling the essays), please let me know in the comments section.

If you want to pledge a subscription, you can do so through the link below!

Subscribe now

Thank you again, and now for some general updates and quick thoughts …

Two Books in the Works

That all being said, I do have some content I’ve decided is best kept for between the pages of books. I am (slowly) working on expanding my essays “The Androgynous Mind” and “Talking to God on Psychedelics” into full-length books.

It’ll be a while before they are finished, but if you enjoyed either of those pieces, stay tuned, it only gets weirder. That being said, because I need to focus on writing the books, posts on my Substack will continue to be infrequent (they tend to take a long time to research and write and I’m a mother and don’t have a ton of free time).

(Maybe paid subscribers could receive copies for free when they are eventually finished? That’s at least two years away, but it’s an idea).

An Unfortunate Prediction (I Hope I’m Wrong!)

Last January, I had an “episode” where I got too high off a very strong weed vape pen and saw a “being of light” (for lack of a better description) which warned me that a period of serious illness is forthcoming — and that far more people would die than during the Covid pandemic and lockdowns.

Last year, it seemed like almost everyone we knew kept getting sick. Usually mild, chronic coughs and stuffed noses, nothing serious, but a handful of people (who are not old) had to go to the hospital with shingles, earaches, and other odd symptoms.

My husband and I didn’t get sick during the lockdowns — when we did catch Covid in early 2023, we both had very mild cases (I recovered after a day and had no respiratory symptoms, just some fatigue and body aches). But last fall and winter, we kept getting hit with back to back bugs. Now, in our case, part of this can be explained by the fact that we had a new baby and a daughter in preschool and weren’t getting enough sleep … but lots of childless people we knew were getting sick too.

Weirdly, even though people seemed sicker than during 2020-2023, there was very little media coverage or public hysteria about it.

I’m not sure why this would be the case, though I can think of many reasons why it would be. (Damage from Covid, Covid vaccines, and lockdown trauma? Maybe the WiFi critics are onto something with 5G? Air quality has gotten worse? Healthy food is expensive and people are eating more crap?) I flirt with conspiracy theories (reality tunnel collage, remember) and during the “bad trip” I was temporarily convinced there was some sort of grand depopulation scheme that this is the next stage of (if you wanted to kill a lot of people, a good way to do it would be to release a not-so-deadly virus, overreact to it, then release several significantly more deadly viruses to little fanfare and no public policy to contain them).

Of course, there doesn’t need to be conspiracy — what we’re seeing could just be the natural consequence of decades of food and drug companies prioritizing profits over people, of disconnection from Spirit / Nature / God, of our age of narcissism. I recently learned from a Kabbalah podcast that the ten plagues of Egypt can be interpreted as metaphors for ten plagues of the human soul (Pharaoh represents the Ego)1, and I think from this lens, it’s just possible we’re in the plagues, literally and metaphorically.

Anyway, I can’t shake the feeling that this cold and flu season is going to be even worse than last year’s (it’s already started, it seems!), so I thought I’d repeat the warning (in a slightly less insane way). I made a bunch of predictions on psychedelics in 2020 which I didn’t publish (other than a few Twitter rants before I deleted my account) and most of those came true so heck maybe I’m channelling Cassandra more than I realize.

Now is a good time to try to kick any unhealthy habits or addictions (I gave up coffee this summer for matcha lattes!), to get outside and soak up the sun’s rays for all it’s immune and anti-inflammatory benefits, and to stock up on herbal medicines like elderberry, echinacea, and oil of oregano. And for the love of God, please limit Tylenol use to extremely high fevers, there are many crunchy alternatives for pain relief and fever reduction that will not deplete glutathione levels and destroy your liver.

If you think you need to “detox”, I highly recommend both Shilajit (after your first meal of the day, drink lots of water) and Moringa (right before bed, does not taste terrible in a latte with raw honey, maybe add some cinnamon and turmeric and black pepper as well). The combination seems to move quite a bit of waste out of your system, plus both are nutrient-dense, they’ll aid in weight loss (if that’s something you desire or believe you’d benefit from, much healthier than Ozempic), improve skin, hair, and bone health, and the Moringa will help you sleep. Cod liver oil is a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamins A and D as well. I’m sorry that none of these things taste good, but they are effective.

If you’re open to it, I really do believe that psilocybin mushrooms are the closest medicine out there to a panacea, not just because of the direct benefits but also because they alert you to unhealthy factors in your life so you can correct them. Recent research has also come out finding that psilocybin slows aging — something I’ve definitely noticed (my husband looks younger than he did five years ago, and frankly I look great for someone in her late thirties with two small children and insufficient sleep).

(Proceed with caution, read this first — I also do not recommend psychedelics for anyone under the age of 25).

And don’t forget to hug your loved ones and to spend a lot of time with friends and family. Loneliness is a better predictor of early death than smoking 10 cigarettes per day — I could ramble on about oxytocin and cortisol but it’s quicker just to say that “love is medicine”.

In Which I Get Into Substack Disagreements

Over the past three months, I’ve responded to pieces by other authors with some criticism in the comments and notes. These have generally been poorly received by the authors in question, which frustrates me because I did try to word my concerns at least somewhat politely.

For those who missed the original notes, I’ve summarized these conflicts below:

(1) It’s Not Just Jealous Uggos Who Disliked That Sydney Sweeney Ad

Last month, I saw multiple takes on the now-infamous American Eagle ad that claimed that the backlash to it was basically caused by jealousy, and, as claimed in an essay (followed up by several podcast appearances), “mate competition” and “romantic desperation.”

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

The Weird Reactions To The Sydney Sweeney Ad Are a Smokescreen For Widespread Romantic Desperation

Read more

a year ago · 97 likes · 24 comments · Rob Henderson

Here’s a similar take from another writer I am a paid subscriber to, :

The Same Drugs

Your self-worth is not American Eagle's responsibility

In the midst of the Sydney Sweeney is aware she is hot and that her hotness can sell jeans moment, we have what feels like a return to the days of yore—the heyday of feminist blogs and hot-taking and cancel culture that peaked in around 2015, demanding for most of the decade that followed that everyone be…

Read more

a year ago · 178 likes · 14 comments · Meghan Murphy

(No, I didn’t cancel my subscriptions — and I’m not going to go after Meghan the same way I’m going to go after Rob here because Meghan bothered to respond to my criticisms, whereas Rob ignored me).

I was going to shrug this all off because I was on vacation and I don’t wear jeans or care about Sydney Sweeney anyway, but then I realized something …

Sydney Sweeney is not a real blonde. She bleaches her hair. Now, arguably this is part of the joke — “genes” is crossed out for “jeans” — but this still rubbed me the wrong way. I’m a natural blonde, and trust me, some people are really freaking weird about blonde hair.

Frankly, it looks like both sides were played by the marketing team at American Eagle. While some of the “woke” responses were a bit silly2, the “anti-wokes” looked far stupider because they were tricked into impulse-buying jeans they might never wear and those among them who do hold White supremacist views gave their money to a company run by Jews because of a bottle blonde with nice tits (who is now reportedly in a relationship with a Jew, making all of this even funnier).

Ryan Reynolds, playing a PR exec in the Christmas Carol parody Spirited, described the strategy perfectly in this excellent song and dance number.

Here are the relevant lyrics:

Oh, it would be sure, simple to boost your market share
We’d rebrand you as nostalgic, tell your customers you care
But the world is what? Tribal! So if you want your sales to soar
It’s not enough for folks to love you, they gotta hate your rivals more

As an expert, my advice is feed that hate, ‘cause hate is strong
Folks will gladly pay your prices to prove those Christmas killers wrong!

As was inevitable, the racists who liked the American Eagle ad eventually outed themselves with their responses to the Levi’s ad with Beyonce (accusing Beyonce of “appropriating” blondness from White people because she’s wearing a blonde wig and channelling Marilyn Monroe, conveniently forgetting that Monroe was also fake blonde) and the Gap jeans ad featuring KATSEYE (calling it “woke” because … it has hot and talented people of colour dancing in it? HOW DARE THEY!).

In response to the backlash to Beyonce, I pointed out (several times) that not all natural blondes are “White” — there are natural blondes who are 100% Middle Eastern (e.g. Persian, Lebanese, Syrian, Afghan), many natural blondes who are mixed race, and even a whole tribe of Black natural blondes in the Solomon Islands.

The responses were hilarious. Several people on Instagram insisted that blonde hair still belongs to White people and it’s different when Sydney Sweeney bleaches her hair versus Beyonce wearing a wig because Sweeney has “blonde features” (which, woo boy, there’s a lot to unpack there). The general consensus seemed to be that while yes, it is a fact that not all natural blondes are “White”, bleaching and dying your hair blonde (and I guess wearing blonde wigs?) is a part of “White culture” and people of colour doing this is therefore “cultural appropriation”.

Now, this is a stronger argument than “natural blonde hair belongs to White people” but honestly, I’m not sure why anyone would want to take this position because it’s a bit embarrassing for the Whites. But sure, pouring hydrogen peroxide and neurotoxic and carcinogenic dyes onto your hair for the sake of vanity can be considered part of “White culture” if you really want it to be.3

While we’ve seen more diversity in the media over the past few decades, hot White blonde women have hardly disappeared. Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter are two of the biggest pop stars in the world, and Sydney Sweeney had big roles in several popular TV shows long before the AE ad (and rightly so, she’s a good actress).

I suspect what’s happening here is that some White people are not actually asking for proportional representation and celebration of White beauty, but instead a return to the days where White people were over-represented and White women were automatically considered more attractive than other women simply for being White — and ethnic women who wanted to go Hollywood felt like they had to alter their appearance to be more “White-passing”. (Lots of money to be made off nose jobs4, skin-whitening products, and hair bleach!)

Here’s the thing … Sydney Sweeney is very pretty and has excellent breasts, but other than that, she’s not exactly unusually stunning, at least by Hollywood standards. Rob doesn’t seem to understand that beauty is subjective. Yes, people find traits associated with good health, fertility, and symmetry universally beautiful, but there is still such a thing as “taste” and “type”.

Maybe some of the “dumb men” Rob is complaining about aren’t engaging in “mate competition” at all … maybe some of them just think Sweeney is mid because they are attracted to a different kind of beauty.

And because Sweeney isn’t exceptionally beautiful (by Hollywood standards), the ad is easily interpreted as suggesting her “great genes” are related to her Whiteness5, blue eyes, and (fake) blonde hair. There’s a pretty long history of this kind of beauty being prized over other kinds (which is why an insane number of women bleach their hair blonde), and it’s just, well, “dumb” to pretend this isn’t the case. And, as I highlighted above, this was clearly deliberate.

Furthermore, Rob is not exactly in a position to be criticizing other people’s physical appearance (sorry, Rob, but you started this).

On the other hand, I am well positioned to call this BS out because I am too good-looking (no, I’m not claiming to be hotter than Sweeney), too blonde, and too happily-married to be credibly accused of being a jealous uggo engaging in “mate competition”.

Anyway, while I initially intended to drop this topic because I thought it was irrelevant to my research, I fell down a rabbit hole and discovered that it’s actually reasonably within the bounds of my usual interests. Plus almost all commentary on blonde hair comes from people who are not (naturally) blonde and I feel like it’s time for a Real Blonde to weigh in with some Real Blonde Energy. Plus the Calabrian in me feels compelled to mock the racists who think blonde hair belongs to fully White people.6

Consequently, an upcoming essay will explore the history of blonde hair (and how it’s been fetishized) and the spiritual significance of hair in general. Hot take, but maybe all that bleach and hair dye is dampening people’s connection to Nature and God.

(2) Please Don’t “Hothouse” Your Children

This one is a response to ’s series bragging about how he taught his two-year-old son to read, leading his kid to be a three-year-old who read The Hobbit (as detailed in a recent article with ).

The Intrinsic Perspective

How to teach your two-year-old to read

All children find themselves living in a new world papered with strange hieroglyphics. Most of the time, they must wait to be enrolled in an institution to slowly learn how to read the signs of civilization. According to experts, most children in America should have learned to sound out simple wo…

Read more

2 years ago · 427 likes · 125 comments · Erik Hoel

This is an example of “hothouse” parenting — as I’ve pointed out in Erik’s comments section (much to his ire), reading is developmentally inappropriate until a child is at least three years old. This is because the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant and rapidly developing in the first three years, while the left hemisphere takes over around age three — reading and writing lateralize to the left hemisphere.

I’ve gone into this topic in several essays, including “The Drama of the Gifted Children” and “The Return of the Refrigerator Mother Theory”, but the gist is that there is quite a lot of (growing) evidence that “hothousing” children increases the risk that they will later be diagnosed with a mental illness (in particular anxiety disorders), with high-functioning autism and/or ADHD, and even gender dysphoria. This is why the Substack is filled with parents talking about how high their transgender child’s IQ is.

Trying to teach a child to read too early not only risks frustrating them and sending the message that parental love is contingent on achievement, it may cause long-term abnormalities in brain lateralization, such as is seen in some cases of autism (a condition known to be highly co-morbid with hyperlexia, or speed-reading in a mechanistic way without understanding the meaning of the text).

No, there’s nothing wrong with teaching your child to read before kindergarten, just wait until they are three or four. Why start before that? So the parent(s) can brag about it publicly and monetize it? There’s a long history of parents doing this, and it frequently ends poorly (as the case of William Sidis, discussed in the “Gifted Children” essay, illustrates).

Or, as Erik writes, maybe it just makes it easier to ignore your little kid:

“Holy smokes, does early reading make parenting easier sometimes!

It’s all the advantages of an iPad, none of the guilt. You’ve unlocked infinite self-entertainment. Long drive? Bring a book. Or five. Roman toddles into restaurants clutching a book as a backup activity, and reads while waiting in boring lines. It’s also calming, and so helps with emotional regulation. Toddler energy descending rapidly into deviance? Go read a book! It’s a parenting cheat code. I don’t know if this alone justifies the hours spent, but it sure is one heck of a benefit.”

Cool, Erik. I have a daughter around the same age, and in boring car rides and line-ups and restaurants, my husband and I just do stuff like talk to her, play silly games, or play music and sing together.

“Calming and helps with emotional regulation”, this is literally the same argument some parents give for distracting their kid with an iPad.

Erik’s kid might be doing great and genuinely love reading, but this won’t be the case for every child and Erik doesn’t seem to consider the possibility (or care) that some children might be harmed by his advice.

Here’s the relevant question — do the benefits of teaching your kid to read at age two outweigh the risks of a child pushing themselves to read before it is developmentally appropriate because they associated reading with parental attention and approval?

I’ll let have the last word:

(3) It’s Not as Simple as “Narcissists Are Appropriating Autism”

To continue the theme above …

Earlier this summer, published a popular article claiming that “autism was hijacked by narcissists”.

Psychobabble

"The Spectrum": How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group…

Read more

a year ago · 1786 likes · 584 comments · Hannah Spier, MD

In her article, Hannah makes a remarkably incorrect claim. She writes:

“Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures.”

This isn’t true. As I wrote in my response:

“[H]ave you read Kanner's paper? The children are verbal. Kanner literally quotes them in the paper.

It’s likely many of the original “autistic” children in both Kanner and Asperger’s studies were children of narcissistic parents, parents who “hothoused” their children, and parents who were “cold” and emotionally neglectful.

Kanner wrote:

“The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.”

He also notes that “there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background” of autistic patients and that among his cohort “there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers”.

Asperger described his patients as “little professors”. These kids were verbal.

You’ve got it backwards — autism is multifactorial, and the original cases likely all had a variety of causes, but in at least some of them, early childhood emotional neglect and narcissistic parenting were factors. Narcissism and autism bleed into each other — both are disorders of left hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction.

Later, as brain damage from pharmaceuticals, environmental toxins, and dietary factors began to become more commonplace, this brain damage (which manifests as the severe form of autism seen in around a quarter of cases today) was lumped in under the “autism” diagnosis, which now serves as an umbrella label, obscuring the variety of causes.”

I go into this in detail in “The Return of the Refrigerator Mother Theory”, but the crux is that autism (and ADHD) and Cluster B personality disorders share considerable symptom overlap and some underlying causal factors, including being characterized, according to , by right hemisphere dysfunction and abnormalities and left hemisphere dominance.

Frequently, what feels like high-functioning “autism” from the inside is experienced by others as “narcissism” or “borderline personality”.

So, no, it’s not as simple as “narcissists are appropriating autism”, it’s much, much more complicated than that and it’s unhelpful (and, ironically, an example of left hemisphere black and white thinking) to draw such a clear distinction between them:

For those who are new, I’ll share my usual caveats about autism — it’s not one condition and it doesn’t have one cause, it’s an umbrella term describing a cluster of symptoms that can arise from multiple causes, with no cause applying to all cases or case only having one cause. So no, I’m not suggesting all diagnoses of autism are related to parenting factors or narcissism.

For details on this, please read “What Causes Autism?”

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading, and stayed tuned for new material.

