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Category: Intervention

What’s the Point of Social Skills?

What’s the Point of Social Skills?

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Just to be clear, despite the title, I’m not questioning the idea that social skills are real or useful. No, instead I’m asking why social skills are useful.  What is their purpose? It’s not a pointless or stupid question, because I can think of at least a couple of good answers: They are useful for building and maintaining friendships, social connections that are valuable because of their inherent worth; or They are useful for instrumental social interactions: for use in…

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Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Why Do Some People Believe?

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Why Do Some People Believe?

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There are still people who believe in the most bizarre “cures” for autism.  We see stories about the continued use of chelation (which reportedly has the rather nasty side-effect of occasionally killing people) and bleach “MMS” (ditto).  Some of these complementary and alternative treatment approaches seem so utterly bizarre as to be completely devoid of any vestiges of logic, reason, or science: I once had a parent earnestly tell me that giant magnets under her autistic child’s bed were essential…

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Theatre and Autism

Theatre and Autism

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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…

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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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Thoughts on the RPM Controversy

Thoughts on the RPM Controversy

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[Author’s Note, June 2020: This post is now out of date.  It was written before the emergence of crucial new empirical evidence from Jaswal et al. that changed the RPM debate.  I also feel that there are sections of this post that are not sufficiently nuanced given the complexity of this issue and importance of the right to communication.  The post thus does not reflect my current perspective, which can be seen here: http://www.autisticscholar.com/rpm-and-fc/.] In recent years, a large segment…

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Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part II

Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part II

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Quick recap: in Part I, we discussed early intervention and how it could be improved.  I think we covered some important points (the need to be clear about our targets, whether the term “ABA” is no longer helpful), but we ended with an important question: How are we going to ensure that our best and hopefully-ever-improving practices actually get implemented at the community level?  Without a good answer to this question, any improvements we make to our best practices will…

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A young child in a green shirt
Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part I

Some Thoughts on Early Intervention: Part I

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As an autistic adult who is also a graduate student researching autism, I’m a member of two very different communities, and these communities have very different views on many issues.  It’s like they see the world through two incommensurable paradigms, relying on fundamentally different sets of assumptions about the world.[1]  The communities certainly don’t usually spend a lot of time talking to each other, at least in North America (the British are a bit ahead of us on that front). …

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