[7] In January 2007, Baggs posted a video on YouTube entitled "In My Language"[11] on the topic of autism which became the subject of several articles on CNN.

[16] About Baggs, Sanjay Gupta said:[13] [They] told me that because [they don't] communicate with conventional spoken word, [they are] written off, discarded and thought of as mentally retarded.

"[2] According to these classmates, Baggs functioned as a typically developing adolescent, and began to suffer psychological problems after long-term use of heavy doses of psychedelic drugs, resulting in a mental breakdown, after which Baggs withdrew from Simon's Rock and spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

After leaving Simon's Rock, Baggs wrote extensively on Deja News (now Google Groups) in the late 1990s, discussing their drug use and mental breakdown, stating that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and theorizing that they may also have had dissociative identity disorder.

[22][failed verification] Baggs did not dispute those details online when questioned after their 2007 CNN appearance, but claimed a loss of all functional speech in their 20s.

[25] An article in Slate stated that some of their past acquaintances had been threatened with legal action by attorneys employed by Baggs for challenging their story.

Baggs died on April 11, 2020, at the age of 39 in Burlington, Vermont; their mother said that the cause of their death was believed to be respiratory failure.