— Meghan

Loosely — because I don’t believe “autism spectrum disorder” is one condition but instead an umbrella term which obscures the various causes of the behaviours associated with the diagnosis — I’ve been using a definition of “autism” based on ’s books and Christopher Badcock’s books. According to McGilchrist, “autism” is a cluster of behaviours associated with right hemisphere dysfunction and hypo-function and left hemisphere dominance, while Badcock similarly — but with key differences — defines it as a condition of hypo-mentalism, or underdeveloped or dysfunctional mentalistic cognition, associated with gene imprinting that skews toward paternal imprinted genes over maternal ones.1

While processing and interacting with some of the reactions to my most recent essays, something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the quarter of autism diagnoses which are severe and include significant intellectual disability.2 I’m only talking about “high functioning” experiences of “autism” here, and in particular, those people who have come to identify as “autistic” (or “ADHD”) at an older age after being an odd, socially awkward “gifted” child.3

For the rest of this essay I will use the word autistic in a non-clinical sense, and “autism spectrum disorder” when speaking of clinical diagnoses. All terms are used loosely, and I’m going to grossly oversimplify the science and theories I reference to keep this short. I expand on several points in the footnotes, and recommend you read this on your browser instead of in your email.

If McGilchrist and Badcock are correct that the “West” has become lopsided cognitively in favour of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere, and mechanistic cognition over mentalistic cognition — then, presumably, most of us in the West are at least sub-clinically autistic using the definition above.

But the experience of autism — as people use the term colloquially — is in part relational.

In other words, people identify their social experiences as “autistic” in relation to their environment, culture, and family. The feeling of being “alien”, of seeing the world differently, of picking up on things that others seem not to, of not understanding the social “code”.4

And so, what are the experiences of right-brained people in a society dominated by the left hemisphere?

If almost everyone around you is mechanistic and left-brained and you are more mentalistic and right-brained, then you would feel like the strange one. The alien.

Which raises the question — are some people identifying with an autistic experience not because they are disconnected from the right hemisphere, but because they are some of the only ones in our society who aren’t?5

Now, I’m spitballing more than usual with this piece — I’m not sure whether this is happening or not, it’s just something I suspect because it would explain why a minority of people describing high-functioning autism appear to believe that “autism spectrum disorder” is associated with being right-brained instead of left-brained.

From ’s website “Heart Centred Minds”:

“More and more individuals are being born with learning differences due to a Heart/Right Brain Orientation. My experience as a teacher convinced me this is a “connective learning difference” rather than what we have misunderstood as an Autism Spectrum Disorder or related Deficit. […]

These individuals are here with a Connective Intelligence: sensitive, inspired, empathic, visionary and in some way, large or small, creative. But, lacking a left-brain filter, they can also easily be overwhelmed by linear input, sensory overload, and chemicals. […]

What I saw while teaching were heart/right-brain connective individuals struggling and reacting to a left-brain-driven world of information and separation.”

I’ve gotten into a handful of disagreements with Magilen in the comments on this Substack, as her definition of “autism spectrum disorder” is essentially the opposite of how it’s defined and described in McGilchrist’s, Badcock’s, Kanner’s, Asperger’s, and many others’ books and papers.

I’ve noticed similar (mis)characterizations of “autism spectrum disorder” on social media, usually by self-diagnosed young women who run influencer accounts about their “autistic” experience.

In the past, I was quick — and perhaps unfair — to dismiss their descriptions as examples of the anosognosia (lack of awareness of deficits) associated with left-hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere hypo-function or dysfunction.6 However, it is possible — assuming I’m on to something here — that some of these people are describing a real experience of being right-brained in a left-brained world.

This ties into my arguments in the “Refrigerator Mother” theory essay — if “Complex PTSD” from low nurture and social isolation mimics many of the symptoms associated with autism, it can be inferred that children who are epigenetically more right-brained — who are more connected to their intuition, sense of meaning-making, spirituality, sense of story, creativity, non-verbal communication cues, and to nature and their own bodies — would be far more sensitive to our “cold” sub-clinically autistic Western society.

What we would have in these cases is not right hemisphere hypo-function or hypo-mentalism but instead a traumatized right hemisphere in individuals who intuitively feel that something is “off” in our left-brained world.

“Trauma”, loosely speaking, lateralizes to the relational right hemisphere.7 While many mental illnesses are characterized by left-hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction or hypo-function, a notable exception is depression, which is associated with the right hemisphere (and with the default mode network associated with mentalistic cognition).

All of this is complicated by the possibility that people who rely more on the right hemisphere — and who, perhaps, do not have as strong of a left hemisphere as many high-functioning, high IQ autistic people do — would theoretically also be more vulnerable to environmental and pharmaceutical toxins and poor nutrition, in particular when exposed prenatally or in the first three years of life when the right hemisphere is disproportionately developing.

To borrow McGilchrist’s metaphor, people with a more powerful emissary (the analytical, logical left hemisphere) are better equipped to function without the guidance of a healthy master (the more intuitive right hemisphere).8

Orchid and Indigo Children

In The Orchid and the Dandelion (2020), W. Thomas Boyce describes a spectrum of sensitivity from “dandelion” (low sensitivity, high resilience) to “orchid” (high sensitivity, low resilience) in children.

Nancy Ann Tappe coined the term “Indigo Child” sometime in the 1970s, referring to children who supposedly were more spiritual, intuitive, headstrong, and resistant to authority. This is generally dismissed as a pseudoscientific “New Age” concept — or as undiagnosed ADHD — but there is some overlap between Indigo children and the idea of “orchid” children proposed decades later. Both are also loosely similar to “highly sensitive people” or HSPs.

Dandelion children tend to do fairly well regardless of circumstance — they are more resilient to dysfunction, neglect, and abuse. Orchid children, on the other hand, thrive in healthy, nurturing environments, but wither and become physically and/or mentally ill under adverse conditions. Orchid children, depending on their circumstances, disproportionately are among the healthiest and sickest children in studied samples. Like most concepts in psychiatry, this is a spectrum, likely involving hundreds of genes, and most people fall somewhere between the extremes of “dandelion” and “orchid”.

Boyce’s theory has come under some scrutiny for being overly simplistic, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

What it highlights, however, is that many of the genes that are known to be associated with autism and various mental illnesses and personality disorders may be mostly genes that increase sensitivity, and appear to be adaptive in a healthy environment (e.g. they may increase neuroplasticity and general intelligence).

By sensitivity, I am referring to an increased responsiveness to the influences of an environment, not to increased “sensitivity” to the thoughts and feelings of other people — if anything, many of the “orchid” genes might be associated with lower amounts of cognitive and affective empathy, at least in combination with stressful or traumatic childhood experiences.9

This is an argument raised several times by Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal (2022). As well, in Chicken Little: The Sky Isn’t Falling (2021), Erica Komisar notes that children born with one or two short alleles on their serotonin transporter gene are “more susceptible and more reactive to stress, as well as more vulnerable to mental health issues like depression and anxiety,”10 and is also associated with increased aggression, higher suicide risk, and traits associated with “ADHD”. These “orchid” alleles can also lead to greater positive outcomes in supportive environments — and the emotional responsiveness goes both ways, with some studies finding that people with short alleles are more likely to have heightened “happy” responses to positive stimuli.

Other potential “orchid” genes include MTHFR at rs1801133 and COMT at rs481811, as well as the infamous “warrior gene” (low activity at MAO-A). Both MTHFR rs1801133 and COMT rs4818 are also associated with an increased likelihood of a person being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, while the “warrior gene” is associated with a higher likelihood of aggressive and impulsive behaviours and is linked to higher severity of some autistic symptoms.

Robert Sapolsky discusses the importance of the interactions between genes and environment in his 2017 book Behave:

“Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood [of antisocial behaviour{ … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. […] In a similar vein, the low-activity variant of the serotonin transporter gene was reported to be associated with adult aggressiveness … but only when coupled with childhood adversity.”12

In addition their association with autism, many of these “orchid” genes are also associated with psychopathy.13 Autism and psychopathy share some traits, but are distinct from each other in how they affect empathy — autistic people have deficits in cognitive empathy (theory of mind skills), associated with the right hemisphere. Psychopathic individuals have reduced or abnormal affective empathy, or the ability to “feel” what other people are feeling. The two spectrums are somewhat co-morbid with each other.

In James H. Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside (2013), Fallon — a neuroscientist who discovered he had the brain of a psychopath — acknowledges that while he had always dismissed the concept of “Indigo” and “orchid” children as “woo-woo”, when he looked into it, he realized that he actually fit the descriptions of both quite well.

Fallon, who died in 2023, was what he described as a “pro-social” non-violent psychopath, whose subclinical psychopathic traits contributed to him achieving an incredible amount of success in his career as a scientist.14 Fallon notes that adverse childhood experiences are extremely common among violent psychopathic offenders in prison and attributes his positive outcomes — despite sharing brain and genetic similarities to many violent criminals — to his loving, nurturing childhood.

Fallon had his DNA analyzed and found that he had many of the gene variants previously mentioned, including the “warrior gene”.15 He also speculates in his book that he has a mild case of Bipolar II.

It’s possible that many “orchid” genes increase neuroplasticity. This would provide some advantages to general intelligence, but the downside would be a vulnerability to addictions (including screen addictions), and, arguably to ideology. Maybe higher neuroplasticity — an ability to rewire your brain quickly and adapt — is one of the reasons for the observation that people with higher intelligence are more vulnerable to being sucked into cults.

Are We Getting More “Sensitive”?

It’s possible that many of these “sensitivity” genes are becoming more common. Erica Komisar writes:

“For reasons that scientists still do not understand, an increasing number of babies are being born with a genetic sensitivity to anxiety and depression. This tendency can be mitigated in the first three years of a child’s life by sensitive and empathic nurturing, and the consistent emotional and physical presence of their primary caregiver or mother.”16

Komisar didn’t include a citation so I’m not sure what studies she’s referring to and I can’t verify this — but if true, this would partially explain the frequent observation that younger generations appear to be less and less resilient.17

I can only guess at reasons why this might be occurring (higher rates of maternal stress? changes to our diet? marriage patterns? higher child survival rates?) — if anyone has any theories, please drop them in the comments!

Right Hemisphere Trauma

As I previously mentioned, “trauma” seems to disproportionately affect the right hemisphere of the brain — the right hemisphere is more sensitive to environmental influences than the left hemisphere. Similarly, Badcock argues that what he calls mentalistic cognition is more sensitive to environmental influences throughout development. The default mode network is part of mentalistic cognition, and is known to be disrupted in many mental illnesses and cognitive differences, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychopathy, autism, schizophrenia, and several personality disorders.

Given that many of the “orchid” genes increase sensitivity to the environment, is it possible that they are associated with increased right hemisphere activity and strength and with increased mentalistic cognition, i.e. gene imprinting in favour of maternal gene expression?

(Yes, yes, I know I’m deviating from scientific terms, but bear with me).

Left-hemisphere dominance appears to the brain in survival mode. Perhaps, when the sensitive right hemisphere is traumatized, the left hemisphere stops listening to it to numb out its pain.

I was chatting about this essay with my friend , and learned — as I frequently do with her — that she had been thinking along similar lines.

“I am quite convinced that autism is a hyper-developed/active right hemisphere after it is “broken” and reformed to perform in a left-brained system.”18

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with my uncle, a criminologist, about the history of “poisonous pedagogies” in parenting books.

He cautioned me not to advise people to “trust their instincts.”

“Sometimes, their instincts are bad.”

What are “instincts” anyway? I tend to believe they largely come from the gut microbiome, and from early childhood experiences (e.g. repetition compulsion).

Perhaps when the brain-gut is disrupted — due to poor diet, heavy metal accumulation, or anything else — and/or right hemisphere development and attachment is disrupted by early childhood stress, our right hemispheres send unhealthy “gut reactions”, unhealthy instincts, to the left hemisphere to act on.

Are “Orchid” Children Autistic?

Some no doubt are, due to the mix of “sensitive” genes and environmental, pharmaceutical, and nurture factors. But, generally speaking, if someone doesn’t have significant impairments in mentalistic cognition and right-hemisphere social functions — in theory of mind skills and non-verbal communication — and is considered to be highly intuitive and creative, then I do not think “autism” is the best description for them, even if they have some of the other traits associated with it.

Christopher Badcock19 defines autism as being characterized by hypo-mentalism or low mentalistic cognition. However, many high functioning autistic people are also hyper-mechanistic. I’ve observed that on social media, descriptions of autistic traits include some hypo-mentalistic ones and some hyper-mechanistic ones — loosely, the former are traits that are deficient in autistic people that most people have (e.g. theory of mind skills, the ability to read facial expressions, default mode network functioning), while the latter are traits that are more pronounced in hyper-mechanistic people (e.g. semantic memory, spatial skills, logic, attention to detail, sensory sensitivities).

Hyper-mechanism, without mentalistic deficits, is not autism, by this definition.

Complex PTSD is a better diagnosis, if we need to use one — or, as I proposed in a previous essay, “Broken Mirror Syndrome”. While I personally wince at this one because it’s the label I was stuck with as a kid, “gifted child” — by Alice Miller’s definition — may also be appropriate.

If you prefer a diagnosis in the DSM, bipolar disorder or ADHD are probably closer fits, depending on the person.

Or you can reject diagnostic labels, and instead think of yourself as one of the mistaken zygotes — intuitive, creative people born into families or subcultures which fail to nurture the right hemisphere.20

At the same time, if almost everyone around you is “masking” and presenting a “false self”, it makes a lot of sense that many people would struggle with non-verbal communication cues and theory of mind skills — not because they lack the wiring to learn them, but because the cues they are exposed to are not authentic.

“Orchid” genes are not “bad” genes — almost all, if not all, serve some sort of adaptive purpose — even genes like the “warrior gene” which are associated with aggression and psychopathic traits. High sensitivity can be a good thing — it keeps many people away from harmful stuff like polyester clothing.

The genes are good — the environment is the problem.

Western society has become increasingly fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic, autistic, left-brained. Many of us have lost the ability to authentically connect to others, including our own family members and children.

If almost everyone around you is speaking in scripts and wearing a mask, following rules without thinking, relational autism — the feeling of being alone and “different” and of not being able to connect — is inevitable.

Most of us here have probably experienced it.

Final Thoughts

I was talking to a therapist at a party recently and she asked what I was writing about. I described this essay and the theory that the West has become cognitively lopsided in favour of mechanistic cognition and the left hemisphere.

She noted that while she had many clients who fit my description, she also had many deeply spiritual, mentalistic, right-brained clients — the problem with both groups, she said, is that they went to the extreme in either direction. The hemispheres are not integrated, not working together, not listening to each other.

I think most people realize that the West needs some sort of collective healing and at least a slight change of course — to heal the brain-gut, the right hemisphere, to reconnect to each other, to our own bodies, to nature, and to Spirit, while still staying grounded in science and logic and law and other left-hemisphere strengths.

Top-down thinking (right hemisphere) needs to meet bottom-up thinking (left hemisphere) — mosaic thinking?

I’ve argued this before, but I suspect that a necessary precondition to healing most mental health issues is to first heal the gut microbiome and any chronic neuro-inflammation.

And if more children are being born with these “sensitive” genes, then the West needs to dramatically alter how we approach childrearing and family life — and nutrition and pharmaceuticals.

As always, I encourage discussion in the comments section. This was more speculative than most of my work, so any criticisms in particular are welcome so I can revise, hone, and adjust these ideas.

Wirh thanks to for talking me through this, and to for the inspiration for this piece in a conversation we had over in Notes.

Our final grade was comprised of scores on four essays (which I did well on) and 20% class participation. Lacking the strong background in biology that the older students had, I barely spoke in most class discussions.

Then, one afternoon, during a unit on love and attachment, the professor described Laplace’s Demon to us.

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)

The professor asked the following question:

“If Laplace’s Demon knows the exact position and movement of every particle in the universe in the past and present, does the Demon understand love?”

He asked for a show of hands for “yes”. Half the class raised their hands.

Then he asked for a show of hands for “no”, the Demon doesn’t understand love.

I was the only person who raised her hand.

I told the class that while Laplace’s Demon would know every fact there is to know about love, would know the mechanisms of the chemical reactions, would know every love story past and present and be able to predict who would come to fall in love, the Demon still wouldn’t understand love unless he fell in love himself.

The professor asked the “yeses” to counter my argument.

I don’t remember everything that was said — this was well over 16 years ago — but I remember some of the arguments that annoyed me. That if Laplace’s Demon knew everything there is to know about the mechanics of love, he would also understand what it was like to fall in love without having done so, in the same way that a theoretical all-knowing oncologist could understand cancer without having had cancer himself.

“No,” I said, “He wouldn’t understand what it’s like to have cancer, so his understanding would be incomplete. And “love” is infinitely more complicated than cancer.”

They claimed the mechanics of love (and cancer) were all there is to know about love. That the Demon, knowing all there is to know about the mechanics of love, would be able to concoct some kind of potion or something in order to fall in love himself.

I countered that if the Demon induced love in himself, then the love would be artificial and the Demon’s awareness of this would undermine any true understanding. The Demon would not be able to fall in love, being separate from humanity and so all-knowing that authentic feeling would be near-impossible.

And even if the Demon were capable of falling in love, I added, he would only understand his particular subjective experience of love. No one, nothing, no matter how omniscient, could fully understand “love”. Love is inexplicable.

The argument seemed to go in circles. The “yeses” did not seem to get my point.

