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Category: Broad Thoughts

The Autism Epidemic – Why Now?

The Autism Epidemic – Why Now?

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I’ve previously written about the “autism epidemic” and why I think it all just reflects better diagnosis rather than an actual increase in the true incidence of autism.  However, this still leaves us with an interesting question: what exactly happened to increase rates of diagnosis? The diagnosed prevalence of autism has been increasing for a long time, but one big change was the emergence of the idea of so-called “high functioning” autism in the 1980s.  Before then, autism had been…

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Silos and Echo Chambers in the World of Autism

Silos and Echo Chambers in the World of Autism

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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,…

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Independence: Preparation for Transition (Part I)

Independence: Preparation for Transition (Part I)

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Transition to adulthood is a daunting challenge.  In transition to adulthood, we fall off a cliff.  We suddenly find the predictable environments that have surrounded us changing, and we enter new and different environments.  In these new environments, we encounter new expectations, new demands.  In these new environments, our familiar support systems fall away, and we find ourselves struggling to advocate for ourselves within an unfamiliar and inadequate set of adult service systems. Seriously, if you have a group of…

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Independence: The Transition (Part II)

Independence: The Transition (Part II)

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In Part I of this post, I raised the concern that many young autistic people can become dependent on their parents or support systems, and that many young autistic people aren’t being expected to succeed in adulthood.  As a result, they are unprepared for the adult transition. In Part I, I recommended that we should do more to prepare young people for the demands of adulthood in the years before they pass that magical dividing line and become adults.  In…

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The Roots of Oppression: Threat, Disgust, and Disablement

The Roots of Oppression: Threat, Disgust, and Disablement

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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…

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The So-Called “Autism Epidemic”

The So-Called “Autism Epidemic”

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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…

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On Neurodiversity: Or, How to Help People without Calling Them Broken (Part II)

On Neurodiversity: Or, How to Help People without Calling Them Broken (Part II)

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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…

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On Neurodiversity: Or, How to Help People without Calling Them Broken (Part I)

On Neurodiversity: Or, How to Help People without Calling Them Broken (Part I)

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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…

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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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