For a long time, we’ve used the metaphor of a spectrum to describe autism. This is a metaphor that has worked fairly well for us in many ways. It alerted us to the fact that instead of being a discrete category, there’s a lot of heterogeneity and variability within autism. Indeed, I would argue that autism lacks biological reality – it’s a social construct, a category that we made up, and its boundaries have shifted over space and time. I’m…
I seem to have a bit of a self-determination theme running through this blog now. I’ve written about self-determination a fair bit, and most particularly in the context of childhood, because I feel like children in general have relatively little freedom to exercise control over their lives and those with disabilities even less. Today, I thought I might take our discussion of the importance of self-determination in another direction – mental health (which I suppose is another thing I do…
This is a bit of a departure from what I usually do with this blog, but I was contacted recently by an autistic person who was forbidden from pursuing an interest in aviation because of an autism diagnosis. I find this to be an outrageous case of discrimination. Now, obviously not everyone is going to be suited to flying planes. I certainly don’t think it would be my cup of tea. But a blanket ban on anyone from a particular…
I’ve decided to write this in order to essentially revisit a topic that I last addressed in a post a couple of years ago. This post, regarding the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), has (based on number of views) apparently received a lot of traffic compared to other posts on this blog, no doubt because of the vital importance of protecting people’s right to communicate. Being profoundly aware of the importance of the right to communicate, as well as fully cognizant…
I’m finding myself increasingly annoyed by the emphasis on evidence-based practice in the autism world. This is not because I don’t see the value in responsible intervention practices that are consistent with research and theory. There are still far too many people who are taken in by alternative pseudoscience, quack treatments, and faith healing in a vain attempt to “cure” autism. Even if we leave aside the important ethical question of whether a “cure” for autism itself is truly desirable,…
One of the most interesting discussions I’ve ever had in the autism world was at a conference I was involved in organizing back when I was an undergraduate student. We had organized some panels on different stages of autistic people’s experiences in life and we found that numerous people had particularly negative thoughts about their childhoods. In particular, they were talking about how relieved they were to be out of school. To provide a little background, this was not necessarily…
In the last couple of years, the autism world has witnessed a very intense debate regarding the historical origins of the neurotype we study. Traditionally, Hans Asperger – one of the first people if not the first to use the term autism in its modern diagnostic sense, and the man after whom “Asperger syndrome” was named – was thought to be an essentially benevolent figure within the murderous Nazi state, which had embarked on a policy aimed at slaughtering disabled…
Autistic people aren’t yet well-represented among autism researchers. I’ve been trying to keep track of my fellow autistic autism researchers and, worldwide, I’m currently aware of about four dozen of us, or thereabouts, spread out widely across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, although from social media groups I think there may be somewhat more. Still, many of us are students, which means that our control over our research is limited. I’m only aware of a tiny handful of research…
I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of problems with the way that we currently do diagnostic assessments for autism and other divergent neurotypes. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the issues, but I thought I would make an effort to identify some of the ones that I think are most important. One important problem is that our diagnostic systems are inaccessible. Parents are likely to notice some evidence of atypical neurodevelopment…
Today, the vast majority of researchers, clinicians, and professionals in the autism world don’t know about autistic burnout. Autistic burnout is an idea that comes from autistic adults, and given how little contact there is between autistic adults and the community of researchers supposedly dedicated to learning more about autism, most researchers will never have had a chance to learn about it. Indeed, as far as I’m aware, the only people investigating autistic burnout from a research perspective are Dora…
