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…
Have you heard the term “hidden curriculum” before? It refers to everything that is not explicitly taught in a place of learning. One important part of the hidden curriculum in a university – the setting where people are getting an education in preparation for undertaking a professional career – is how to actually go about getting a career. Universities teach people academic information – facts, theories, and so forth. Information about how the world works. We don’t really discuss how…
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…
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…
Jobs are pretty important. Obviously, we live in an economic system that happens to value “productive” labour – i.e., work done in jobs. We get paid for jobs. Through jobs, we also get something to do with our days and a way to be satisfied with ourselves, a way to feel that we are contributing to society. (I personally don’t think productive labour should be so closely tied to our self-worth and the way society values us – I don’t…
Lately, I’ve been devoting a lot of thought to the question of how we can best conceptualize executive functions with an eye towards the real world: towards practical concerns like strategies and interventions that can help us to improve our time management skills. I’ve heard some autistic people arguing that we shouldn’t be trying to force anyone who struggles with executive functions and organization to improve through effort and force of will. Instead, the argument goes, we should provide accommodations…
Warning: I write this post with a minimal and superficial knowledge of the science of diet and nutrition. I am obviously not in any way, shape, or form, qualified to give medical or dietary advice. You may have heard claims that autistic people need to exclude particular foods from our diets. These exclusion diets are one of the most popular types of complementary & alternative medicine intervention in the autism world (Perrin et al., 2012). Special diets may indeed be…
Parents, I know that learning about your child’s autism can be a stressful experience, to say the least. Maybe you’ve told doctors and professionals about your concerns, only to have them dismissed. Or maybe your doctor sent you straight along the correct path to a diagnosis, but still you found yourself having to sit through a series of questions and assessments you didn’t understand, before being briefly issued a label with only a little bit of explanation – leaving you…
After my recent, somewhat abstract and theoretical post on neurodiversity, I thought it might be a good time to turn to something a little more practical. I think it’s about time I wrote a post I should have written long ago: a rant about the expensive, inaccessible, disorganized, uncoordinated, under-capacity, and generally grossly inadequate system for diagnosing autistic adults. I hear that jurisdictions in the UK are moving to make obtaining a diagnosis is a relatively accessible process. But across…
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…
