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…
Have I ever mentioned that “typically-developing” mice are disgusting? They’re always spending their time going around “anogenitally sniffing” each other. Horribly unhygienic. Look, mouse models of autism have problems at the behavioural level. Just how are you going to equate the behaviour of this relatively simple creature with that of humans? I mean, humans have language, elaborate ways of nonverbally signalling our intentions, and even things like social institutions and societies. Mice have anogenital sniffing, which is apparently good for…
For a long time, I was part of a theatre group for autistic people. I joined when I was 13 and I remained part of the group in some capacity or other for a total of ten years (although for the final year I was only irregularly attending meetings as a substitute instructor). I suppose it’s fairly obvious I wouldn’t have stayed for such a long period – indeed, from the beginning of my teenage years until I was finishing…
Today, I’ll be continuing my assault on the idea that everybody should be forced to attend all-inclusive mainstream schools with a sixth post on the subject. We’ve already heard how autistic students in the mainstream can be bullied and isolated. Furthermore, I’ve argued that the mainstream does little to help us learn social skills and instead probably delays social learning. We’ve also discussed how educational placement decisions are made and we’ve discussed why all of this is so critically important….
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…
If you read this blog, you might notice that I have devoted a lot of time to the question of inclusion and specialization in the school system. Why am I so obsessed with schools and school placement? Well, I admit I hadn’t really thought about that question for the longest time – I just knew, from my own experiences and my observations of a couple of specialized schools in the community, that school placement can make a real difference in…
I’m a big believer in the idea of an autistic community. We live in a world where autistic people are isolated and marginalized. Furthermore, we live in a world where typically-developing people’s expectations and preferences regarding social interactions and customs are valued, and where autistic people’s own preferences are generally not valued. Communities of autistic adults can provide us with unconditional acceptance and the opportunity to be among others who, even if they’re not necessarily similar to us, will at…
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…