Mel Baggs

[9][10][8] Baggs created a website titled "Getting the Truth Out", a response to a campaign by the Autism Society of America.

[8] They also spoke at conferences about disabilities, and worked with Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists who were researching autism.

[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.

Baggs wrote extensively on Deja News in the late 1990s, discussing their drug use and mental breakdown[citation needed], stating that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and theorizing that they may also have had dissociative identity disorder (DID).

[27] 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.