Traduction française (merci beaucoup, Autisme et Société!) Well, it’s been a while… I must confess that I haven’t written a single blog post in a few years – and haven’t posted any in a couple of years. I got busy and distracted, and I guess the idea of writing blog posts turned gradually into a chore instead of what it was supposed to be – a nice way for me to share thoughts without going through the rigmarole of peer…
The monotropism account of autism – which was introduced by Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson in 2005 – is, within the autistic adult community, probably the dominant theoretical approach towards understanding what autism is. Many autistic people – myself included – find monotropism to be quite a bit more consistent with our personal experiences than other theories of autism. I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the monotropism account was developed by autistic…
Research suggests that volunteering and helping others can be beneficial for the mental health of the helper. This effect is believed to stand above and beyond any tendency for those with better mental health to be more likely to volunteer for things in the first place. Conversely, dependence on others and being a recipient of help can be bad for mental health. Indeed, a major component of the dominant interpersonal theory of suicide suggests that those who perceive themselves as…
I’m not writing this post because I particularly want to apportion blame to either researchers or neurodiversity advocates, or to fight over old grievances, as an end in itself. Mostly, I hope we can move forwards into a future where researchers and autistic advocates see one another as collaborators, as allies who are both fundamentally interested in the same goals – in particular, enhancing quality of life for autistic people across all the whole breadth of the multidimensionally diverse autism…
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…
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,…
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…