Finally, a purple-haired graduate student stood up and offered that I was making a poetic argument, not a scientific one.

I was pissed at her dismissal. I felt that I was making a scientific argument. At the same time, I was exhausted and a bit depressed. How could all these people think so little of love? How could they be so narcissistic as to think it was possible for a theoretical omniscient demon to fully understand something as ineffable as love? (The subtext I thought I picked up on was that they seemed to believe that if they could learn all the facts of something like love, they too would “understand” it — which I found ominous in a bunch of psychology and biology honours and graduate students). How could they be so confident, and yet so obviously wrong? (And what the heck was up with the half of the class that didn’t say a word the entire time, or cast a vote either way? Cowards.)

I don’t have much to say about this story, other than that feeling I had in the classroom is one that frequently returns, including in a minority of my interactions on Substack.

In retrospect, having since read ’s works, I’ve realized that this was an example of a right-hemisphere intuition on my part butting up against the dogmatic black-and-white scientism of my classmates’ overactive left hemispheres.

“[With the left hemisphere] Any subtlety, any nuance, anything that comes from context—and context alters everything—everything that comes from the realm of the implicit is missed. And the realm of the implicit, by the way, includes everything that we really value. So it includes, for instance, the beauty of nature, poetry, music, narrative, myth, ritual, sex, love, the divine—all these things remain implicit. They can be made explicit but when they’re made explicit, they change their nature and they become less than they were. And they may become completely other than they were.”

—Iain McGilchrist1

Recently, I’ve also thought that a more difficult question would be whether God understands love. I asked my husband and he said “yes”. I said “maybe.” If anyone understands love, fully understands it, it’s God, but it’s also possible that some things are just impossible to completely understand — even for God. Maybe love, as a concept, is an asymptote.

My psychedelics-fuelled sense of God is of a consciousness that is evolving alongside us, in a fractal relationship akin to the one we have with our gut microbiomes, one that cannot predict the future with certainty. In this sense, I reject the foundational determinism of Laplace’s Demon. Knowing the placement and movement of every molecule and atom in the universe both past and present can yield reasonable predictions about the future, but the future is still unwritten. There’s chaos, free will, uncertainty.

It’s too bad Pierre Simon Laplace lived before Benoit Mandelbrot and the discovery of fractal geometry.

I write with a lot of confidence about some very difficult topics, but I don’t claim to know anything with certainty, nor to understand any concept fully (and if I’ve implied this, it was an error on my part that warrants correction).2

I’m also cautious that over-intellectualization can destroy some of the wonder, the magic, of our world.

In 2022, my husband and I went to Mexico with our daughter. We got into a conversation with a local who spoke English, and he told us that he wasn’t scared of the coronavirus because “love” and “God” would protect him.

I launched into a long-winded mechanistic explanation about oxytocin and cortisol and the science behind why love and faith can heal.

He waved his hand to shut me up.

“I don’t care about any of that science crap,” he said. “All I need to know is love is medicine.”

We can know things intuitively without understanding them mechanistically. And this can be a more powerful and effective way of knowing some things.

Of course, I think the mechanistic explanations are important. You can’t win an argument with someone who is disconnected from their right hemisphere intuition without appealing to the logic of the left hemisphere.

But I want to appeal to the right hemisphere too — I pray for collective healing of our right hemispheres, a return to intuition, to connection, to nature, to Spirit, to metaphor, to meaning.

A return to love.

I ended up getting a fairly good mark for participation in that class, even though I barely participated in any of the other discussions.

So I guess the professor, at least, thought the poet had a point about love.

“We’ve catalogued every way a father can fail—missing football games, traveling too much, never saying “I love you”—and clearly tied it to conduct disorders, risk-taking, and low empathy. Yet, we refuse to name the female equivalent needed to prevent psychiatric symptoms later in life. Doing so would mean admitting there is such a thing as optimal maternal care.”

— , “This is a Good Mother”, 2025

The “refrigerator mother” theory1 of autism is slowly, but surely, making a comeback.

Frequent readers of this Substack will know that I have argued for over a year now that there is an element of truth to the “refrigerator mother” theory — that I believe that while “cold parenting” or “early childhood emotional neglect” is far from the only cause of autism and not a cause in every diagnosed case, it is nonetheless a significant cause in many cases of both diagnosed and self-diagnosed autism.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen multiple posts on Substack that essentially argue for or support this theory. I’m going to dive into them, but first, the usual caveats:

• Autism is not one “condition.” It is an umbrella term describing a cluster of symptoms (e.g. deficits in non-verbal communication, repetitive behaviours) which can arise from a multitude of causes which all interact with each other. These causes include nurture, genetic, environmental, pharmaceutical, and nutritional factors. If you took 100 cases of autism, you could easily have 100 different causal profiles. No cause applies to all cases, and no case will only have one cause. Each case should be seen as unique.

• “Refrigerator mother” is a bad name. The healthy nurturing of a child is the responsibility of both parents and also of extended family members and the broader community (i.e. “alloparents”). Singling mothers out is both unfair and incorrect. The “refrigerator mother” name arose from Kanner’s original paper on autism, but this was a misinterpretation / distortion. Kanner wrote that “there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background” of autistic patients and that among his cohort “there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers”.2 You’ll note that he does not single out mothers — this came later, and the “refrigerator mother” misnomer was popularized by Bruno Bettelheim, not Kanner — and that he explicitly does not suggest that there was obsessiveness or a lack of warmth in the parents and other family members of all of his patients.

As I’ve previously written, the “refrigerator mother” theory was discarded not because of evidence against it, but due to a backlash from parents and the feminist movement, and by the introduction of the vaccines-cause-autism theory. To be clear, other causes of autism have been identified in clinical research — but the existence of other causes does not disprove that “cold parenting” is not also a cause. They merely prove that cold parenting is not the only cause.

Nonetheless, the “refrigerator mother” theory fell out of favour sometime around the 1970s.

But now, slowly, but surely, it’s making a comeback.

Several ABA (applied behavioural therapy) websites have recently added articles acknowledging early childhood emotional neglect as a potential cause of autism.

“The relationship between emotional neglect and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is complex. Emotional neglect is not the sole cause of autism, but it may contribute to the development of certain characteristics associated with ASD.

Children who have experienced emotional neglect may exhibit autistic traits at a higher rate compared to those who have not experienced neglect. A study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found a correlation between emotional neglect in early childhood and the presence of autistic traits in children.”3

Pretty much all of these articles will clarify that not all children who experience early childhood emotional neglect will become autistic, and not all children diagnosed with autism experienced early childhood emotional neglect. However, the correlation between the two has been found in several studies and case reports.

Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker, has also been making the rounds on the conservative podcast circuit lately discussing the importance of attentive nurture — in particular from mothers — in the first three years of a child’s life.

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”4

For this, she has received considerable backlash5, but nonetheless, her message is clearly resonating with a lot of people.

also circled around this point in an essay from a couple of years ago in the publication Unherd, “Fragile Students Just Need a Hug”. In it, she argues that “woke” activist-oriented students have many traits associated with early childhood emotional neglect. While she does not point this out, it is well-established that many “woke” young people — in particular those invested in gender ideology — are on the autism spectrum.

“[T}he “meltdowns”, the emotional dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.”6

So Obvious, It’s Probably True: Complex PSTD as a Subtype of Autism

published the below piece on Friday.

Holly’s Substack

So Obvious, I'm Probably Wrong

I have a thought — a not-quite-hypothesis — that has been bouncing around my brain for awhile. It’s about autism and the astonishing rise in diagnoses over the last twenty-five years…

Read more

a year ago · 123 likes · 38 comments · Holly MathNerd

She writes:

“This is just one of those things that drives me completely insane because it seems so obvious to me, but I look around and see….literally no one talking about it.

Autism is, at core, a disorder of social and emotional development — a neurological difference that impairs a person’s ability to perceive, process, and respond to social cues in a typical way. It affects things like eye contact, emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and theory of mind (the ability to intuit what others are thinking or feeling).

One way this can arise — not always, but plausibly and increasingly — is through a lack of consistent, fully-present attention from the adults around a child.”

Holly goes on to argue that the rise in smartphone use (and addiction) by parents and other caregivers may be one of the factors behind the recent spike in autism diagnoses — especially as the diagnostic criteria has widened to include people with milder autistic traits. I’ve made the same argument a handful of times (e.g. here and here).7

In addition to the rise in smartphone addiction by parents and other caregivers, several authors have pointed to the rise in early daycare use (in particular before the age of one) as one of the explanations for rising rates of autism, ADHD, and other psychiatric conditions.

Here’s an article from about how early daycare use may be partially responsible for rising rates of autism:8

Year Zero

Universal Early Childhood Daycare Has Been Proven to Damage the Children Who Have Been Through It

By every objective measure, child mental health has gotten dramatically worse in the last few decades. Depression and anxiety, formerly rare in young children, have skyrocketed. In 1986, fewer than 2% of adolescents used a mental health service. Now, nearly a quarter of high school students have a diagnosable mental disorder. Lest we be tempted to blame…

Read more

3 years ago · 410 likes · 318 comments · Laura Wiley Haynes

Here’s Holly MathNerd again:

“One reason so many adults think they’re “on the spectrum” is unresolved trauma. A lot of traits that get coded as “spectrum-y” or “neurodivergent” aren’t about neurology at all. They’re adaptations to chronic emotional neglect or childhood chaos.”

Holly is only partially correct here. Chronic emotional neglect and childhood chaos affect brain development and wiring and brain-gut health, so it’s still about neurology.

makes a similar mistake in this recent piece:

Disaffected Newsletter

Clearing out the bullshit

Enough of the euphemisms, and enough of the pretending that psychiatric illnesses and child abuse, that we know are those things, are somehow not those things…

Read more

a year ago · 134 likes · 86 comments · Josh Slocum

He writes, with his usual bite:

“In light of the recent hysteria over R. Kennedy's remarks on autism--normal, factual, plainly true remarks devoid of malice but full of good will--many people are asking:

“Do these hysterical, angry people protesting Kennedy actually want to avoid finding the cause of autism? Is it that they actually want there to be autism, and they're genuinely angry that someone is working to cure it?”

Yes. The answer is yes. Not an equivocal yes, not a subtle yes. A plain yes.

Yes, these people want “autism” to be real and uncured. But more, they want the perception of autism the way it helps their image as mothers to continue without question. Put another way, these women don’t have “autistic” children. They have children they’re abusing, and who are reacting to this abuse in the ways that normal creatures react to mistreatment. They’re acting out, they can’t control their emotions, and they’re developing lasting psychiatric trauma.”

This is echoed in a poignant quote from ’s new book, The Children We Left Behind9:

“Selfish parents not only exist in our friends and family circles, but are also prominent figures who hypnotize the public with excuses for their neglect.”

Now, I think Slocum is correct that in a minority of cases, children who are labelled as “autistic” have one or more abusive parents, and the abuse is one of the causes of their “autistic” traits. I also agree that many of these parents cling to the genetic explanation of autism (“neurodiversity” activism) and oppose research into other causes of autism because, as he says, it helps their image. However, I think early childhood emotional neglect — what Holly was talking about — is far, far more common than abuse.10

Furthermore, many parents — who love their children — may not realize that they are neglecting them, because in part thanks to the history of “poisonous pedagogies” in the Western world, there is a widespread cultural misunderstanding about the amount and kind of nurture and babies and toddlers need to thrive.11

The loss of the “village” — separation from or lack of support from extended family in childrearing, lack of support for mothers, financial pressures, and other factors also make it far more difficult for parents to provide as much attention and care to their children as they may wish to. Both 12 and Christopher Badcock13, in their respective books, have argued that much of the Western world is sub-clinically autistic (as Badcock puts it, we are in the “Age of Asperger”) — I would add to their arguments that the history of poisonous pedagogies in the Western world discussed by Alice Miller14 and the breakdown of the “village” are both large contributing factors to this.

Loneliness and poor attachment in childhood also increases the risk of loneliness and attachment disorders in adulthood — neglected children may struggle more to form meaningful friendships and romantic relationships, and, of course, this is also known to be the case with “autistic” children too.

I also think that Slocum is incorrect to say that these women do not have “autistic” children. “Autism” is clinically diagnosed based on observed and reported behaviours, and self-diagnosed based on how much a person relates to the descriptions of “autism” they find in diagnostic criteria and questionnaires, in articles, and on social media. In other words, if these children have behaviours that look like “autism” and identify with the descriptions they’ve read online of “autism”, then, technically speaking, they are “autistic”.

The criteria for “autism spectrum disorder” does not specify or exclude causes. As well, there is considerable evidence15 that early childhood emotional neglect was a contributing factor to the “autism” of many of the children in both Kanner and Asperger’s studies.

The “refrigerator mother” theory of autism was the dominant theory for decades in the 20th century for a reason.

Let’s look at common symptoms of early childhood emotional neglect and “Complex PTSD”, a folk diagnosis used to describe the complex trauma of people who experienced chronic abuse or emotional neglect in early childhood16:

• Sensory sensitivities / sensory processing issues

• Increased amygdala activation (enlarged amygdala in early life, shrunken amygdala in adulthood)

• Difficulties with emotional regulation

• Substance abuse (including refined sugar and processed food addictions)

• Self-harming and suicidality

• Dissociation

• Lack of interest in peers / impaired ability to form authentic relationships

• Repetitive play and “stimming” behaviours such as rocking and head-banging

• Outbursts / meltdowns

• Difficulty sleeping / insomnia / nightmares

• Anxiety / depression

• Theory of mind / cognitive empathy impairment

• Prosopagnosia / difficulty interpreting facial expressions

• Obsessive-compulsive tendencies / obsessiveness / perfectionism

• Rejection sensitivity

• Black and white thinking

• Disordered eating

• Chronic gastro-intestinal issues / IBS

• Chronic migraines

• Early puberty in girls / endometriosis and/or PCOS in girls

• Developmental delays, including social and language deficits

• A deep feeling of being “alone” / chronic feelings of emptiness

• Maladaptive daydreaming

• “Masking” or the creation of a “false self” / lack of sense of self

• Non-heterosexual sexual orientation17

All of these symptoms also characterize or are highly correlated with autism spectrum disorder.

It is well established in clinical literature that parents with Cluster B personality disorders — narcissism, borderline, histrionic, and/or antisocial — typically are not very nurturing parents and are more likely to abuse or emotionally neglect their children (I’ll add to this that they are also more likely to “hothouse” them, which I’ll discuss further later in this essay).

Research has found high rates of personality disorders and other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, among parents of “autistic” children.

Arguably, “Complex PSTD” is a subtype of what is called “autism” — one defined by its cause (early childhood emotional neglect) as well as its symptoms. This makes it a more useful diagnosis, but unfortunately, the DSM does not currently recognize it, despite significant advocacy from clinicians.

“Autism spectrum disorder” is a diagnostic bucket for chronic brain inflammation and atypical behaviours caused by everything from early childhood emotional neglect, epigenetic complications, severe nutrient deficiencies, toxin exposures, and adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals (and more). The diagnosis essentially serves to obscure the actual causes of these differences, to protect both pharmaceutical companies and food companies, the broader culture, and caregivers from criticism.

All of these causes bleed into each other — parents who neglect their children would also be more likely to feed them a diet high in processed “convenience” foods, leading to nutrient deficiencies, gut disruption, disordered eating, and vulnerability to refined sugar addiction (and other addictions later in life). Chronic stress and nutrient deficiencies impair healing and detoxification, which increase vulnerability to adverse reactions to environmental toxins and pharmaceutical poisoning, including vaccine injury.

Frankly, I think we should abandon the diagnosis altogether and replace it with a series of diagnoses (such as Complex PTSD) that address the suspected underlying causes as well as the observable characteristics. I feel the same way about the personality disorders, in particular “narcissistic personality disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” — which also share considerable symptom overlap with “autism spectrum disorder” and Complex PTSD. The terms autistic and narcissistic are useful in a non-clinical sense to describe states of being, but the subtle difference between saying someone is “autistic” or is “narcissistic” versus that they have “autism spectrum disorder” or have “narcissistic personality disorder” opens the doors for an understanding of these states that are more conducive to healing.

Brains are plastic. Gut microbiomes can change, often very quickly, with dietary and lifestyle changes. Toxins can be detoxed or avoided. Inflammation can decrease, and so can inflammatory behaviours. Healing is possible, but only if the person believes they can heal and wants to heal, and only if the underlying causes / trauma is identified and addressed.

The Dangers of Hothousing Kids

Two common types of child maltreatment that can disrupt healthy development but do not fall easily into either the “abuse” or “neglect” categories are helicopter parenting — overprotection and excessive involvement in a child’s life — and hothouse parenting.

“Hothouse” parenting is an extreme form of helicopter parenting, where the parents push a child to excel at a specific skill (e.g. chess, a musical instrument) and/or academics through intense study and practice, typically starting in the early toddler months or even during babyhood or infancy.18 It is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States and also very common in some Asian countries (e.g. South Korea, which has one of the highest rates of autism in the world).

