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Category: Miscellaneous

A photograph depicting a large crowd of young people at an event featuring displays by different vendors at tables.
Networking and Planning Careers

Networking and Planning Careers

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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…

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3D scatterplot depicting cognitive ability, anxiety, and discomfort to loudness scores of autistic and non-autistic individuals
The autism constellation

The autism constellation

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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…

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A black-and-white photograph depicting children in a row of beds, one of which is enclosed by a mesh cage. A woman in a nurse's uniform stands facing away from the beds.
A ward in the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. Hundreds of children were murdered there in the Nazi era, while others were subjected to severe abuse. Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance.
Autism and Asperger’s in the Nazi Era

Autism and Asperger’s in the Nazi Era

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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…

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Get Early Job Experience

Get Early Job Experience

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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…

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Practical Executive Functions

Practical Executive Functions

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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…

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Exclusion Diets

Exclusion Diets

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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…

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Revealing the Diagnosis to an Autistic Child

Revealing the Diagnosis to an Autistic Child

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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…

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The Need for Adult Diagnostic Services

The Need for Adult Diagnostic Services

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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…

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Autism Spectrum Development

Autism Spectrum Development

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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…

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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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