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In Defence of Intense Interests

August 27, 2018 Patrick Dwyer Comments 3 comments

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…

Autism over the Ages

August 3, 2018 Patrick Dwyer Comments 3 comments

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…

Autism & Violence: What About Psychosocial Stress?

August 2, 2018 Patrick Dwyer Comments 2 comments

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…

Autistic Scholar

Thoughts on autism, neurodiversity, and more

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