, in Bad Therapy (2024), also describes “hothouse” parenting and indicates that it is very common among the affluent communities she focusses her work on. She describes mothers choosing their children’s activities and even their friends, while at the same time “manipulating” them by offering patronizing, “fake” choices. Parents make each day “activity-jammed, presided over by a series of adults who judge [children’s] progress”, which contributes to children being so tired, “it feels as though [they] are missing a layer of skin.”19

A common example of hothouse parenting that can increase the risk of autistic development is teaching a child to learn to read before the age of two — this disrupts normal brain development of the right hemisphere by pushing a left-hemisphere dominant task on the child prematurely, and may explain some of the abnormal lateralization seen in some high-functioning autistic cases.20

It is likely that many of the “autistic” children in Kanner and Asperger’s cohorts were hothoused children. From Kanner:

“The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.”

Recently, , an autistic detransitioner, wrote an essay describing her childhood with “hothouse” parents who “worked tirelessly to create the most enriching environment possible.”

Maia’s Substack

Trans: When Adolescent Survival Strategy Becomes Family Breakdown

Note: The "play” button at the top is not a decoration. It is an audio-taped version of myself reading this essay. Also note, there are videos in the first section of this essay, so if you are a listener, keep this in mind…

Read more

a year ago · 42 likes · 4 comments · Maia Poet

Maia Poet has also written:

“One common theme I have noticed from upper middle class parents of Gen Z kids, who are the group most vulnerable to adopting trans identities in adolescence or young adulthood, is that our parents are usually helicopter parents.”

Now, Maia is not quite correct here, though I have no doubt that her observations reflect her experience — while affluent children with helicopter parents are one of the groups most vulnerable to rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the group that appears to be the most vulnerable is actually foster children (with autistic traits) — which is what you would expect if early childhood emotional neglect were a significant risk factor for both autism and gender dysphoria.21

One gender specialist in Vancouver even boasted that half the children in his clinic were from the foster-care system.

To be clear, in most cases, both helicopter parenting and hothouse parenting are manifestations of a very anxious and misguided kind of love for the child in an increasingly hyper-competitive and difficult world.

However, in at least some cases, “hothouse” parenting seems to stem from the parents’ narcissistic ambitions for their child (and themselves), and the child’s achievements are used as a source of “narcissistic supply” for the parents.

“It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.”22

There’s nothing wrong with providing an intellectually enriching environment for your children, as long as the tasks are age-appropriate, and as long as any focus on academics and other left-brained cognitive achievements are well-balanced with right-hemisphere development: with play, with socializing, with singing and dancing and goofing around, with exercise and sport, with nature, with an appreciation for cooking and healthy whole food, with connection, with love.

And the academics should wait until after the child is three. The first three years should belong to the right hemisphere.

Here’s Erica Komisar:

In addition to autistic development, “hothouse” parenting also appears to increase the risk that the child will later develop gender dysphoria — as was the case with Maia Poet.

Both Lisa Littman and 23 have reported that an unusually high number of ROGD (rapid onset gender dysphoria) cases are “gifted” children. I have also observed that many of the distressed parents on the (Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans) Substack mention that their ROGD child is “gifted”, with some even going as far as to mention the child’s specific score on an IQ test.

I discussed the dangers of hothouse parenting and how it may increase the risk of a child later being diagnosed with “autism” and/or ADHD and/or developing gender dysphoria in great detail in “The Drama of the Gifted Children”.

The Challenge for Feminism

Currently, there are two major camps of belief around what is called “autism” — the “neurodivergence” activists (autism has always existed and is genetic, and rising rates are due to better identification and widening diagnostic criteria) and the “anti-vaccine” activists (autism is caused by vaccines and did not exist before them).

These two sides tend to be at each other’s throats, with the neurodivergence activists claiming that vaccines do not cause autism and pointing to studies that find no connection between the two, and anti-vaccine activists pointing out that “genes do not cause epidemics”.

While there is some good evidence for both genetic causes and cases of vaccine injury triggering autistic regression, I tend to think both sides are overstating the effect size.

The anti-vaccine activists are correct that more children are autistic than in previous generations, and that cases of autism have become more severe. This strongly points to various environmental and pharmaceutical causes — not just vaccines, but many, many other factors as well.

The neurodiversity activists are correct that there is evidence of cases of high functioning autism throughout history, before the invention of and widespread use of vaccines — of course, if early childhood neglect is a significant risk factor for autistic development, this makes perfect sense, as there have always been abused, neglected, hothoused, and orphaned children.24

I’ve outlined some of the evidence that early childhood emotional neglect is a significant factor in at least some diagnosed (and self-diagnosed) cases of autism. The other significant factor that has quite a lot of evidence backing it is nutritional deficiencies and diets high in processed foods and refined flour and sugars.

“Autism” is largely characterized by social deficits (in particular in non-verbal communication) and chronic gastrointestinal issues, nutritional deficiencies, and picky eating (e.g. ARFID, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder). Early childhood neglect and dietary factors should be at the forefront of the conversation around it.

What the genetics and vaccines arguments have in common is that they let caregivers and the broader culture off the hook for the rising rates of autism and other psychiatric conditions in young people.

I do not think this is a coincidence.

If “autism” is mostly genetic or mostly caused by vaccines, then we do not have to ask the question — do babies and toddlers need one (or more) attentive caregivers at home taking care of them and cooking healthy food for them in order to thrive?

Did the influx of women — specifically mothers of young children — into the world of work cause more harm than good?

As Erica Komisar has said:

“In an effort to guard women’s rights, children’s rights were thrown under the bus.”25

I am aware of the feminist arguments here. I am also aware of the counter-arguments, the “anti-feminist” arguments. I’m not going to go into them — this essay is long enough as it is — but I think both have valid points. I’d love to see some discussion about this in the comments.

I will make the following points, however:

• According to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018), approximately half the jobs in the West are “bullshit”, as in they do not need to exist — they contribute nothing positive to society (or actively harm it), they are busy work, or they exist because the necessity for them is created by the culture of overwork (e.g. with both parents working, the need for more daycare workers increases).

• Most women do not have high-powered, interesting careers. Most women — most people — have jobs that kind of suck.

• If parents left the workforce en masse to stay at home with their children, this would shift more power to workers (fewer workers) which would hopefully result in higher wages.

• The maternity leave conversation is complicated by the fact that extended maternity leaves disproportionately put pressure on small and independent businesses — I personally think the world is better with more small businesses and fewer government jobs and jobs at large corporations (the latter which disproportionately make up Graeber’s “Bullshit” jobs).

• Both surveys and my personal experience indicates that the majority (not all) of mothers with young children wish they could not work, work part-time, or work from home in order to spend more time with their children. The typical barriers to this are financial need (many mothers are now the primary breadwinner, many families cannot survive on a single salary) and the investment of years and thousands of dollars into elite educations in order to reach high-powered careers — which makes them difficult to give up.

• Women have higher rates of burnout in the work force than men do.

• Many women are interested in creative careers. Being a stay-at-home mother who is financially supported by your partner (or family) is very conducive to writing novels (or a Substack!) or painting or building a business as a social media influencer (etc). I work on my essays by getting up in the morning before my kids do, and taking advantage of naps and my older daughter’s preschool. This, of course, applies to all jobs that can be done from home with flexible hours.

• Not all women want to have children, and that’s fine. And for the highly careerist women who do want children, stay-at-home fathers and grandparents make good primary caregivers as well. (And nannies are preferable to daycare).

I’m going to wrap this up by sharing a beautiful essay by :

Modern Femininity & Motherhood

The Unique Challenge of Becoming a Mother for Intellectual Women

The Left Brain Dominated Intellectual…

Read more

2 years ago · 192 likes · 62 comments · Kyra

Like the author, I am very “left-brain dominated” and cerebral. I actually fit many of the stereotypes of the “refrigerator mother” well — I was very standoffish and cold when I was younger (I’ve worked on this), I like my books, and I can be quite obsessive (just read literally any essay on this Substack).

Anecdotal evidence indicates that “geniuses” and people with extremely high “IQs” (of both sexes!!) are more likely to make poor parents (yes, yes, there are exceptions). Regardless of your sex, I think if you are the type of person who wishes to pursue their brilliance at an extremely high level, it is probably best not to have children. Go be a genius! We need geniuses — including female ones.

Because becoming a parent — a good parent — means you have to sacrifice some of your ambition. You have to learn how to become more cognitively balanced, more right-hemisphere oriented, less autistic, in order to nurture your children. And this can be difficult — but it’s far from impossible.

My older daughter is in half-day preschool instead of daycare, so I know a lot of stay-at-home and part-time / flex-work mothers. Something I’ll note: these women tend to be very smart (and beautiful, and kind, and frequently very cool). There’s a myth out there that STAH mothers are not as interesting or intelligent as working moms — or that they are “wasting” the talents they have on motherhood. I think this is completely nonsense.

As a STAH mother, I’ve found that learning how to become a better cook — including developing and honing my own healthy recipes — and learning about nutrition and folk medicines to be very intellectually stimulating. (Cleaning and laundry suck, but someone has to do it — also some people like cleaning? I’ll admit that sometimes I need a microdose of psilocybin and a story I tell myself about banishing the dark spirits in my house with lemon essential oil to become more productive in this area).

While I found it heartbreaking to give up playing ice hockey for my kids (I still play dodgeball once a week, but I was on four sports teams prior to motherhood and am now down to one), there’s a lot of joy in exercising with your kids — taking babies out for long walks strapped to your chest in a wrap, dancing with them, or baby yoga (my kids both love baby yoga, but it does come with the real risk that they will vomit on your face).

If you love reading, audiobooks are a great option — I’ll admit I listen to them during those long breastfeeding sessions. Modern technology, has, in many ways, made stay-at-home motherhood significantly more enjoyable than it would have been in the 1950s or 60s — even for those of us who are overly cerebral and nerdy.

, in his own way, makes this point in the following essay:

Always The Horizon

How Feminism Will Finally End

Between 1950 and 1970 women flooded into the western work force. This occurred for many reasons, but chief among them was corporate propaganda and a general dissatisfaction with life that women were experiencing at the time. To properly understand the flaws of modern feminism and its apocalyptic consequences, it is necessary to examine the original impe…

Read more

2 years ago · 665 likes · 276 comments · Copernican

He argues — correctly, I think — that one of the drivers of women into the workforce was “suburban boredom”, and that technologies such as social media have made staying at home with children significantly less boring. This, he argues, will contribute to the end of feminism.

Maybe.

But I think — I hope, at least — that the bigger factor will be the widespread recognition that our children need us. Fathers are great, grandparents are great, but babies and toddlers want Mommy.

And I hope that our love for them is greater than our ambitions.

As always, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts (and criticisms) in the comments section. If a debate gets going, I ask that everyone be respectful.

“By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. And we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”

This claim, naturally, has pissed a lot of people off (and I suspect this essay will too, but as always, I ask you to stay with me to the end). Others are celebrating. Some people, like me, are skeptical — but hey, I wish him good luck, and I suspect he’ll be able to provide some answers by September, but a definitive list of all the causes of autism? I doubt it. Autism is way too complicated for the puzzle to be pieced together in such a short period of time.

This is a topic I’ve heavily researched and have some strong opinions about (as anyone who has read some of my past essays and recent notes will be well aware — there will be some repetition if you’re a frequent reader). So I’m going to go out on a limb and talk about the history of autism, some of the theories out there, the evidence for them, and make some predictions.

Conversations about autism tend to be fraught, and one of the reasons for this is that autism is most likely not a single condition, but rather an umbrella term for a cluster of symptoms that can arise from a variety of causes.

Andrew Solomon, in his bestselling book, Far From the Tree, states:

“It seems likely that autism is a blanket term. Autistic behavior may prove to be a symptom of a variety of causes […] No single gene or consistent set of genes causes the syndrome, although many genes that have been identified as functionally connected to one another, forming a network in the brain. It is not yet clear whether autism-related genes always or sometimes require environmental triggers to become active, nor, if so, what the triggers may be.”1

And in The Matter With Things, writes:

“Autism is, in my view, not a unitary condition. In keeping with this, I believe, on the one hand, that the variety of presentations of autism is so great that we should talk about autisms; and it is well recognised that schizophrenia, too, takes many different forms.”2

Later, he adds:

“The point is that though there may be a virtually infinite number of causes of a complex system’s malfunctioning, there are only so many ways in which that malfunction can manifest itself.”3

Or, as neurodiversity activists succinctly put it: “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”

In other words, there is no one cause of “autism”, and in all likelihood no single case of “autism” has only one cause, and no cause applies to all cases. When I start talking about the potential causes, if you see items on the list that you believe don’t apply to you and/or your child(ren), I already explicitly said that no cause applies to all cases. I even bolded it for you! No need to swear at me or call me names in the comments section.

I’m going to start with the original — and most controversial — theory about autism. This is one that RFK Jr. and his team are almost certainly not looking into or reviewing the literature on, in part because bringing it up risks people freaking out at you, trying to destroy your career, and/or icing you out of polite society.

“Refrigerator Mothers” and Early Childhood Emotional Neglect

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”4

The term “autism” was coined in 1911 by German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. Just over thirty years later, the two landmark papers describing “autism” in children were published by Hans Asperger (Germany, 1944) and Leo Kanner (United States, 1943). Asperger’s paper went largely unnoticed until the 1980s (Nazi Germany and all that), but Kanner’s paper sparked the first controversial theory of the cause of autism.

Kanner states (emphasis mine):

“It is not easy to evaluate the fact that all of our patients have come of highly intelligent parents. This much is certain, that there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background. The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.

One other fact stands out prominently. In the whole group, there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers. For the most part, the parents, grandparents, and collaterals of persons strongly preoccupied with abstractions of a scientific, literary, or artistic nature, and limited in genuine interest in people. Even some of the happiest marriages are rather cold and formal affairs. Three of the marriages were dismal failures.”5

However, Kanner then gave the following important caveat:

“The question arises whether or to what extent this fact has contributed to the condition of the children. The children’s aloneness from the beginning of life makes it difficult to attribute the whole picture exclusively to the type of the early parental relations with our patients.”6

Despite Kanner’s caution, his paper would set the stage for the rise of the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism (also known as Bettelheim’s theory of autism), which was popularized by Bruno Bettelheim in the mid-1900s.

From Bettelheim:

“The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.”7

Bettelheim’s theory has “fallen out of favour” since the 1970s, and Bettelheim — who was revealed to have lied about his academic credentials and was allegedly abusing autistic children put in his care after he prescribed “parentectomies” — has been thoroughly discredited. However, a handful of psychologists and doctors, such as , Frances Tustin, and Alice Miller, continued to believe that there was an element of truth to the refrigerator mother theory, and the theory is still believed by some people in Europe (e.g. in France) and South Korea.

Even renowned trauma guru Gabor Maté once published a paper “Autism is the Child of Social Disconnection”, which received some backlash (for example). Maté then dropped the subject, and his most recent book, The Myth of Normal (2022), conspicuously makes no mention of autism — although Maté does reiterate his claim, from 1999’s Scattered Minds, that ADHD is caused primarily by childhood stress and trauma. He is presumably aware of the high comorbidity and significant symptom overlap between ADHD and autism, but does not mention this.

Alice Miller wrote:

“A child’s autism is a response to his environment, sometimes the last possible response open to a child […]

I heard of similar, though still rare cases of autistic children being cured. A technique was developed, the “holding” technique, aimed at the need of the lost, lonely, alienated child to be held […]

I have known that this is not necessarily a genuine cure. The mother’s complete physical and psychic devotion to the autistic child can no doubt work miracles, provided she refrains from making making pedagogic demands; otherwise she will create the drama of the gifted child — the very thing the child was warding off with his autism.”8

To provide an example as to why Miller was cautious about the “holding” technique, consider this passage from Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes:

“Holding therapy required mothers to “tame” their children by hugging them for an hour each day — by force, if necessary — while gazing intently into their eyes and confessing their innermost feelings […]

In one of [Margaret Welch’s] training vider heos, a mother lies on top of her autistic daughter in bed, telling her how angry she is because her daughter doesn’t listen.

“How does that make you feel?” the mother says.

“I can’t breathe!” her daughter groans.

“Well, I don’t care about that right now,” the mother snaps back. “You’re not going to get up until we resolve this.”9

In Toxic Psychiatry (1991), apparently argues that the refrigerator mother theory was discarded because of pressure from parents (I haven’t read his book so I cannot confirm or provide a quote).

Here’s the thing — it’s well established in the psychological and counselling literature that parents with Cluster B disorders make some of the worst parents. People with Cluster B disorders are famously incapable of taking responsibility and for lashing out at anyone who causes them “narcissistic injury”. So it logically follows that parents with Cluster B disorders would freak out at anyone who tried to point out a relationship between how they nurtured (or didn’t nurture) their children and their child’s autism. (See ’s work for more on Cluster B parents).

I tried to track down studies “disproving” that “cold” parenting was a cause of autism (as opposed to studies finding other possible causes of autism, which abound), and was unable to find any. I did find multiple articles, social media posts, and books claiming the theory was “debunked” and there was “no evidence” for it, always with no sources cited. And yet there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence from autistic adults who claim to have had one or more parents with narcissism or borderline personality disorder (examples here and here).

