BTS rapper Suga co-wrote The MIND Program with medical experts.
Every day, there seems to be news about the Korean supergroup BTS. They released their much awaited post-military album Arirang. The septet starred in their own Netflix documentary, BTS: The Return. And they’ve already kicked off their world tour, which is slated to end on March 14, 2027 in the Philippines.
But something that didn’t get enough attention (in my opinion) is Suga co-authoring the book, MIND Program, with experts from the Yonsei Severance Hospital. The MIND in question stands for Music, Interaction, Network, and Diversity, and the book offers a music-based approach to developing social skills for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). (Suga’s fans may recall that the music star donated $3.5 million to that same hospital in 2025 to establish the Min Yoongi Treatment Center.)
Due to a pre-existing injury, Suga was assigned alternative military service (from 2023 to 2025) rather than active combat duty like his bandmates. While employed as a public service worker, he began planning ideas for MIND with Cheon Keun-ah, who specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry. Around the same time, Suga quietly volunteered to work with children with ASD.
While some naysayers have said he only did this to get back in the public’s good graces after his much publicized scooter incident, I’d argue that celebrities don’t usually put in this much time, effort, or money when making public mea culpas. They issue apologies, disappear for a while, and then pretend it never happened.
But this book wasn’t written to make a lot of money or top the world’s bestseller lists. It’s an academic book aimed at a specific market.
According to the World Population Review, “autism is a neurological and developmental condition related to brain development. Autism impacts the way individuals perceive and socialize with others and interact with their surroundings. Signs of autism can usually be observed in the early childhood years. Autism is defined by a specific set of behaviors that affect a person’s ability to interact and communicate with others. There are different degrees of autism, but some common behaviors associated with this disability include poor motor skills, repetitive behaviors, delayed speech, difficulties with reasoning, very narrow interests, and impairments in social interactions and communications (such as a diminished ability to detect social cues).”
Andrew Wakefield was a British gastroenterologist and surgeon who, as of 2010, was stripped of his medical license. Why? For professional misconduct. In 1998, he presented a research paper based on a small sample group of 12 children, and claimed that the MMR vaccine — for measles, mumps, and rubella — led to increased rates of autism. Though scientists conducted epidemiological studies and disavowed his research as flawed, and though his publisher retracted Wakefield’s paper, his initial claim became the kindling that sparked the anti-vax movement.
“There were lots of problems later found with what [Wakefield] published,” Dr. Josh Sharfstein said on the Public Health On Call podcast. “They were cherry-picked cases. And we know that, given that the age when children receive the MMR is also the age when some children regress into autism, there will be a temporal relationship; by chance alone, some children would develop autism after vaccination. So, from a scientific perspective, the paper didn’t show much. But you had a very well-credentialed, very charismatic person coming from an outstanding institution publishing this paper in a very prestigious journal, and he really ran with it.”
As of today, no peer-reviewed research confirmed any links between vaccines and autism. Sharfstein, who’s also a professor at Johns Hopkins University professor, concluded, “[As of 2025], we have 16 well-conducted, large population-based studies, carefully designed, done by different investigators in different countries, using different but strong methods. And all have found no relationship between the MMR vaccine, thimerosal in vaccines, or the number of vaccines given and autism. The evidence is compelling.”
Courtesy: Council on Foreign Relations
Yes, but then no. In 2000, the measles had been eliminated in the United States. But by 2025, the U.S. cited more than 2,200 measles cases that year alone. We’re not even halfway through 2026, but at least 1,600 cases of measles have been confirmed so far.
The U.S. has become one of those shithole countries that our president shook his finger at. And now the U.S. is at risk of losing its measles-elimination status from the Pan American Health Organization.
I bring all of this up because it is true that South Korea culturally does not view those with disabilities favorably — and it’s an important issue that is being addressed by South Koreans who are nowhere near as famous as Suga.
But let’s not pretend that this isn’t also the case where most of us (all of us?) live. This isn’t whataboutism. It’s fact. Yet there is a certain contingent of westerners who have had a field day using this as an indictment against South Korea. As if the U.S. isn’t experiencing a major measles epidemic right now because some parents believe the possibility of autism is a worse fate than death itself.
I have nothing but kudos for Suga, who could have let the academics and scientists handle this project. But he chose to use his celebrity to bring attention to an important cause that he knows will get more coverage because of who he is.
This is how change happens. Not the only way, for certain, but a definitive way for sure.
Suga alongside Severance Hospital president, Keum Ki-chang (Courtesy: Severance Hospital)
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