If you read this blog, you might notice that I have devoted a lot of time to the question of inclusion and specialization in the school system. Why am I so obsessed with schools and school placement? Well, I admit I hadn’t really thought about that question for the longest time – I just knew, from my own experiences and my observations of a couple of specialized schools in the community, that school placement can make a real difference in…
I’m a big believer in the idea of an autistic community. We live in a world where autistic people are isolated and marginalized. Furthermore, we live in a world where typically-developing people’s expectations and preferences regarding social interactions and customs are valued, and where autistic people’s own preferences are generally not valued. Communities of autistic adults can provide us with unconditional acceptance and the opportunity to be among others who, even if they’re not necessarily similar to us, will at…
Controlled laboratory environments are great, don’t get me wrong. I hate the messy real world, with its confusing morass of different measurable and unmeasurable variables, just as much as the next researcher. I realize why we often want to take people away from that messy quagmire and into a nice room where we can shove them in front of a computer and show them pictures and stuff, while we track their eye gaze or while we have them push little…
Many autistic people suffer in mainstream schools. They can be bullied and victimized, isolated and ostracized. They can experience the distress which comes from being in an environment that is hostile to their senses. Their mental health can suffer. Some autistic people, in the schools, do not learn the subjects being taught in their curriculum, but helplessness and fear. There are at least two major responses to this problem. One group – those who could be called “full,” “universal,” or…
There is something seriously wrong with the distribution of autism research funding. The most recent report of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) in the United States reported that fully half of all autism research funding continues to go to the area of biology and risk factors (Office of Autism Research Coordination, 2017). For comparison, only 2% of all research funding was awarded to projects in the “lifespan” area. A similar situation prevails in a number of other jurisdictions.[1] This…
In previous posts, I have argued that the mainstream school can be – rather than an inclusive environment – a place where autistic children are victimized and isolated. It isn’t always, but it often is. However, we often hear the idea that autistic people should be mainstreamed because exposure to neurotypical peers can improve their social skills (e.g., Lynch & Irvine, 2009, p. 848, Roberts & Simpson, 2016, p. 1086; Sansosti & Sansosti, 2012, p. 924). In theory, because neurotypical…
[Author’s Note, June 2020: This post is now out of date. It was written before the emergence of crucial new empirical evidence from Jaswal et al. that changed the RPM debate. I also feel that there are sections of this post that are not sufficiently nuanced given the complexity of this issue and importance of the right to communication. The post thus does not reflect my current perspective, which can be seen here: http://www.autisticscholar.com/rpm-and-fc/.] In recent years, a large segment…
I have already posted about what is perhaps the most obvious disadvantage of the mainstream school – bullying. But there is another problem which is at least as important, and probably much more so. It is more subtle and insidious, but certainly no less damaging. It is the problem of social isolation. There is ample research to demonstrate that autistic people in the mainstream are isolated. Autistic children often lack friendships and may find themselves reduced to the peripheries of…
Friendship Competition I’m a big fan of applying social science perspectives to autism. We spend so much time thinking about autism from the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, biology, psychiatry – but we rarely think about autism from perspectives like anthropology or political science. Fortunately, “rarely” doesn’t mean “never.” For example, in 2015, Elizabeth Fein published, in a psychological anthropology journal, a fascinating article about how societal changes that have increased the competitiveness of our social relationships might have affected the…
We’ve come a long way in conversations about autism and violence. It used to be normal for people to speculate that autistic people are more likely to commit violent crimes than neurotypicals, and to an extent people still do that. But now we at least have access to some excellent studies, like this one by Heeramun et al. (2017) with its huge population sample, showing that autistic people are no more likely to commit violent crimes than neurotypicals, at least…