A 2016 study found that parents of autistic children have higher rates of psychopathology:

“The frequency of having personality disorders was higher in the parents of autistic children than controls (p<0.01). The most common psychiatric conditions among parents of autistic children were melancholic personality, persistent depression and negativism (44.6%, 29.2% and 25.4% respectively). Alcohol and substance use and antisocial personality were the least prevalent. Clinical patterns of personality disorders (avoidance, depressed, sadist, negativist, masochist), severe personality pathology (schizotypal, borderline, paranoid), clinical syndromes (generalized anxiety, somatoform, bipolar, persistent depression, PTSD), and severe clinical syndrome (thought disorder, delusional disorder) were higher in parents of autistic children than controls (p<0.05) and prevalence of histrionic personality disorder was lower (p<0.01).”

There are a lot of Instagram and TikTok accounts run by mothers which are centred on and exploit their “autistic” children (some of these children have not yet been diagnosed, despite their mother’s fervent doctor-shopping). I frankly think this — and all exploitation of children on social media by their parents — is one of the great evils of our time.

While I do not think all parents of autistic children are narcissistic or emotionally negligent (most probably aren’t, I’m going to discuss other causes later), I do think the parents who exploit their “autistic” children on social media, or otherwise parlay them into some sort of “activist” career, probably are. Simply because this is a really narcissistic thing to do.

Almost all of these “autism moms” appear to be white (or white-passing) and middle class to affluent. It’s worth noting that this is the same demographic that has unusually high rates of trans-identified children (see Lisa Littman’s 2018 study) and also the group with the highest rates of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases (more than 90% of MSBP cases are perpetuated by women, specifically mothers).

There is also anecdotal evidence that high-functioning autistic adults (Asperger’s) are more likely to be estranged from their parents. Studies from orphanages have found that lack of nurture increased the likelihood of autistic traits and even death in infants.

As described in the video above, neglected and abused children also have higher rates of disordered eating, including anorexia — which is highly co-morbid with autism.

This is further supported by animal studies; for example, in Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiment where rhesus monkeys were raised in isolation:

“Some would sit alone, clutching themselves. rocking “autistically.” Others would be markedly inappropriate in their hierarchal or sexual behaviors.”10

It is well-established from research that disabled children, including autistic children, are more likely to be abused — and murdered — by their parents. One study found that around one in four autistic children who were admitted to psychiatric care had a history of being abused, while another study found that between 40% and 50% of autistic adults reported being sexually abused in childhood.

A frequent criticism of the “refrigerator mother” theory is that many of the “cold” parents described by Kanner were autistic or sub-clinically autistic themselves — and thus passed their autism onto their children genetically, not through nurture. I’ll discuss genetics later in this essay; for now, I’ll simply note that this is a reasonable point, one which Hans Asperger actually made back in the 1940s.

From his paper, “Autistic psychopathy in childhood” (emphasis mine):

“We want only to state briefly that over the course of ten years we have observed more than 200 children who all showed autism to a greater or lesser degree. We have been able to discern related incipient traits in parents or relatives, in every single case where it was possible for us to make a closer acquaintance.”

He also pointed out — as many neurodiversity activists do today — that autism appeared to present differently in girls and women.

“While we have never met a girl with the fully fledged picture of autism, we have, however, seen several mothers of autistic children whose behaviour had decidedly autistic features. It is difficult to explain this observation. It may be that autistic traits in the female become evident only after puberty.”

That all being said, the fact that many parents of autistic children are autistic or sub-clinically autistic themselves can also point to the passing down of intergenerational trauma (as well as genetics; it’s probably both — epigenetics). Yes, genes run in families, but so do parenting styles, trauma, and environmental and dietary factors.

Consider this:

• Mothers who had traumatic childhoods are significantly more likely to have children with ADHD or autism.

• High levels of anxiety and depression in mothers are linked to worse behavioural outcomes in autistic children.

• Prenatal maternal stress is associated with increased risk and severity of autistic and ADHD traits in children. As well, complications associated with stress, such as preterm birth (second source), preeclampsia, and NICU stays are associated with increased risk of autism.

Research has found that autistic children’s symptoms improve when their parents are trained to better understand and interact with them; one California-based study reported in Today’s Parent found that “[b]abies treated early for symptoms of autism showed no signs by age [two].” In The Guardian, one mother describes how with professional help she was able to go from a “refrigerator mother” to a “super parent,” leading to improvement in her child. Another article in The Atlantic tells the story of an autistic father who consciously worked to be more nurturing and has a healthy daughter. The evidence that nurture matters more than genes is also backed up by animal studies, such as this 2005 study by Michael Meaney.

Modern neuroscience finds that the right hemisphere of the brain is disproportionately developing and dominant during the first three years of life. As notes in his books, autism is related to right hemisphere abnormalities and dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance — he also claims this of narcissism, borderline personality disorder, body dysmorphia, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and anxiety disorders, all of which are known to be highly co-morbid with autism or to have significant symptom overlap.

Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker, writes:

“The first three years of your child’s life are a critical window in which to develop your baby’s right brain and nurture her emotional health and social development through attachment, play, and nonverbal communication. The development of right-brain attributes, like the ability to read social cues, relate to others, and develop lasting emotional connections, lays the foundation for later cognitive development; without that foundation a child may not be able to tolerate the frustration and mistakes for effective learning or the resilience to recover from making a mistake.”11

In The Matter With Things, McGilchrist notes:

“It is relevant that the important areas for mother-infant attachment, recognition of the mother’s face and voice, and of self-other distinction are all in the right hemisphere, which is normally dominant in early childhood.”12

The other main criticism I’ve seen of the “refrigerator mother” theory is that parenting is no worse today than in previous generations — and so “cold” parenting cannot explain the dramatic spike in autism cases or autism severity. This strongly points to the “autism epidemic” being caused by modern environmental factors. I agree with this criticism more than I agree with the “genetics” one, however, I think the following should also be considered:

• More mothers work full-time now than in the 1940s-60s.

• Consequently, early daycare use has ballooned. Even under the best circumstances, babies and toddlers will be emotionally neglected in a daycare setting due to the child-worker ratios. ( wrote an interesting piece arguing that the rise in daycare use is contributing to the autism epidemic). It’s worth noting here that, depending on the child, daycare use after the age of two or three does not appear to have any significant negative consequences — and for kids who are socially oriented, it may be something they very much enjoy.

• Many researchers and cultural commenters have observed that rates of narcissism have been steadily increasing in the West since at least the 1970s. This means that there would be more narcissistic parents (and grandparents) today.

• There is higher mobility now, people are more likely to move away from their parents and extended family — more people are raising children without the benefit of grandparents and other extended family members, resulting in lower overall nurture due to lack of allo-parenting.

• Many millennials are reporting that their boomer parents are unwilling to help (very much) with childcare, suggesting that even when grandparents do live close by, they are providing less support to parents and contributing less allo-parenting than in previous generations (this is also related to people having kids older, and thus grandparents are older).

• There are more only children who are growing up without the social benefits of siblings (and cousins they see regularly).

• There are more children of single parents.

• The invention of the smart phone and proliferation of social media also means that more parents (and grandparents!) are addicted to their phones, social media, games etc. From 2006 to 2009, the number of 30-49-year-olds who were on social networks rose from 6% to 44%.

• Social media use may exacerbate narcissism.

• Narcissistic parents now have more opportunity to exploit children than in previous generations due to social media.

The history of parenting books and practices in the West is also relevant here. According to Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good (1980), starting shortly after the invention of the printing press, parenting books started being published — primarily out of modern-day Germany — advocating for practices that many would consider emotionally neglectful and/or abusive, which she referred to as “poisonous pedagogies”.

For example, Dr. Moritz Schreber wrote several bestselling parenting books in the 1800s which, among other things, instructed parents not to hug or cuddle their children. Schreber is credited with being largely responsible for multiple generations of German children growing up “without direct, loving contact with their parents” and other family members. Three of his children were later diagnosed with mental illnesses, with one committing suicide, and another becoming a famous case study for schizophrenia and gender dysphoria. Miller suggests that “poisonous pedagogies” contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany.

I discuss poisonous pedagogies in my essay “The Dark History of Parenting Books.” I include a list of traits which Miller describes as being common in children who were raised under “poisonous pedagogies”, many of which also frequently appear in descriptions by self-identified autistic people of their experiences (e.g. “masking”).

I am aware that intergenerational toxic parenting practices are not unique to the Western world, but an in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this essay.

As well, common and relatively new parenting practices such as using a stroller (instead of carrying babies in a wrap or sling) and putting babies to sleep in a crib and sleep-training (instead of co-sleeping) contribute to babies today growing up with less physical contact and face-to-face interaction than hundreds of years ago.

Erica Komisar writes:

“I see many children on the streets of New York in their strollers, facing away from their mothers or nannies who are on their cell phones or who look disengaged themselves; they are anything but present. The babies have a glazed look in their eyes, which is the result of feeling disconnected from the person who is central to their secure attachment. This kind of emotional withdrawal is the basis for depression in older children, adolescents, and adults. In my consulting room I see the same look in the eyes of my adult patients who have experienced absent mothers.”13

I discuss this further in my essay “The Lost Girls and Boys.” But here, I just want to emphasize that there is cultural problem with childrearing, one that cannot be blamed on individual parents.

There are also unusually high rates of autism diagnosed among immigrant children, clustered at the low-income end of the spectrum. While I suspect that many of the environmental factors I’ll discuss later disproportionately apply to low-income immigrants, the “nurture” explanation here is that children of immigrants are more likely to grow up without the benefit of extended family, and language and cultural barriers make it more difficult for them to connect to their peers. There may also be more trauma in the family background, and higher levels of stress.

That all being said — even if there are higher rates of early childhood emotional neglect nowadays, which is debatable — this cannot account for the increase in severe autism cases and I sincerely doubt this is a factor in all cases. Evidence suggests that autism is a condition of modernity. While writers and researchers have speculated that many famous figures were high in autistic traits, the earliest case of high-functioning autism suggested by Silberman is Henry Cavenish (1731-1810) and by Christopher Badcock14 Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). However, this may reflect the limitations of our historical knowledge; the printing press was only invented around 1440. McGilchrist notes that there are clear descriptions of depression and bipolar disorder in Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sources, and descriptions loosely matching borderline personality disorder going back to Ancient Greece.15

However, I do think stress plays a significant role in the autism epidemic, in interaction with other factors I’ll discuss below.

As I mentioned above, I searched for sources “debunking” the “refrigerator mother” theory, and was unable to find any (if you know of any, please drop them in the comments!).

One of the only useful sources I found on this topic, an article in VeryWell Mind, credits Bernard Rimland with “debunking” the refrigerator mother theory. However, the article fails to mention that one of the ways Rimland “debunked” the theory was to implicate vaccines instead. Rimland was the parent of a son with autism, and the founder of the Autism Research Institute and Defeat Autism Now! (aka the “DAN protocol”). The latter program was terminated in 2011, as Rimland’s approach to “curing” autism had no evidence to support it and “led many to undertake risky and expensive treatments.”16

So it would appear that the “refrigerator mother” theory was mostly “debunked” with the introduction of a new controversial theory — one which, in the mainstream media, is today also described as being “debunked” and “pseudoscience.”

Vaccines

I’ll keep this one short — I do not trust pharmaceutical companies, and the “anti-vaxxer” movement and my own experience over the past few years has convinced me that “vaccines”, broadly speaking, are not as safe or effective as advertised, and that many of the illnesses we vaccinate for are not particularly dangerous. I’m glad RFK Jr. is looking into this. I suspect that an honest inquiry into vaccines will find that some have a net benefit, whereas with others the risks outweigh the benefits.

My older daughter is a fan of the show Little Bear (1995-2001). We were watching it recently when an episode where Little Bear gets the mumps came on. The show depicted it as not a big deal — Little Bear’s mom even gives him ice cream and says that’s good for the mumps (it’s not, we’ll get to that).

Consider also this video from Instagram comparing how the measles were portrayed in popular media in the 1960s compared to today.17

However, I also think that many people in the anti-vax movement are overstating the adverse effects of vaccines. A lot of the evidence that “vaccines” are the main cause of the autism epidemic are based on correlational data — as the number of vaccines children receive have gone up, so have the autism rates — and there are too many confounding variables to draw reasonable conclusions. There are studies that find no link between autism and vaccines, and those that do find a link are frequently accused of being methodologically flawed.

Critics of vaccines will also point out that there are significantly lower rates of autism in unvaccinated children. I think this is probably true, but nonetheless, there are still cases of autism in unvaccinated children. There would also be numerous confounding factors, including that parents of unvaccinated children are probably more skeptical of Big Pharma and Big Food generally. Religious people are also less likely to vaccinate their children, but they also tend to be more family and community-oriented. Autism is associated with atheism, and so it’s likely any genetic factors in autism would also be lower in religious populations.

There are many parents out there who insist their child regressed into autism after vaccination — and I believe them — as well as many adults who claim to be vaccine-injured (for example, see on Substack). I suspect in the majority of these cases there were other interacting factors that increased vulnerability to vaccine injury; in particular, nutrient deficiencies (especially of Vitamins C and D), Tylenol use (I’ll get to this), stress, inflammation, and processed food consumption during the sensitive window after vaccination when many kids experience a decrease in appetite. As well, vaccinations appear to be safer when they are spaced out. Which is all to say, there is a harm reduction approach that can be taken here.

I suspect (at least some) vaccines are contributing to the autism epidemic. There is no way they are the sole cause, and I suspect they are not the main cause either.

That all being said, the “anti-vax” activists have convinced me that there are numerous other risks, besides autism, to at least some of the vaccines currently pushed on the population. From personal experience, I got two Covid vaccines while I was pregnant in 2021, and my daughter ended up in the NICU after a rough birth and resuscitation. The diagnosis I later received was “unexplained placental inflammation.” A friend who was pregnant at the same time and also got vaccinated also had issues with her placenta. has since released a book linking issues with mother’s placentas to Covid vaccines (listen to her interview with ). Our kids are both fine, but, you know, mine could have died, and the NICU stay was traumatic, so I’m a bit salty about this.

As well, I’ve noticed that critics of the “anti-vax” movement rarely engage with any of their actual arguments or evidence. Their counter-arguments tend to read a bit like “Haha, look at those stupid anti-vaxxers! That’s been debunked! That’s pseudoscience! That’s misinformation!”, which is not convincing. It’s also a bad look when the mainstream media stirs up hysteria that, for example, an unvaccinated child died with the measles recently, without clarifying that the child died from other complications and medical error may have contributed.

To return to one of my favourite quotes from Christian scholar Paul Johnson:18

“The louder the abuse, the bigger the lie.”

At the same time, many “anti-vaxxers” discredit themselves with wild claims such as “vaccines are the primary cause of rising rates of LGBTQ+ identified people.”

In short, vaccines are probably neither as dangerous as the anti-vaxxers make out, nor as safe as the mainstream insists.

To read more about the potential adverse effects of vaccines, I recommend the work of :

• How Do Vaccines Cause Autism?

• The Century of Evidence that Vaccines Cause Sudden Infant Deaths

• Why Does the Government Cover-Up Vaccine Injuries?

• What Are the Pros and Cons for Each Vaccine?

Many more articles are available over on his Substack.

Heavy Metals

Studies have found that autistic people have higher levels of various heavy metals in their bodies, in particular lead, uranium, cesium, arsenic, cadmium, thallium, chromium, mercury, and aluminum.

The most common theory for how vaccines cause autism has to do with heavy metals — specifically aluminum, which is added to vaccines as an adjuvant, and mercury-containing thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines. However, the majority of doctors, scientists, politicians, and journalists insist there is no scientific evidence for a relationship between aluminum and mercury in vaccinations and autism.

One of the most popular and frequently-cited researchers on the potential relationship between aluminum and autism is — you can read his Substack here. Exley has suggested that conditions like ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia are “simply ‘mild’ forms” of more serious neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.19

Vaccines are far from the only cause of heavy metals exposure in pregnant women and children. Prenatal vitamins have been found to frequently be contaminated with heavy metals, including lead, thallium, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury — other common supplements and protein powders have also been found to have heavy metal contamination. As well, some children’s toys, baby formulas, baby rice cereal, and processed, packaged baby foods (e.g. food pouches) have been found to contain heavy metals.

Heavy metals are also frequently found in some herbs and spices, in particular cinnamon and spice mixes, as well as leafy greens and root vegetables like potatoes and carrots. Disposable paper coffee cups have been found to leach heavy metals (and micro-plastics!) into hot drinks, including lead, chromium, and cadmium. Chocolate is another common source of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium — and many women eat a lot of chocolate during pregnancy due to magnesium cravings. Unfortunately, cadmium also depletes magnesium, which can create a toxic feedback loop where you crave more chocolate.

Air pollution is another source — and may partially explain why urban centres have higher rates of autism than rural areas. Certain types of seafood contain high amounts of heavy metals (this is why pregnant women are told to avoid them). As well, many popular cosmetics — and even teeth-whitening toothpastes! — contain heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, mercury, aluminum, zinc, chromium, and iron.

Parental Age and Birth Proximity

Studies have found that autism is correlated with having an older father, or a very young or older mother. The theory goes that sperm and egg quality diminishes with age, and thus children of older parents are at increased risk for autism and various other disorders. This is probably true, and so the fact that more people are having children later in life is a likely contributing factor to the rise in autism rates — however, I think a very minor one.

