Lifting Blame for Autism Off Moms

If anything could be tougher on a mother than seeing her child slip into autism, it might be having to shoulder the blame. That’s what happened to a generation of moms in the 1950s and ‘60s, when doctors blamed autism on a woman’s failure to bond with her child.

Some of those women help set the record straight in “Refrigerator Mothers” (10 p.m., KCET), an alarming “P.O.V.” documentary about the impact of misdiagnosis.

“Cold mother syndrome” was the theory of Bruno Bettelheim, a concentration camp survivor who believed autism arose from detached mothering--something akin to how prisoners reacted to Nazi guards.

Before the diagnosis was debunked in the 1960s and ‘70s, when doctors realized the neurological disorder couldn’t be cured with Freudian analysis, thousands of children were condemned to questionable therapies, their mothers to years of self-doubt. Many women eventually resisted the verdict and still care for their children--illustrating a bond that has outlasted scientific error. As one mother says, “I had this darling little boy, and I lost him. I’ve been trying to find him ever since, and I’ll never stop.”

The film, directed by David E. Simpson and produced by J.J. Hanley and Gordon Quinn, is told in typical “P.O.V.” style, without heavy narration. Instead, it offers the points of view of various mothers.

One black woman recalls being denied treatment for her boy because he didn’t fit the autism profile: coming from a white, upper-middle-class family.

“You can’t even be a refrigerator mother,” she says. “The irony of it all.” She finally got him into a school, but the teachers were Bettelheim disciples who isolated the child from her.

With autism diagnoses on the rise, there are now several leading theories about the cause of the mysterious disorder. None of them blames the mother.