Originally produced in 2002.

Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Humanities Council.

Special features: Interview with the filmmakers; additional scenes; soundtrack; web links.

Executive producer, co-producer, Gordon Quinn; music, Hannah Marcus; camera, Tsuyoshi Kimoto, Gordon Quinn.

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, the American medical establishment thought it had found the cause of autism: poor mothering. Doctors presumed that the bizarre behaviors of autistic children--rigid rituals, difficulty with speech, extreme self-isolation--stemmed from their mothers' emotional frigidity. Medicine now knows that autism is a brain disorder, not the result of poor parenting. But for a whole generation of women branded as cold "refrigerator mothers," the damage had already been done.

DVD.

Closed-captioned.