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…
In previous posts, I’ve criticized the “pathology paradigm” of autism. I believe that there are a number of problems with this paradigm, but I always find myself returning to one that I find especially glaring: when we describe autism as pathology, when we use the language of deficit and disorder, we’re very openly suggesting to autistic people – a marginalized population with high vulnerability to mental health challenges – that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Autistic people are…
Author’s Note: I no longer particularly like some of the ideas in the post, which I now think are a bit oversimplified. If you want an updated take on my view of neurodiversity, I wrote an article at https://doi.org/10.1159/000523723. In Part II of this series, I discussed a lot of the basic ideas that still motivate my approach to neurodiversity. I argued that we presently lack a clear, consistent definition of neurodiversity, and I illustrated how this ambiguity hinders our…
Here’s an interesting question: what is the proper subject of autism research? Or, to rephrase things slightly, who should be the subjects of autism research? When I use the word “subject” here, I don’t mean a participant in a research study. I’m talking about a nonliving thing, living being, or class of things or beings that is dealt with by something else (in this case, that is dealt with by autism research). I’m asking about the proper subject matter for…
Here’s a fundamental question: what is the political status of autism? Are autism and other disabilities simply impairments that need to be addressed through the provisions of services and supports, or are autistic people also victims of oppressive social and political systems that cause marginalization? Do autistic people just need charity, or do we need social justice as well? We need to address this question and answer it, for I would say that the present model used to address autism…
Sometimes, the best way to see where our conventional assumptions can go wrong is to consider concrete examples. Within the pathology paradigm, we assume that autistic people are disordered, that they have deficits in different skills and abilities, but we don’t critically examine how autistic people’s environments and the typically-developing people within these environments might contribute to autistic people’s disabilities. We ignore the possibility that the typically-developing person might be something less than a normative ideal of perfection. Autism and…
I can be a bit of a theory nerd, sometimes. I like considering how different systems of thought develop in relation to one another. One of these theoretical questions that interests me is the emergence of the neurodiversity paradigm. This idea, developed by Judy Singer in the late 1990s, is a radical departure from most of previous human thought. The neurodiversity paradigm portrays the diversity of individual human minds and brains as something to be valued, whereas most human societies…
I’ve previously written a post to complain about the behavioural assays that are used in research with mouse models of autism. I’m seriously concerned that these tests just aren’t tapping into autistic behaviours, and that autistic development might be so complex and social in nature that animals like mice can’t really simulate it. I therefore suggested that autism research with mouse models might be better limited to the molecular level. I think it’s possible to broaden this criticism a little. …
I’ve previously posted a description of how I see the neurodiversity paradigm, as well as a post contrasting the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model of disability. (We often conflate the neurodiversity paradigm and the social model, but they’re really not the same thing.) Basically, I see the neurodiversity paradigm as a way of shifting our focus. Instead of looking solely at the neurodivergent person, we can use the neurodiversity paradigm to look at both the individual and society. We…