What term should we use to describe autism? To be clear, I’m perfectly happy to just say “autism” and “autistic”. I’m all for identity-first language. However, I also recognize that some people will want to keep a technical, fancy term around – and if we’re going to have a technical term, we should at least try to make it a good one. The current convention is, of course, “Autism Spectrum Disorder.” This language of “disorder” is extremely unhelpful. Autistic people…
A while ago, I described my view of what the neurodiversity paradigm means. In that post, my ideas owe some very clear debts not only to others who have thought about the concept of neurodiversity, but also to the thinkers who developed the social model of disability. Indeed, in Judy Singer’s new introduction to the original thesis (1998/2016) which she used to propose the idea of neurodiversity, she credits the social model with providing the “framework” of the thesis. However,…
Since the 1960s, numerous social psychology studies have shown that people in echo chambers become more extreme in their shared views. This finding is important enough that it has a name: the group polarization effect. This can be positive or negative, depending on the group: when people who aren’t racist get together with other non-racists, everybody gets even less racist, but when people who are a bit racist get together with other racists, they become more racist (Myers & Bishop,…
Last week, I was unpleasantly startled to read in a Spectrum News article that the latest draft of the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD-11, excludes differences in sensory processing from its list of autism symptoms. I thought we were over this. The ICD-11’s counterpart, the DSM-5, now includes sensory symptoms. I still grumble a little that they’re just lumped as a single symptom under the general category of restricted and repetitive behaviours, but I’m at least happy that they’re…
I think there are about three major strategies that people have used to justify violence and oppression in human societies: threat, disgust, and disablement.[1] Threat is a pretty straightforward one. We take a group of people and construct them as threatening Others (with a capital “O”): people who are not like us and who are threatening to us. We come to believe that those Other people are violent, dangerous, and savage. Whenever we feel that we are threatened by some…
I usually keep a pretty close eye on the autism news, and it seems like a day can hardly go by without me seeing some new, hysterical reference to the rising rates of autism diagnosis. It’s an epidemic, we’re told. It’s a crisis, we’re told. I not only find it tiresome to hear this idea repeated endlessly, but I’m also concerned that this sort of fearmongering is dangerous. It’s true I have some biases here. All communities want to imagine…
For a long time, the story about intense interests in autism has been a negative one. We viewed autism as pathology, and so naturally, anything about autism had to be bad. Intense interests were associated with autism; therefore, intense interests were bad. Of course, we tried to find explanations, to find justifications. Autistic kids need to get out and learn social skills, and they can’t do that if they’re pursuing an intense interest, we reasoned. Autistic kids need to get…
The Neurodiversity Paradigm In Part I of this post, we discussed how the pathology paradigm (Walker, 2013) is failing under the weight of the anomalies that beset it. We concluded that it was time to find a new paradigm. The emerging rival to the pathology paradigm is the neurodiversity paradigm. Judy Singer (1998/2016), who is generally accepted to have coined the term “neurodiversity,” asked: “Why not appropriate metaphors based on biodiversity, for instance, to advance the causes of people with…
The Pathology Paradigm Most of us have a basic idea of how psychological interventions work. The “disordered” person has a deficit, a deficiency. We intervene to eliminate or reduce the deficit, improving the “disordered” person’s ability to function in the world. Ultimately, we want to eliminate the “disorder” entirely if possible. It’s neat and logical. We can refer to this set of ideas and assumptions as the pathology paradigm (see Walker, 2013). There’s also a number of serious problems with…
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…