andrewducker | Some thoughts on the opposing ways autism is viewed

I had a realisation recently about the "autism wars" - an ongoing disagreement between some autism specialists and some autistic people over how autism should be viewed and approached.

One of the groups thinks of there being "mild autism" and "severe autism" (or "high functioning" and "low functioning"). And they are the ones who want to treat it, and mostly focus on the needs of parents in dealing with their disabled kids.

And then there are the ones I knows more of personally. And they basically think of autism as being a different way of thinking. One which happens to have a common co-morbidity with intellectual disabilities - but the cognitive style and the intelligence issues are separate, they're not two parts of the autism. The first part is the autism, the second just hits a lot of the same people.

And (one of the reasons) the disagreements seem to keep happening because the two sides do not realise that they are conceptualising things so differently. If you think of autism as being both the difference in thinking style _and_ the intellectual disability then the people who talk about how autism isn't a bad thing are clearly detached from reality. And if you think of autism as being a difference in thinking (of which group a higher than normal percentage are also affected by an intellectual disability) then people who want to "cure autism" are basically saying "We want to wipe out your way of thinking".

I don't have an answer for this. And it's not my area of expertise. This is just one thing I've noticed. Please do feel free to point out anything stupid I've said, and I apologise in advance for any offense I've caused.

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From:

alithea

I've come to the same conclusion and I think I've seen at least one autistic person on Twitter trying to explain this to some parents too.

I wonder if most of the problem is that kids with both issues are just being diagnosed as 'low functioning autistics' so parents who are really struggling just aren't seeing that the autism bit isn't the (only) problem. I get the impression that even supposed specialists can have very different ideas about anything neurological - we really do still have a very poor grasp of how brain wiring works in general!

But also not my area of expertise either, my understanding is based almost entirely on reading stuff on Twitter and if I've misunderstood any of the autists trying to educate me, I apologise too.

From:

danieldwilliam

I don't think we have a good grasp on how the brain works at all.

A good friend of mine is a professor of psychology at Cambridge. He does a lot of work on memory and in recent times has been greatly helped by portable MRI scanners. They seem a great advance on the previous model of finding people with brain injuries and trying to work out what parts of their memory or personality or cognitive functions had been changed.

Or you would observe higher primates and try and draw some correlation between their brain structures and ours.

There was a running joke when we were at uni that his job was basically throwing fruit at monkeys trying to brain damage them for science.

From:

momentsmusicaux

"And (one of the reasons) the disagreements seem to keep happening because the two sides do not realise that they are conceptualising things so differently"

This is a pattern I have observed before!

From:

danieldwilliam

I often mull over this issue. I think you have it right that the two views on autism are talking past each other.

I'm not in favour of autism "cures." I'm strongly in favour of the view that autism is a different way of thinking about the world.

One of the things that I circle around is to what extent are autistic people required to fit in with the rest of society. Autism as a different way of thinking has some implications for interacting with other people. Autistic people often find dealing with society as it is currently run difficult or painful. Autistic people are relatively rare in society. So there seems to be some asymmetry in how the shared problem of having autistic people and not-autistic people interact. All autistic people have to interact with some people who are not autistic and many will have the majority of their interactions with non-austistic people. It's not the case for most non-autistic people that they have to interact with austistic people.

I think it is probably easier for non-autistic people to change the way they interact when interacting with an autistic person but doing so is a rare event and the downside of it going wrong seems to sit with the autistic person.

From:

gingicat

I think it is probably easier for non-autistic people to change the way they interact when interacting with an autistic person but doing so is a rare event and the downside of it going wrong seems to sit with the autistic person.

Yeah. Some of that is that autistic people and non-autistic people can't imagine being in the other's shoes. And not-autistic people tend to look at the parts they think should be there and tell the autistic people that they're broken.

This is a huge part of ableism generally - for example, blind people just live their lives, not-blind people find themselves pitying them.

From:

theandrewhickey

This is part of it. But not quite.

On the tests I've taken, I am extremely "low functioning" in *every* area except verbal skills (where I function far better than most neurotypicals). By most clinical metrics I am more disabled than most so-called "low functioning" people. A big part of what happens is that Autism Parents think that someone who has verbal skills must therefore be "high functioning" and therefore has no problems. Because of this, any of us who can talk are "not like my kid" and not actually disabled.