Older fathers would be more likely to be in age-gap relationships, so the sociocultural factors involved in an older man impregnating a much younger women confound the research. As well, men and women who are highly career-oriented and not particularly family-oriented, people who either had one or more previous divorces, and people who struggled to find a partner earlier in their lives (for various reasons) would be overrepresented among older fathers and mothers. As well, it’s likely that people who are high functioning autistic or sub-clinically autistic are more likely to have children at an older age compared to the rest of the population — for example, religious people tend to have children younger than atheists, and atheism is correlated with autism.

As for younger mothers — mothers under the age of 20 — maternal stress during pregnancy and single parenthood (a risk factor for low nurture — it’s much more difficult to be a single mother) would be confounding variables. Young and single mothers are also more likely to live in poverty or near-poverty, further confounding this relationship. Egg health probably has nothing to do with the association between autism and teen moms.

Research also suggests that children born after shorter intervals between pregnancies are also at an increased risk of autism, in particular when pregnancies are only around two year apart or less — when a second child is conceived within a year of the first being born. This likely has to do with how taxing pregnancy is on the body — mom doesn’t have time to fully recover. However, I’ll throw it out there that looking after a young toddler is hard and you basically have to watch them at all times to make sure they don’t kill themselves. Mothers alone with a baby and a toddler would have no choice but to give the infant less attention, because a toddler demands so much. Allo-parenting by extended family members and lots of support for mom would attenuate these effects.

Genetics

While certain genetic factors absolutely increase autism risk, the skyrocketing rates of autism diagnoses and autism severity seen today cannot be explained by genetics. Genes don’t cause epidemics.

As writes in the :

“Scientists have been unable to define how autism is genetic. Over the past two decades, an increasing number of genes have been blamed in causing the disorder. It’s now argued that 500 to 1,000 genes are involved, which amounts to 7 to 14 percent of all the genes used in brain function. This is like saying a cut on a leg is caused by genetics, and pointing to the leg-related genes from the site of the cut as proof. Other genetic disorders lack this tautology — Down syndrome is caused by an extra chromosome 21, Rett syndrome is caused by mutations in one gene.”

writes:

“As the autism rate exploded throughout the U.S., the state of California hired eleven of the best geneticists in the country to examine the role of genes in autism. They concluded that genetics explains at most 38% of autism cases and in two places they explained that this was likely an overestimate (Hallmayer et al., 2011). Whatever is driving the surge in autism prevalence, it is not primarily genetics.”

Even Steve Silberman, generally considered a hero in the neurodiversity movement, admitted:

“The authors of a major study published in Nature admitted that even the most common genetic factors brought to light in their research were found in less than 1 percent of the children in their sample. “Most individuals with autism are probably genetically quite unique,” said Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. UCLA neurogeneticist Stanley Nelson added, “If you had 100 kids with autism, you could have 100 different genetic causes.””20

A reminder: genes run in families and in ethnic groups, but so do parenting styles, cultural factors, trauma, and environmental and dietary factors.

There are some genetic conditions which are associated with a significant increased risk of autism, such as Fragile X syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and Angelman syndrome. However, at most only around half of kids with Fragile X, around 80% of children with Angelman syndrome, and around a quarter with Prader-Willi also have autism (dietary issues and excessive eating in PW likely contribute to this risk).

As well, there is some evidence that inbreeding increases the risk of autism, and “autism may be the result of the widespread inbreeding of ancient generations.” It is speculated that many members of the famously-inbred Habsburg family may have been sub-clinically autistic. Autism rates are high in the Middle East, where consanguineous marriage is also more common. However, I can think of multiple confounding factors here — and South Korea has one of the highest rates of autism, while banning marriage between third cousins or closer. As well, rates of autism are higher in Jewish Israelis than in Muslim Israelis, despite Muslims having higher rates of consanguineous marriage. However, it is more common for Jews to have high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome), whereas autistic Muslims in Israel tend to be lower-functioning.

Too many genes have been implicated in autism for me to discuss them all. Instead, I will hone in on three genetic hypotheses I find particularly compelling.

The Imprinted Brain Hypothesis

Christopher Badcock, a sociologist from the London School of Economics, has written two obscure books and a Psychology Today column about his controversial “imprinted brain” hypothesis. Badcock, along with his research partner Bernard Crespi, posit that there are two types of cognition — mechanistic and mentalistic — and that autism and schizophrenia are diametrical disorders of mentalism (hypo-mentalism and hyper-mentalism respectively).

According to Badcock and Crespi, there is a tug-of-war between maternal and paternal genes during gestation, they argue, with over-expression of paternal genes resulting in autism and maternal genes schizophrenia. Badcock is explicit in noting that their theory is different and incompatible with Simon Baron-Cohen’s more well-known “extreme male brain” theory of autism.

“[A] recent brain-imaging study of a large sample of high-functioning male and female adults with autism found no evidence of an extreme male brain in the male subjects, even though it did find evidence of male brain development in the females […] All the difficulties are resolved by the imprinted brain theory and by its more subtle insight that it is not so much a question of autistic having an extreme male brain as risk of ASD being characterized by an extreme paternal brain.”21

Badcock also implicates genes on the X chromosome in autism. One of the mechanisms he suggests is something called “lingering Lyonization”, named after its discoverer, English geneticist Mary Lyon. (Most) females have two X chromosomes, and so one is inactivated in each cell of the body — on average, half the cells in a woman’s body express one X, and the other half expresses the other.22

Badcock writes:

“[T]he known possibility that X-inactivation imprints placed on specific X genes in a woman’s body might be accidentally retained on the X chromosome she passed on to her children. If these inactivating imprints affected the very same genes implicated in [autism syndrome], the striking sex ratio of the disorder’s incidence would be explained. AS affects approximately 10 to 20 times more males than females (depending on the exact diagnostic criteria). Because males have only a single X, they could be predicted to be much more vulnerable to lingering Lyonization than a woman’s daughters, who would always have a second, paternal X chromosome lacking such imprints to compensate and dilute the effect.”

However, Badcock does not address what might increase the risk that inactivate imprints would be passed down after a recombination error. Maternal stress seems to me like a plausible contributing factor here, and is, as noted earlier, a well-established risk factor for autism in children.

There are notable issues with the imprinted brain hypothesis, including that Badcock and Crespi’s characterization of schizophrenia is inaccurate, and that they fail to adequately explain why autism and schizophrenia are highly co-morbid (autism was initially thought of as “childhood schizophrenia”, and it’s possible that many people today are now getting diagnosed with “autism” when they would have been diagnosed with “schizophrenia” in the recent past). In addition, I do not think Badcock does a good enough job of addressing reasons why autism rates are rising — although he does address dietary factors, noting that autism is more likely with a calorie surplus, and schizophrenia with a serious calorie deficit. If autism is a disorder of extreme paternal brain, then why the shift in genetic imprinting?

Imprinted genes and lingering Lyonization strike me as a relevant mechanism in the rising rates of autism, but not an underlying cause.

Yamnaya Ancestry

I was recently alerted to this theory by , who posted this note a few weeks ago:

Here’s the study he is referencing.

An article in New Scientist refers to the Yamnaya as the “most murderous people of all time” (I don’t see how it’s possible to know this, but whatever — maybe the most murderous people in recorded history). What historical evidence objectively reveals, however, is that between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya people and their descendants violently conquered most of Europe, carrying the Indo-European language family with them.

Modern-day Central and Northern Europeans have the most Yamnaya ancestry (38.8%-50.4%), followed by South Asians (6.5%-50.2%) and Southern Europeans (18.5%–32.6%) — with Calabrians, Sicilians, and Sardinians having lower amounts than other Southern Europeans.

Yamnaya ancestry is also associated with increased risk of multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s — both which are associated with autism.

However, many of the countries with significant amounts of Yamnaya ancestry do not have abnormally high rates of diagnosed autism — and, if they do, this is largely because of high rates of low-functioning autism among children of immigrants (migration during pregnancy may increase autism risk, likely in part due to stress). For example, DNA evidence suggests a strong genetic link between Germans and the Yamnaya (see also the Wikipedia article on the Corded Ware culture). However, Austria and Germany are on the list of countries with the lowest rates of diagnosed autism.

The key word here is “diagnosed.” There is no medical test for autism, it is diagnosed primarily based on behaviour and social functioning (common physical symptoms such as gastrointestinal distress, sensory processing issues, and vitamin deficiencies can also contribute to a diagnosis). It is very easy to find people online speculating that all Germans are a little bit autistic (also possibly the Japanese?), and the popular autism forum Wrong Planet has a lengthy thread speculating that Scandinavians are more autistic on average than other peoples — which would support the theory that autistic traits are associated with Yamnaya ancestry.

Joseph Henrich’s work on “WEIRD” populations23 and Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain hemisphere lopsideness in the Western world24 also support the Yamnaya theory, as they suggest that Western and Northern Europeans and their descendants are more “autistic” on average than other peoples.25

Presumably, then, high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome) would be unlikely to be diagnosed in Northern and Western European countries where the average person is more sub-clinically autistic, simply because autistic traits (in the absence of intellectual disability) are not seen as abnormal.

MTHFR Mutations

The MTHFR enzyme “facilitates the addition of a methyl group to folic acid, rendering it usable by the body.” It is essential for folate utilization. It also “plays a crucial role in the conversion of homocysteine into methionine, vital for proper metabolism, muscle growth, and the creation of glutathione [an important antioxidant].”

Studies have found a significant increase in vulnerability to autism spectrum disorders in people with a MTHFR C677T (rs1801133) gene polymorphism or a A1298C (rs1801131) polymorphism. Both polymorphisms are associated with a higher risk of several other conditions, including cancer.

G/G on rs1801133 and T/T on rs1801131 are considered “typical” and a low-risk of methylation issues. A/A on rs1801133 (two copies of C677T) indicate around 70%-80% reduced activity, whereas G/G on rs1801131 (two copies of A1298C) indicate around 20% reduced activity. If you are heterozygous on rs1801133 (A/G) then you have around 40% reduced activity. Heterozygous on rs1801131 (G/T) indicates a mild reduction. These mutations indicate a risk for higher levels of homocysteine in your blood.

Around 40% of the world population has one or more of the C677T and/or A1298C polymorphisms. The C677T polymorphism is very common in Ashkenazi Jews (nearly 50%) and Europeans, in particular Italians and Spaniards. Black people are the least likely to have either of these genes (1-2%).

While studies consistently find higher rates of C677T among autistic people, it appears more than a quarter of diagnosed autistics do not have this mutation. One meta-analysis also found that there was no relationship between autism and the A1298C polymorphism.

Autism rates have been more rapidly increasing in the Black populations in the United States and the United Kingdom — despite unusually low rates of the relevant MTHFR mutations. More importantly, the vast majority of people with one or more of the C677T and A1298C polymorphisms are not clinically autistic.

If the C677T and A1298C polymorphisms are playing a role in the rising rates of autism, it is through interaction with new environmental factors. Because they are so common, I suspect these polymorphisms once served an adaptive purpose. Both the C677T and A1298C polymorphisms are associated with reduced folate usage, and so I wonder if they are an adaptation to lighter skin in hotter/sunnier climates to retain healthy levels of folate in the body, as sun exposure rapidly depletes folate. However, this adaptation became a liability when folic acid — a synthetic form of folate — was introduced.

Which brings us to the next section:

Folic Acid and Prenatal Vitamins

Folic acid first appeared on the market in prenatal vitamins introduced in the late 1970s and popularized in the 1980s — which coincides with an uptick in autism diagnoses — in order to prevent neural tube defects (e.g. spina bifida) from low folate in pregnancy. In the late 1990s, folic acid was added to many “fortified” and “enriched” grain products and processed foods in several countries, including the United States and Canada.

“Folic acid” is made from petroleum products, chemical acids and acetylene.

People with the C677T and A1298C polymorphisms have an impaired ability to utilize and break down folic acid as well as folate.

“Unlike folate, not all of the folic acid you consume is converted into the active form of vitamin B9 — 5-MTHF — in your digestive system. Instead, some folic acid is converted to 5-MTHF in your liver. Yet, this process is slow and inefficient in some people […] Even a small dose, such as 200 to 400 mcg per day, may not be completely metabolized until the next dose is taken. This problem may become worse when fortified foods are consumed in addition to taking folic acid supplements. As a result, unmetabolized folic acid is commonly detected in people’s bloodstreams.”26

Folate from food sources, unlike folic acid, does not accumulate in the blood. There is no upper limit for folate consumption. Unmetabolized folic acid may lead to accumulation of dihydrofolate, disrupt the one-carbon cycle and adversely impact DNA synthesis and repair, and methylation.

Our bodies prefer folic acid to folate — this means that folic acid binds more readily to receptors than folate, and can block the receptors from using natural forms of folate. This can cause a “functional folate deficiency”, where symptoms of folate deficiency appear despite lab tests reporting normal or high “folate” levels.

Excess folic acid (not folate!) may slow brain development. Research has also linked high folic acid consumption during pregnancy to an increased risk of insulin resistance, to a higher risk of obesity, and to poor psychomotor development in children. As folate modulates the epigenome and plays a critical role in methylation, excess folic acid may also “potentially alter gene expression and lead to aberrant epigenetic programming.” Both insufficient folate and excess folic acid in pregnancy has been linked in studies to a higher risk of autism in children.

Children with the vulnerable MTHFR mutations may be at higher risk for autism if mom consumes a lot of folic acid during pregnancy, and/or if the children consume a lot of folic acid during development.

Prenatal vitamins may cause or worsen morning sickness in some women, with synthetic iron, choline, and iodine being the main culprits. Nauseous mothers are more likely to eat more foods like bread, crackers, and pasta — all of which can be high in folic acid, depending on where they live. Unfortunately, refined sugars and flours also rapidly deplete Vitamin B1, and a Vitamin B1 deficiency can cause low appetite, which may in turn worsen nutritional deficiencies and reliance on processed foods during pregnancy. If women are taking prenatal vitamins with folic acid and eating a lot of fortified grain products and processed foods, they can easily go well over the recommended amount of folic acid and experience issues related to that.

I wrote about MTHFR and folic acid in detail in “Down the Folic Acid Rabbit Hole.”

Glyphosate

Many common crops — including grains — are sprayed with glyphosate (Roundup), a popular herbicide in many countries, including North America, parts of South America, Denmark, Poland, Netherlands, Portugal, and Israel. It has been banned or severely restricted in other countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar due to its link to higher rates of various cancers, celiac disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Glyphosate was introduced as a herbicide in 1974 by Monsanto.

The authors at the Weston A Price Foundation argue that glyphosate disrupts the body’s effective use of folate, and its use was a cause of rising spina bifida cases in the 1970s and 80s (emphasis mine):

“[F]olate is produced from products of the shikimate pathway, and this is the pathway that even Monsanto admits is disrupted in plants and microbes by glyphosate. Furthermore, the microbes that synthesize folate for the host, lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, are the ones that glyphosate preferentially kills. A continued rise in spina bifida would raise public awareness of a hidden environmental toxicant that might be causing this rise. Making sure that pregnant women were well supplied with external folic acid might mask the problem.”

Glyphosate has also been linked to the rising rates of autism. Dr. Zach Bush, in a video for the YouTube channel After Skool, argues that glyphosate is one of the main driving forces behind the autism epidemic.

In his thorough essay “The Story of Autism”, writes the following:

“Glyphosate causes most-to-all modern disorders and diseases, including autism, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes, according to six papers published from 2013 to 2016 by Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff. It does this by, among other ways, breaking down gut and blood-brain barriers; suppressing cytochrome P450 enzymes (used by animals to metabolize toxins, synthesize endocannabinoids and hormones, activate sensory neurons); disrupting the shikimate pathway in plants and microbes, causing animal deficiencies in at least serotonin, DMT, 20 opioids, nine vitamins, dopamine, melatonin; and by being erroneously inserted into thousands of proteins because it resembles glycine, one of the 22 amino acids that life uses to build itself.

Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, has argued that glyphosate, which the U.S. uses the most out of any country — spraying it on an area equivalent to around three Californias — is the one toxin most responsible for the autism epidemic. In a 2016 paper, Seneff and James Beecham described at least seven ways that glyphosate could cause autism, including through adverse effects on the thyroid glands of mothers and children during gestation, by disrupting calcium inflow to immature neurons, and by causing mothers to pass cytokines to the placenta/fetus […]

[T]ests from multiple labs on 19 vaccines confirmed [contamination by glyphosate], which to many people was not surprising, since vaccines contain soy, sucrose, fructose, lactose, bovine serum, egg protein, and gelatin derived from glyphosate-sprayed crops and factory-farmed animals fed heavily contaminated soy, corn, and beet pulp.”

Please see Lin’s essay in the for details and citations.

