Like the ice-pick ‘cure’ of the ’50s, a new ‘therapy of despair’ has parents seemingly shrugging off FDA warnings in hopes of making their children with autism easier to handle.
In the 1940s and 1950s, state mental hospitals around the U.S. were bursting at the seams with untreatable disorders, most commonly schizophrenia. In fact, more people were hospitalized with psychiatric illnesses than with all other diseases combined. Psychiatrists were desperate to do something, anything to stem the tide.
The answer: lobotomies.
Today, lobotomies share a space in a dusty bin next to whips, chains, snake pits, phrenology machines, and trepanning—an ancient ritual in which holes are drilled into the brain to “release evil spirits.” Although lobotomies are now a subject of horror movies, in a sense, they’re back. We just don’t call them lobotomies anymore.
In the middle of the 20th century, lobotomies were a “therapy of despair.” Today’s psychiatric therapies of despair don’t involve adults with schizophrenia; they involve children with autism, a disorder that can be both emotionally and financially burdensome and for which modern medicine has little to offer. Children with autism have been put in hyperbaric oxygen chambers, causing intense, painful pressure on their eardrums and at least one death. They’ve been given intravenous medicines designed to bind heavy metals, causing another child to die when his heart stopped beating. They’ve been taken to Central America or other regions where stem cells (or what have been called stem cells) have been injected into their spinal fluids. And, perhaps worst of all, they’ve been subjected to a therapy called Magic Mineral Solution (MMS), which crosses the line from desperation to child abuse.
MMS—marketed variously as Master Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Solution, and Miracle Mineral Supplement—was invented by a former Scientologist turned health evangelist named Jim Humble, who calls himself the archbishop of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing and has claimed in church videos to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy.
MMS, which Humble offers as a cure for AIDS, malaria, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, contains two chemicals, sodium chlorite and citric acid that combine to form chlorine dioxide—a potent, industrial-strength bleach. In 2010, the FDA warned consumers not to take MMS, and to throw any containers of it away immediately.
Unfortunately, parents of autistic children haven’t gotten the message: MMS is now all the rage in the autism community. The problem—apart from the fact that autism isn’t caused by worms—is that even small quantities of the substance, which children are directed to swallow or receive as an enema, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, respiratory failure, anemia, and, ironically, developmental delay. In October 2015, one U.S. vendor was sent to prison for selling the product. A California man has alleged that MMS caused his wife’s death, though an autopsy was inconclusive.
Parents who give their children this industrial bleach—and there appear to be thousands of them—often share their stories online. They write about children crying out in pain. They talk about how their children’s hair has fallen out. And they talk about how their kids have slowly grown more apathetic, losing any previous emotion. How MMS has made their children quieter, easier to handle. In essence, how—as had been the case for lobotomies—they have substituted one disorder for another. Still, these parents urge each other on. It’s working, they claim.