Autism is *both* a disability *and* a different way of thinking, and the two are very, very, interlinked, to the extent that you couldn't possibly cure one without the other -- and I don't want to be cured of being me, or for my friends to be cured of being them. And the focus on a cure takes time and money away from things that can actually help all autistic people.

I am disabled. Some of that disability (like the communication stuff) is stuff that can never truly go away, but could be mitigated by NTs being willing to meet autistic people half way. A lot of the other disability could be eradicated altogether if we didn't have a society that insists, eg, on people having to earn a living by getting to a particular place at a particular time and sitting in a room full of flickering lights, uncomfortable textures, smells, noises, and chatty neurotypical people for a long period of time. And the rest of the disability is autoimmune and mental health stuff, which could actually do with treatment, but which is ignored in the search for a "cure" for the things that don't need curing. All these disabilities are common to almost all autistic people, yet none of them are the things that the cure-seekers focus on.

But because the autism parents use the fact that some of us can speak or write as evidence that we're not "really" autistic, the focus stops being on what will make our lives liveable, and remains on making sure we can make eye contact or nonsense like that.

From:

gingicat

Indeed.

From:

cmcmck

I was education manager for an autism charity and met parents who took both views (I take the 'different way of thinking' approach).

Some of it is the old, old thing (and I know this one up close and personal for obvious reasons) of wanting a 'normal' child, whatever that is.

As far as I'm concerned, a lot of the people I worked with and for didn't see their autism as a bad thing and they should know!

Edited Date: 2020-02-25 04:20 pm (UTC)

From:

liv

I think it's

cal__montgomery who says, we have never seen autism without trauma. (But possibly that's a quote from somebody else.) There are people for whom autism is a different way of thinking, but also who live in a society where nearly everybody is horrible to autistic people, whether from malice or lack of understanding. Those people, if they are highly intelligent adults, can seek out social groups where people are less brutal to autistic people. So they're somewhat more able to escape from trauma, and therefore more likely to be classified as having 'mild' or 'high-functioning' autism. People who are autistic and also intellectually disabled are much less likely to be able to escape from traumatic environments, and I suspect that having more difficulties is partly a consequence of more trauma. However I don't think we need to cure people of being intellectually disabled either; with or without autism, society is really hostile to people with intellectual disabilities, but it doesn't have to be that way.

From:

reverancepavane

Not quite in the autism field, but currently in my particular case there is debate as to whether the diagnosis should be classified as neurological (structural)or psychological (a result of trauma). There is increasing evidence that it should be classified as neurological through things like fMRI studies and the fact there is strong evidence it is an inheritable condition (about 40$ confidence). However it is mostly realised clinically by the severe psychological problems that it can create. [I only realised that other people shared my condition through reading a paper on fMRI imaging of the frontal cortex limbic system.]

I was lucky enough to be intelligent enough to realise I didn't think the same way other people did at quite an early age, and realise that what I was feeling was not what I was actually feeling. It did cause me some minor social problems - especially given the immaturity of other children when faced with something different - but it never developed into the severe sociopathy and psychopathy that is common with many sufferers of the condition. And it is very simple - once you realise this - to see why these psychological states would develop as a defence mechanism (in my book the mind will always attempt to protect itself).

There is no chemical intervention that can really help in this matter because it is how my brain is wired. There is no chemical imbalance. All that can be done in that way is to drug it senseless (in fact the nature of the disease makes psychoactive drugs a most unpleasant experience since it disrupts the "internal communication" and "monitor mind" that stabilises my condition. And most doctors do not appreciate being told there is nothing they can do - it just makes them go look for a bigger hammer to "cure" the problem.

My condition has made me much more aware of my own mind, as well as the minds of others. In this regard I am almost certainly "higher functioning" than most people (including many of the doctors attempting to diagnose me), but I am still not the same as other people. I can see the temptations of both sociopathy and psychopathy in dealing with this condition (and though I can readily project a sociopathic menace that can seriously scare people I am not going to give into the temptation).

In other words I don't think like other people. I have developed quite a different model of consciousness than most other people (and one which many cannot relate to). I tend to overreact to other people's emotional state and the emotions around me. This results in lots of social problems, including a lack of close personal friendships, extreme extoversion (in the original Freudian sense), and currently extreme social isolation and PTSD-level flashbacks of high emotional events (which coupled with an excellent memory means I relive the events when triggered). All of which are severe social disabilities.