Returning to the role of heavy metals, Lin notes in his essay that glyphosate may interact with aluminum in vaccines:

“Two glyphosate molecules wrap around an aluminum atom, hiding its charge and producing an uncharged small molecule that easily crosses barriers. This glyphosate binding allows aluminum to be carried past the gut barrier and into the brainstem nuclei, where an acidic environment prompts the glyphosate to release it.”27

He later clarifies:

“It seems that the modern brain—multigenerationally malnourished, chronically sleep-deprived, immersed in anthropogenic radiation—is overwhelmed by thousands of old and new poisons crossing leaky gut and blood-brain barriers, leading to chronic brain inflammation, causing the symptoms of autism and other disorders.”

Proponents of the MTHFR mutation theory of autism have also pointed out that glyphosate exposure appears to have greater adverse effects on people with the C677T and A1298C polymorphisms. This could (partially) explain the discrepancy in autism rates between Jews and Arabs in Israel — where glyphosate is used liberally and prenatal vitamins with folic acid are recommended — as Jewish people are significantly more likely to have the C677T polymorphism.

As Dr. Will Powers pointed out when I interviewed him for my essay “Down the Folic Acid Rabbit Hole”, many countries used glyphosate without seeing the spike in autism until folic acid fortification was introduced — “it seems to not be the primary driver of the problem.” As well, there are still increasing rates of autism in some countries that have banned glyphosate.

Diet, Nutritional Deficiencies, and Processed Foods

Autism and autistic-like traits have been found to be associated with nutrient deficiencies in Vitamins A, C, D, E, K, B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B6, B7 (biotin), B9 (folate), B12, iron, magnesium, zinc, selenium, iodine, calcium, and Omega-3 fatty acids, as well as deficiencies in glutathione, cysteine, taurine, glutamine, melatonin, and circulating endocannabinoids. In several studies, supplementation or dietary changes to treat deficiencies were associated with improvement in one or more autistic symptoms in at least some children in the samples.

Dietary deficiencies are both a cause of and a symptom of autism. Many autistic children are picky eaters — in its extreme form, this manifests as “avoidant restrictive food intake disorder” or ARFID.

A diet high in refined carbohydrates and processed foods — which are filled with preservatives and other toxic chemicals — can lead to gut dysbiosis — low gut microbiome diversity and surplus of “bad” bacteria — as well as gastrointestinal issues such as chronic constipation and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Common “safe” foods in ARFID include: white bread, pizza, french fries, sweets, chicken nuggets, plain noodles, crackers, and cereal. Ultra-processed foods may be as addictive as smoking. Refined sugars may be more addictive than cocaine. Further exacerbating picky eating, deficiencies in thiamin (B1), folate (B9), B12, and Vitamin D may cause low appetite, while folate, B12, and zinc deficiencies have been linked to an altered sense of taste and smell.

Treating ARFID and disordered under or picky eating may require first treating nutrient deficiencies (or “hidden hunger”) that contribute to low appetite and disrupted taste. “Healthy” multivitamins — made from whole foods — have entered the market targeting parents of autistic and picky-eating children. Many parents have endorsed these products, stating that their child’s behaviour and/or picky eating improved after starting on the multivitamins. Two brands I’ve observed to consistently receive positive reviews (I have never purchased them myself) are First Day and Subluna.

Eating lots of highly-processed foods may also cause an aversion to healthy, whole foods. In one interesting study by Paul Kenny, he found that rats who were fed a processed-food diet for a while, when the junk food was taken away and replaced with healthy food, rejected the healthy food.

“The animals would rather starve themselves.”

Low glutathione is also a serious concern in autism, as glutathione is a critical antioxidant for detoxifying heavy metals from the body, among other things. Low glutathione would make children more vulnerable to “vaccine injuries” and various toxin exposures. Vitamin C and glutathione are mutually essential to each other, and so a low Vitamin C intake can exacerbate the issue (which is partially why research on vaccine injury finds Vitamin C deficiency is a risk factor). Making things worse, a high refined sugar intake interferes with Vitamin C absorption.

Higher rates of autism have been found to be associated with formula-feeding (instead of breastfeeding), in particular with soy-based formulas. There may also be a relationship between autism risk and use of prepackaged baby foods — and there are currently active lawsuits against baby food companies because they’ve been found to contain high amounts of heavy metals and have been linked to the development of autism. “Food pouches” — which are very popular — are also far more unhealthy than advertised, as they contain high amounts of added sugar, the heating process to make them destroys most vitamins and minerals in the food, and the “nutrients” on the labels are typically from synthetic vitamins added in.

I highly recommend this article by on the ingredients that many popular synthetic vitamins are made from. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of petroleum byproducts, formaldehyde, and ammonia.

Autistic children are also more susceptible to hyponatremia and it is possible low sodium can contribute to or exacerbate autism.

“Autism is a complex disorder with many likely causes and genetic links. However, one theory holds that autism could be a disorder of overhydration, with low sodium levels in the blood depleting certain essential brain nutrients, such as taurine and glutamine. This may be one reason why children with autistic disorders tend to have salt cravings. Children with autism may benefit from consuming more salt, whereas low-salt diets may actually worsen their condition. Oral rehydration salts may also be of benefit in autism.”28

A loose, general observation that I have made — both on social media and from my real-life interactions — is that many parents who report their children are “picky eaters” (common in autism) prepare “healthy” foods that a bit unpalatable, largely due to under-seasoning. For example, raw and steamed broccoli are both kind of gross and it’s not surprising that children offered broccoli this way would come to think they don’t like it. But properly seasoned with salt and olive oil and roasted in the oven, broccoli is delicious. Lightly salted eggs and moderately-salted homemade chicken broth were two of the first foods I fed my kids, and they’re both very healthy — and I frequently get comments that my older daughter is one of the least picky kids other people have encountered.

Mainstream advice to parents is to not add salt to baby foods, however, these guidelines lack scientific rigour and evidence suggests that there are health benefits to adding a small amount of salt to foods fed to babies. I am not saying it’s fine to give your babies highly-salty processed or canned foods — over 70% of salt consumption in the United States comes from processed and packaged foods, which is troubling — but sprinkling a little sea salt on their cooked veggies, eggs, and meat might be a good idea if you want them to enjoy these foods.

In The Salt Fix (2017), James DiNicolantonio suggests that a low-salt diet in childhood — and during pregnancy — may contribute to sugar cravings, disordered eating, metabolic syndrome, and obesity in children. Low sodium levels can also contribute to constipation. While his book is controversial, my husband and I have personally found we both feel a lot healthier and enjoy our food a lot more with a bit of added sea or kosher salt. And we both feel like crap after eating even a small amount of refined sugar, supporting the theory put forward by people like DiNicolantonio and Robert Lustig29 — that refined sugar is driving the modern health crisis, not salt.30

Nearly one in ten children worldwide suffer from constipation (another source claims between 1% and 30%). Chronic constipation affects up to 4% of preschool-age children in the United States and Canada, including around a quarter of autistic children. Constipation is also common during pregnancy.

Unfortunately, the adverse effects of a poor diet can be compounded by one of the most common treatments for constipation. Which brings us to …

Polyethylene Glycol 3350 (PEG) / MiraLAX

PEG 3350 is a synthetic polymer produced through polymerization of ethylene oxide molecules, derived from the by-products produced during the refinement of petroleum, natural gas, or coal, and chemically similar to ethylene glycol in antifreeze. It is the most commonly doctor-recommended treatment for constipation in adults (including pregnant women) and children, despite the FDA only approving its use for those ages 17 and older.

MiraLAX was introduced on the market in 1999, coinciding with the start of the dramatic spike in autism diagnoses (see the graph from the “Folic Acid” section above). It became an over-the-counter drug in 2006, and is now so commonly used, that a shortage was reported in 2023.

I first became aware of MiraLAX when I read this article in The Epoch Times.

The article includes a handful of interviews with parents who believe their children were harmed by MiraLAX — including shocking accounts of behavioural changes. The Epoch Times suggests that MiraLAX may harm children in the following ways:

• Killing beneficial gut bacteria, causing gut dysbiosis and altering serotonin production.

• Depleting short-chain fatty acids, which are critical for brain health.

• Disrupting the absorption of nutrients, in particular B vitamins and magnesium, leading to deficiencies (MiraLAX is an osmotic laxative, and thus blocks the absorption of nutrients in the small intestine).

“[MiraLAX’s] extended use may result in severe malnutrition-related disorders, particularly in young children and older adults. Autism is one such disorder. It may take only two weeks of an acute iron or iodine deficiency to cause autism in a child younger than two.”

Common psychiatric side effects of MiraLAX reported by parents include depression, anger, anxiety, mood swings, violent behaviours, and tics.

A Facebook group, “Parents Against Miralax Restoralax Movicol (PEG 3350)”, has over 100,000 members as of April 2025. The website “No PEG” also features dozens of testimonials from parents.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that there is no evidence to support the claim that MiraLAX causes autism. While I’m not sure whether MiraLAX is one of the potential causes of autism that RFK Jr. is investigating, PEG is on his radar as it is also an ingredient used in the Pfizer and Moderna Covid shots — and some people reported that they developed a PEG allergy after vaccination.31

Antibiotics

This one is pretty straight-forward so I’ll keep it short. Some antibiotics can wipe out the gut microbiome, including all healthy or “good” gut bacteria, leading to gut dysbiosis — obviously, sometimes you need to take antibiotics, and if you do, eating lots of pre- and probiotics during and after use can help prevent issues.

As discussed above, low gut microbiome diversity, low levels of healthy gut bacteria, and gut dysbiosis are all implicated in autism. Antibiotics can cause nausea, and serious gut disruption can occur if you rely on easy-to-eat carbohydrates such as bread — this can lead to a nutritional deficiencies and an addiction to refined flour and sugars. This is something to be wary of in particular with children (and adults!) who are already picky eaters or have ARFID.

“Antibiotics can also reduce appetite by increasing yeast overgrowth and damaging the intestine’s lining. Yeast overgrowth can turn the intestines into a fermentation machine. When yeast digest sugars, the intestines bloat, sending either a “full” signal or a call for more carbohydrates.”

Maternal and early-life exposure to antibiotics are associated with an increased risk of autism and ADHD.

Tylenol

Tylenol has been touted as a safe pain relief and fever reduction option for pregnant women and young children — however, recent studies have found that Tylenol use during pregnancy and early-life can significantly increase the risk of autism and ADHD in children. This is because Tylenol depletes glutathione, one of the body’s most important antioxidants. Glutathione plays a critical role in detoxifying the body from heavy metal exposures; as such, some research shows that the risk of autism is significantly higher when Tylenol is given to children before and/or after vaccination.

Another researcher has suggested that Tylenol use may interact with amoxicillin (a common oral antibiotic) and glyphosate exposure to increase autism risk.

Other sources argue that this correlation is due to confounding factors — and it seems likely that if Tylenol is a causal factor in autism, it would be in interaction with other factors and vulnerable genes (for example, the MTHFR polymorphisms discussed earlier can result in lower glutathione levels and increased vulnerability to Tylenol).

A class-action lawsuit was recently filed against Tylenol, arguing that it caused autism and ADHD in children.32

Hormonal Contraception / Birth Control Pills

Study results are mixed as to whether the use of birth control pills prior to pregnancy increase the risk of autism in children. The risk seems to be higher when mothers use hormonal birth control up to just before (<3 months) or during pregnancy than past use (>3 months)— the obvious confounding variable here is that women who use birth control up until or during pregnancy disproportionately were probably not trying to get pregnant. The association in the study I linked to was also driven primarily by non-oral progestin-only birth control.

There’s a few theoretical mechanisms as to how use of birth control could cause autism. The depletion of nutrients is one — birth control has been found to deplete B Vitamins (including folate), Vitamin C, magnesium, selenium, and zinc, which would cause some immune impairment, but a healthy diet is protective here. Birth control use is also associated with poorer mental health, and women on birth control are more likely to be prescribed SSRIs. At least one study has linked birth control to impaired judgement and empathy in women — but the sample size was small and effects were mild. Some people believe that past use of hormonal birth control can cause issues with fertility, but the majority of mainstream sources claim this is a myth.33

There’s also this one woman’s theory that hormonal birth control could disrupt gene imprinting and impair estrogen receptor expression (see the sub-section on imprinted genes under “Genetics”) — if she’s on to something, and I’m not claiming she is, I imagine that affected offspring would disproportionately be female and higher-functioning, and thus “autism”, if it is diagnosed at all, would be in the late teens or early adulthood, and thus missed by the majority of studies.

Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, and Other Psychiatric Medications

Antidepressant use during pregnancy has been found to be correlated to an increased risk of autism in children, but, again, there are multiple confounding variables, study results vary, and the effect size appears to be small. The same applies to benzodiazepines, ADHD medications, and antipsychotics. The general consensus is that maternal mental illness increases autism risk through genetics and environmental factors, not the medications used to treat them.34

Fluoride

Higher fluoride exposure during pregnancy has been linked to autism in children, as is chronic fluoride exposure during early childhood.

“Studies have shown that chronic exposure to fluoride can have neurotoxic effects, affecting various aspects of neurological function. These effects include metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress and inflammation, immunoexcitotoxicity, and melatonin level disruption.”

Fluoride was first added to drinking water in Grand Rapids, USA in 1945, and the first fluoride toothpaste appeared on the market in 1955. Today, just over 70% of the water in the United States and around 40% of the water in Canada has fluoride added to it.

Prior to the discovery that fluoride prevented cavities, it was “considered to be a toxic waste product of the aluminum and phosphate mining industries, and a chief contributor to environmental pollution.”35

Many criticisms of fluoride involve its calcifying effects on the pineal gland.

“The pineal gland is an endocrine gland whose main function is the biosynthesis and secretion of melatonin, a hormone responsible for regulating circadian rhythms, e.g., the sleep/wake cycle. Due to its exceptionally high vascularization and its location outside the blood–brain barrier, the pineal gland may accumulate significant amounts of calcium and fluoride, making it the most fluoride-saturated organ of the human body. Both the calcification and accumulation of fluoride may result in melatonin deficiency.”

In addition to disrupting sleep, fluoride accumulation in the pineal gland may speed up the onset of puberty (at least in girls). In one study, Jennifer Luke found that animals exposed to fluoride showed signs of earlier puberty. Girls with autism, on average, enter puberty earlier than their non-autistic peers.

High fluoride exposure may also contribute to magnesium deficiency — this has cascading effects, as our bodies cannot use Vitamin D properly without adequate magnesium levels.

As well, a recent New York Times article admitted that fluoride exposure has been linked to lower IQs in children.36

Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) and Microplastics

EDCs are natural or man-made chemicals which are known to interfere with or disrupt hormone production and the endocrine system. Microplastics can be carriers of EDCs — and can cause oxidative stress, DNA damage, organ dysfunction, metabolic disorder, immune response, neurotoxicity, as well as reproductive and developmental toxicity.

Examples of natural EDCs are tea tree and lavender essential oils — both of which have been linked to early puberty. Common examples of man-made EDCs include atrazine (a popular herbicide), BPA (frequently found in packaging, toys, paper receipts, household cleaners, and canned foods and drinks), and phthalates (frequently found in cosmetics, fragrances, and household cleaners).

BPA exposure prenatally and in early-life has been linked to an increased risk of autism — but only in male children. Moreover, adverse effects of BPA exposure may be transgenerational. Animal studies have also linked atrazine and other pesticide exposures to autistic-like behaviours. Phthalates have also been linked in studies to an increased risk of autism. I am not aware of any research linking naturally-occurring hormone disruptors like lavender oil to autism, but it’s still a good idea not to over-expose your children to these.

While Simon Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” theory of autism received a lot of attention, overwhelming evidence suggests that it is incorrect.

A competing theory, the “gender incoherence theory”, predicts that “[autistic] males should be more similar to [typically-developing] females and ASD females should be more similar to TD males.”

There is good evidence of physical masculinization—or at least de-feminization—in autistic women.37

A 2012 study noted that “somewhat paradoxically, many individuals with ASD display androgynous physical features regardless of gender.” The authors state: “Rather than being a disorder characterised by masculinisation in both genders, ASD thus seems to be a gender defiant disorder.” Many autistic people have androgynous facial features.

Either way, this indicates that hormone disruption is a factor in at least some cases. (Nutritional deficiencies, e.g. of Vitamin D, would also contribute to hormone disruption).

Overall, evidence supporting a relationship between prenatal and early-life exposure to EDCs and autism is limited and inconclusive.

Electric and Magnetic Fields (EMFs) and … Mold?

Sigh. Here’s an essay by summarizing why EMFs — including from your WiFi baby monitor — may be partially responsible for the rising rates of autism and other health complications. Quite a bummer if true. Apparently we should all be turning our WiFi off at night?

As well, mold exposure is a suspected contributor to autism, and apparently EMFs may exacerbate mold growth.

Vitamin D Deficiency and Sunscreen

Vitamin D is one of the most common deficiencies seen in autism. Symptoms include bone pain, muscle weakness, fatigue, anxiety, depression, mood swings and irritability, increased pain sensitivity, sleep disturbances, hormonal imbalances, menstrual irregularities in girls and women, and an impaired immune system and wound healing. Vitamin D deficiencies during pregnancy have also been shown to increase the risk of autism in children.

While there are some decent food sources of Vitamin D (e.g. egg yolks, fatty fish, and fish liver oils) the best source of Vitamin D is the sun. You only need around 5 to 30 minutes of direct sun on your skin between 10 am and 4 pm — depending on where you live and your skin colour — to meet your daily needs.

