Andrew Whitehouse never expected his work as an autism researcher to put him in danger. But that’s exactly what happened soon after he and his colleagues reported in 2020 that few autism interventions used in the clinic are backed by solid evidence.
Within weeks, a range of clinicians, therapy providers and professional organizations had threatened to sue Whitehouse or had issued complaints about him to his employer. Some harassed his family, too, putting their safety at risk, he says.
For Whitehouse, professor of autism research at the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia in Perth, the experience came as a shock. “It’s so absurd that just a true and faithful reading of science leads to this,” he says. “It’s an untold story.”
In fact, Whitehouse’s findings were not outliers. Another 2020 study—the Autism Intervention Meta-Analysis, or Project AIM for short—plus a string of reviews over the past ...
