Anyone who says autism does not exist is either ignorant or a liar or both! Ignorance I can forgive for a little while, but the outright liars I rank among the kooks that say the Holocaust never happened, or that man has never been to the moon. Why deny such proven things?
“Autism” is a broad term covering a spectrum of mental disorders that range in severity from mild to severe. There are different types of those disorders, but there is often some commonality recognizable among them. My autistic son is 34 years old, high functioning and has never required medication of any kind. However, he exhibits some of the classic signs. During those 34 years I have informally studied other autistics to see how they compare. Autism is real! Autism seems like a recent phenomenon, but perhaps it has always existed and now the symptoms have been better recognized and classified. Perhaps once they belonged to an even larger group simply called idiots. Or perhaps something in the environment has affected more people than in the past. Whatever it is, it exists.