Sunscreen blocks the absorption of UVB light and therefore frequent, daily use may contribute to lower Vitamin D levels. Obesity can also contribute to Vitamin D deficiency as excess fat may negatively impact the bioavailability of Vitamin D — obesity also increases the risk of sunburn. Darker skinned people living in cooler climates and areas with less sun are also at a higher risk of Vitamin D deficiency than pale people — in the United States, black people have higher rates of Vitamin D deficiency. As well, women who wear modest religious clothing such as the burqa are at an increased risk of Vitamin D deficiency. Certain pharmaceuticals, such as SSRIs, can also increase sun sensitivity and the risk of sunburn, thus contributing to low Vitamin D levels. Low levels of Vitamin C, Vitamin E, zinc, and essential fatty acids can also increase sunburn risk, as can dehydration or excess alcohol consumption while sitting in the sun.

Sunscreen ingredients are absorbed into the bloodstream through the skin, and many popular brands include endocrine disruptors — however, there are safe options available such as zinc oxide-based sunscreens.

I’ll admit this is an area where I’m a bit of a radical — I rarely wear sunscreen and I go out in the sun quite a bit. I just spent a month in Mexico and didn’t put the stuff on once. I have olive skin and Mediterranean ancestry and tan very easily, but I’m a far cry from dark — and yet, I rarely burn, and when I have, it’s been very mild.38 My kids are paler than me but neither of them have ever had a burn, despite only rarely wearing sunscreen. Some people look good with pale skin, but I am not one of those people, so I prefer to rock a bit of a tan.

While this is controversial, many people believe that processed foods — and in particular seed oils — can increase the risk of burning. I’ve spoken to people who are very pale — think Irish ancestry — and report that they are far less likely to burn when they avoid seed oils.

The introduction of sunscreen and rise in sunscreen use correlates with the uptick in autism diagnoses — but like many other possible factors in this essay, the correlation does not prove causation.

has a great essay about “dermatology’s horrendous war against the sun”, which I recommend everyone give a read. He suggests, among other things, that low sunlight exposure might increase cancer rates and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Nature Deficiency and Air Pollution

As previously mentioned, autism is associated with right hemisphere hypofunction or dysfunction. The right hemisphere is dominant when we interact with living things — other people, animals, and nature. (The left hemisphere, on the other hand, is dominant when we interact with objects and machines).

In addition to the issues with low Vitamin D, a lack of time spent outdoors and in direct contact with the earth can contribute to low gut microbiome diversity.

Several studies have shown that spending more time outside in nature has significant benefits for autistic people (and for everyone else too).

One obvious barrier to getting outside is air pollution — which has been linked to an increased risk of autism in children. As previously mentioned, air pollution can be a source of heavy metal toxicity. It is likely that one of the reasons why autism rates are higher in urban centres than rural ones is access to nature and air pollution.

“Screen Time”

Screen time is getting a lot of attention these days as a potential driver of the youth mental health crisis. When we interact with screens — in particular with smartphones and iPads, which use more focussed vision — our left hemisphere is dominant. Excess use of screens can therefore exacerbate left hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction, especially when that screen use comes at the expense of RH-dominant activities such as in-person socializing and spending time in nature.

However, this also applies to other activities — including excessive reading, which may actually exacerbate left hemisphere dominance more than watching television.39

Back in 2015, Iain McGilchrist tried to sound the alarm about smartphones making younger generations “borderline autistic.” From what I’ve discerned from the research on this, it would seem that the greatest risk for exacerbation of autistic traits would come from using text messages as a primarily mode of communication — i.e. reading text on a screen instead of talking to people in person. The right hemisphere processes non-verbal communication (e.g. body language, tone of voice, facial expressions) and all of this information is missing when we talk to people over text.

Christopher Badcock argues that reading is inherently “mechanistic” and that literacy is “‘autistic’ to the extent that it not only mimics the autistic savant’s ready recall of words verbatim or facts with perfect precisions, but allows private, personal access to another person’s thoughts without having to interact with that person in a social context.”40

Generally speaking, I think the harms of allowing children to watch television are overblown (I agree that smartphones and iPads are very harmful). I believe what’s on the TV matters more — I only let my kids watch music (e.g. Jewish a cappella and Tiny Desk concerts), musical movies, and slow-paced children’s shows like Bluey and Little Bear. Similarly, I believe the content of books has a significant effect on the value of reading — I’d rather my daughter watch a good show than we read a really stupid book to her. Obviously there is reason for concern if a child prefers screens to other activities, but I do not have this problem with my kids.

Many parents — including me — turn the TV on for their kids so they can get other stuff done. I’ve tried baby-wearing in the kitchen, and it is not safe. If someone else is around to play with my kids while I’m cooking and cleaning, great, that’s obviously preferable, but it’s also simply not the case a lot of the time.

However, I still believe that screens are a significant contributor to the autism epidemic — but the bigger issue is not children’s screen time (although that is an issue), but rather parents (and grandparents!) who are addicted to their screens.

Last year, in a post wondering “Are Millions “on the Spectrum” Now?”, Dr Naomi Wolf observed:

“I saw lots of affluent younger moms pull a plastic covering, like a clear Zip-Lock bag designed for baby humans, right over the toddlers in their strollers — rain or shine — and, as if the moms have closed up a business venue for the day, they’ll then wedge their phones against the push-bars of the stroller and walk the stroller, with their eyes glued to the screens.”

While researchers such as and Jon Haidt have done a good job of discussing how smartphone use has negatively impacted children and teenagers’ mental health, they rarely, if ever, discuss how smartphone use by parents might be playing a role: from 2006 to 2009, the number of 30-49-year-olds who were on social networks rose from 6% to 44%.

I have also observed many parents and other caregivers ignoring their children because they are staring at their phones. This is no doubt a significant contributing factor to early childhood neglect, which, as discussed above, is likely a risk factor for autism and other mental health struggles in children.

It is fairly obvious that lack of face-to-face time in infancy and toddlerhood could be a cause of prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, which is seen in around a third of autistic adults without intellectual disability, or of the difficulty many autistic children have with eye contact. It is fundamental to neuroscience that cells that fire together, wire together. Babies learn faces from interacting with faces, not from “screen time” or playing with toys or smiling into Mom’s cell phone camera. When we’re looking at our phones, we are not looking at our children.

Other Causes

Let’s be real — the above isn’t a complete list. There’s definitely a ton of other contributing factors to the autism epidemic out there, and other pathways to cause or exacerbate autism in an individual. Basically anything that can cause brain inflammation and/or gut disruption. Traumatic brain injuries come to mind (I mean, I’m pretty sure brain swelling and damage from my fall onto my right parietal lobe as a toddler is one of the reasons I turned out a little odd). C-sections save lives, but they are also correlated with an increased risk of autism in children (through a variety of mechanisms and confounding variables; notably, C-section children miss out on the microbiome transfer from passing through mom’s vagina — if you have a c-section, you can always look into maternal-child microbial seeding interventions). Maternal viral infections have also been linked to increased risk of autism — but I fail to see how this could account for the uptick in diagnosis since viral infections have always existed.

Some people speculate that ultrasounds may contribute to autism and other chronic health conditions in children. Some people blame flame-retardants in children’s clothing, mattresses, and popular household products. Some parents are convinced parasites are the problem, and some report that parasite cleanses improved their child’s symptoms. Some parents have given their autistic kids Ivermectin. Other people say that good worms can treat autism.

If you know of or suspect any causes I missed, feel free to drop your knowledge in the comments section!

The Right Hemisphere and the Four Subtypes of Autism

There is a general theme to all of this.

As Iain McGilchrist pointed out, autism is a symptom of right hemisphere dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance. The right hemisphere is dominant is processing our relationships to other people, to our own body in a holistic way, to nature, and to spirituality / God. “Autism” in this broad sense, is in part a symptom of the West’s mechanistic worship of “Science” — many of the suspected culprits in the autism epidemic come from a lab or are a product of recent scientific advancement.

We need to find a balance between the right and left hemispheres, between science and spirituality / nature.41 I am not arguing that in an ideal world, there would be no “autism” or “autistic” traits. There are some benefits to higher functioning and sub-clinical autism. As Hans Asperger wrote:

“It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways.”

As Temple Grandin has claimed:

“If all the genes and other factors that cause autism were eliminated, the world would be populated by very social people who accomplish very little. The really social people are not motivated enough by “making things” to spend the time necessary to create great art, beautiful music or master-works of engineering that require attention to detail. It’s just not part of their mindset. Yet, that’s often where people with ASD excel.”42

In this vein, some of the genes that have been implicated in autism have also found to be associated with higher intelligence.43 I suspect, at a genetic level, some people with autism (Subgroup 1 in the graphic below) are more sensitive and have higher neuroplasticity, and thus are more vulnerable to adverse effects from an unhealthy environment, unhealthy food, pharmaceutical toxins, and low nurture.

There are many people out there who believe that autism doesn’t need to be treated. Much of the backlash to RFK Jr. has come from media pundits, parents of high-functioning autistic children, and self-described autistic activists who believe that autism is mostly genetic and shouldn’t be prevented or cured.

This stems in part from confusion — as autism is not one condition — and from willful misunderstanding. While I believe every individual with autism is unique, a recent study has found that cases can be loosely clumped into four useful subtypes. All four of these subtypes would be associated with the right hemisphere dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance described by McGilchrist, but otherwise there are significant neurological differences between the groups.

RFK Jr. seems to be almost entirely focussed on “Subgroup 2” in the above graphic, whereas his critics seem to come from Subgroups 1, 3, and 4.44

Language impairments in autism are likely a result of some combination of poor diet / nutritional deficiencies (in particular of folate, B12, and Vitamin D), heavy metal accumulation, environmental toxins, and adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals.

This is the group that suffers most and has the lowest quality of life, and it makes sense for RFK to focus on helping them — however, he should do a better job of acknowledging in his public statements that other types of autism exist and that some of the high and average-IQ autistics who successfully parlay their atypicality into a career in tech or writing (etc) or as a social media influencer feel differently about their diagnosis.

At the same time, high functioning (and self-diagnosed) autistic people and parents of higher-functioning children need to stop attacking parents of low-functioning autistic children and people like RFK Jr. who are trying to help them and their kids. Fine, if you want to be really pedantic about it, we can say that “autism” is not the problem, but do you know what objectively is? Severe nutritional deficiencies, chronic painful gastrointestinal issues, disordered sleep, debilitating anxiety, heavy metal accumulation and other types of poisoning, chronic migraines and other types of pain, and self-harming behaviours (etc).

Just because you experience your particular subtype of autism as a blessing, a gift, a career asset, something that makes your or your child super-special, and/or an opportunity to gain followers on Instagram and TikTok doesn’t mean you can speak for everyone with this diagnosis. Maybe it is mostly genetic in your case — a lot of neurodiversity activists have Yamnaya and Germanic vibes — but it isn’t for everyone.

Personally, when I was suffering from chronic gut issues, migraines, anxiety, and distressing “autistic” traits, I wanted to get better. And so I went through an incredibly difficult healing process with magic mushrooms, made a ton of lifestyle changes which improved my health, and worked on my social skills — and now I’m doing a lot of work to try to raise children who are happy and healthy in the hope that they will not suffer as much as I did.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to healthy, or wanting your children to be healthy. And guess what? Even after all those health improvements and rewiring my brain with psychedelics, my IQ more or less remained intact, as did my heightened sensitivity and tendency to obsess over things (see: this essay). Also and alas, I still have some “stimming” behaviours, such as nail-biting, and I’m still clumsier than I would prefer. But I ditched most of the poor health, while keeping the parts of me that were kind of special and unique. You do not have the right to bully or silence people who want that for themselves or their children.

Closing Thoughts

At pretty much every step of my “journey” into motherhood I’ve been bombarded with awful advice from healthcare workers. I’ve been told to give my kids Tylenol for basically everything, including an upset stomach. I was told to supplement with baby formula when my older daughter wasn’t gaining weight as quickly as is “normal” (I didn’t, she’s healthy and both tall and strong for her age — formula causes more weight gain then breastmilk, and my daughter was giving no indication that my boobs were running dry). I’ve been told not to bed-share, to give my kids Cheerios and rice cereal as first foods, not to salt their food, that they won’t learn social skills if don’t put them in daycare, not to let my babies’ skin touch the sun. I’ve been told that my daughter will get cavities if I don’t use fluoride toothpaste and breastfeed her to sleep (alas, the dentist had to admit her teeth look perfect). She got constipated recently after a bout of the flu, and the doctor told me to give her MiraLAX. It only took a few days to relieve the issue using natural remedies.

I was told to take SSRIs during pregnancy when I was mildly depressed. I was told to take prenatal vitamins — when I refused the second time, multiple midwives told me that was just fine; actually, there’s no evidence the majority of women with a healthy diet need them. Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and stool softeners were pushed on me postpartum — I took them the first time and refused them the second, and I healed in a fraction of the time the second time around. I was also told to go back on birth control pills immediately after giving birth — and when I raised concerns about the negative effects on mental health and nutrient levels, the midwife told me I was correct and that she personally wouldn’t use birth control pills — but it was “her job” to advise me to take them. When I refused the Vitamin K shot for my second child, I received a fear-mongering lecture that she could bleed out from a small cut because her blood wouldn’t clot. She ended up needing to get the foot prick test three times because her blood was clotting so well — I guess all the Vitamin K-rich foods I ate during my third trimester did something after all.

I ask about natural remedies, and most of the time, the doctors and nurses haven’t even heard of them — and when I tell them about natural remedies that worked, they either shrug it off, or lower their voices to tell me that they know — but they could lose their jobs if they recommended them instead of the pharmaceuticals they are paid to hawk.45

I followed the advice of healthcare workers for my first pregnancy, and my daughter ended up in the NICU. I “did my own research” and followed that for my second pregnancy — including skipping the prenatal vitamins — and I literally had a complication-free second pregnancy and birth.

The autism epidemic is not parents’ fault — even when early childhood emotional neglect is a factor, as it almost certainly is in at least some cases (some parents are more guilty than others).

As I’ve written before, both surveys and my own personal experience talking to parents indicates that the majority of mothers wish they could only work part time or not work at all so they could spend more time with their small children — and, yes, fathers and grandparents also make good primary caregivers too. The issue is that most families cannot afford to do this.

In most cases “cold” nurture is a result of lack of time and support — and this applies to the reliance on packaged convenience foods too. I have two kids and being alone with a baby is difficult. When I’ve been alone with one of my babies, I talk less, I get bored, I have no choice but to put them down if I want to prepare a healthy meal. The “village” is gone for most of us in the West. Mothers are burnt out and stressed-out. Blaming and shaming mothers (and fathers) misses the point entirely — parents need more support, in particular from extended family like grandparents, to raise healthy children. We need to take care of mothers, not blame them — and yes, we can do this while still acknowledging that crappy and abusive mothers exist. Families need to have the option to have a stay-at-home parent. We need to start valuing mothers and motherhood again.

As writes:

“To connect the dots would have meant acknowledging that mothers at home perform an invaluable service to the health of our nation and that the solution to said problem rests, in large part, in more mothers quitting their jobs and going home.

We all know how well that message would go over. This, despite the fact ever since mothers stopped being valued for the thankless and relentless work they do, Americans have never been sicker.”

Our culture is toxic. We’re swimming in bad advice, “poisonous pedagogies”, and bad “health” advice sponsored by money-hungry pharmaceutical and “food” companies. Parents, doctors, and nurses (etc) are gaslit and shamed when they try to raise the alarm. I’m not blaming healthcare workers either — most enter their fields with a sincere desire to help people. They receive subpar Big Pharma-sponsored training and risk losing their jobs if they go off-script.

But I digress — this post started off being about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and so I’ll end with him.

There’s no way he’ll know all the causes of autism by September. That’s ridiculous.

RFK Jr. will not know the “cause” of autism by September because autism is not a disease or even a singular condition. It is an umbrella term used to describe a cluster of symptoms that arise from a variety of causes — genetic, environmental, pharmaceutical, nutritional, and nurture-related. No cause applies to all cases, and no case only has one cause.

Similarly, there is no single “cure” or “treatment” for autism, nor any government policies that could “prevent” all types of autism. What is helpful in some cases will be ineffective in others. It depends on the symptom profile and underlying causes. But, loosely speaking, the treatment for autism is to strengthen the right hemisphere, to reconnect to “Spirit” — to other people, to nature, to healthy whole foods, to own’s own body. And just to be even more controversial, I suspect that psilocybin (magic) mushrooms will emerge as one of the more effective ways for adults to do this. (Not recommended for children).

I hope that RFK and his team will manage to identify a handful of the environmental, pharmaceutical, and dietary causes of severe autism and other chronic health conditions and make meaningful policy changes in the United States to address them. And I hope other countries, including my own, will follow suit. I pray for this, for him.

The man is a little crazy, I’ll admit. Apparently a worm ate part of his brain? As fellow brain damagee, I kind of like that.

So here’s rooting for RFK Jr., his brain worm, and his insane, impossible promises. While we definitely won’t know all the causes of “autism” by September, I appreciate that the man is at least trying.