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The Autism Research Institute (ARI), established in 1967 by Bernard Rimland, is a San Diego, California, based nonprofit that funds research and provides information on autism and related autistic spectrum disorders. Since its inception, ARI has been guided by the premise that autism can be treated effectively through intensive behavior modification, such as Applied Behavior Analysis, and a variety of individualized biomedical autism therapies.

Contents 1 Shedding light on autism 2 Infantile Autism 3 The autism epidemic 4 Ongoing projects 5 See also 6 External link

Dr. Stephen M. Edelson, who became the director of ARI upon Rimland's death in 2006, said “Dr. Rimland will go down in history as the person who ended the ‘dark ages’ of autism and spearheaded the fight to bring hope and help to autistic children. When he began his work in the field of autism in the 1960s, psychiatrists blamed parents for their children’s autism, institutionalized those children, and ‘treated’ them by drugging them into submission. Today, autistic children receive effective educational interventions and biomedical treatments that bring about dramatic improvement and often even recovery. At every step of this revolution, Dr. Rimland led the way—and at every step, he had to fight tooth-and-nail against an establishment determined to maintain the status quo.”

Dr. Rimland's 1964 book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior", challenged the belief of the mainstream medical establishment that autism was an emotional disorder caused by refrigerator mothers. Treatments, prescribed by Bruno Bettelheim and other psychoanalysts of the 1960s, included having children kick and spit on statues representing their mothers. Rimland's leadership of ARI helped change such medical stereotyping, and fostered an understanding among medical professionals that autism is actually a biomedical disorder, rather than the result of poor parenting.

During the 1980s, ARI was in the forefront of calling attention to what is now widely recognized as an autism epidemic. Recent studies^{[citation needed]} show an 800% increase in cases since 1985, when Rimland and ARI first started calling attention to the rapidly increasing number of children diagnosed with autism and other pervasive developmental disorders. ARI developed and maintains the world's largest databank of information on autistic individuals, with over 37,000 detailed case histories of autistic children from 60 countries, and is a major source of information on the epidemic and its potential causes.

ARI is engaged in a variety of projects, including:

• Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) Think-Tanks and Conferences brings together physicians and scientists from around the world to develop advanced methods of diagnosis and treatment.
• Autism Research Review International (ARRI), a quarterly newsletter that provides the latest information about autism from scientific and medical articles.
• Providing free and low-cost information to parents, professionals and the media.

• Autism Society of America

• AutismWebsite.com - Autism Research Institute homepage