They used the valproic-acid mouse model of autism spectrum disorder; such mice exhibit reduced social behaviors as a result of being exposed to the anti-epileptic drug valproic acid in the womb.

Just like with autistic humans, you flood them with valproic acid while they are gestating.

/s

https://www.drugs.com/sfx/valproic-acid-side-effects.html

Valproate can impair cognitive development with prenatal exposure and produce major congenital malformations, particularly neural tube defects (eg, spina bifida), and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Basically, drug manufacturers decided that autism is the same thing as chemically lobotomizing and physically deforming the subject in utero, because chemically lobotomized mice are less social.

I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4688329/

Autism is a specific disorder in humans, and most of its symptoms can only be approximated by animal models.

VPA induces ASD both in human and animals. The etiological mechanism may involve changes in epigenetic marks, expression level of genetic determinants as well as brain lesion.

Translated: If we give flood mice with valproic acid in utero, they develop brain lesions, which makes them kind of retarded (they literally use mental retardation as a ‘common symptom’ of autism in the paper) and bad at socializing, therefore that’s basically the same as autism.

To apply this directly to humans, when an adult autism diagnosis requires something like a year or two of continuous meeting with a PhD psychologist, is completely bonkers.

Given that the core ‘chemical imbalance’ model that was the theoretical underpinning for the development of SSRIs has been shown to be at best, wildly incorrect, and at worst, totally bunk, I’d say this study is horseshit.

EDIT: When people make showerthoughts style questions like “what is going to be the ‘oops we didn’t know widespread cigarette or leaded gasoline usage was actually horrible for us’ of our time?” … the answer is mass use of manufactured psychoactive drugs.

The actual truth is that their efficacy in treating what they are prescribed to treat is far, far less than is commonly presented by most common people and professionals, that the proposed mechanisms to explain how and why they work are actually quite poorly understood and not backed up by real data (cough, almost all the studies are on psychiatric drugs are conducted or funded by the drug manufacturers themselves, cough), and that the deleterious side effects caused by them are far more common and severe than lay people and professionals believe.