Some thoughts on the opposing ways autism is viewed

[andrewducker]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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.