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Category: Miscellaneous

Media Normalization of Violence and Marginalization

Media Normalization of Violence and Marginalization

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Why do we allow mockery of autistic and neurodivergent people? If you look at our media today, it seems to accept the idea that awkwardness and difference can be a source of amusement.  We’re routinely invited to laugh at neurodivergence and mock it.  We’re invited to laugh at the class nerd, or the crazy professor, or some other stereotyped neurodivergent character.  We’re even taught that awkward kids will get bullied: such bullying is often presented as entirely natural and predictable. …

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In Defence of Intense Interests

In Defence of Intense Interests

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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…

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Autism over the Ages

Autism over the Ages

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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…

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Autism & Violence: What About Psychosocial Stress?

Autism & Violence: What About Psychosocial Stress?

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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…

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