Understanding autism

Post Reply New Topic

Autism is among the most mystifying of psychiatric disorders. For patients and their families, doctors, and caregivers, it presents an intractable and often painful clinical reality. For researchers, it presents a profound theoretical challenge. While it has a handful of fairly well agreed-upon characteristics (the so-called “core triad”), it is also linked with an enormous range of inconsistent and heterogeneous symptoms. These include behavioral, cognitive, neurobiological, and genetic abnormalities, as well as somatic medical conditions.

Given this messiness, it is hard to say what autism itself even is, let alone design effective interventions and treatments for it. There has been a call by some—psychologist Lynn Waterhouse most prominently—to eliminate the disorder from our nosology, on the grounds that it is too disunified to count as a single condition.


http://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.co. ... utism.html

I think the problem is non-autistic people want autistic people to be a diagnosis, not individuals. Autism will become easier to understand when it's viewed as a term to describe a way of being, a very general category for a large group of people, like neurotypical is. The way he describes autism in that post says more about him than the individuals he hopes to describe. Look at this sentence:

Sure, I think we'd all agree we have issues and struggles, but would a neurotypical describe themselves that way even though they have their own struggles in life? His description is pretty hateful to me. There are birds that fly and birds that don't. They're both birds. They have successes and struggles, and are what they are, enjoying their lives as they do. Would a neurotypical ever describe their egocentric, tunnel vision-like demand to be the way of being as part of a "perfect storm" which we call neurotypical? No.

We all understand how key communication is in different types of relationships. That's really what they issue is, though neurotypicals (who think they are expert at communication, compared to us) don't see that. Almost all writing on autism seems to be from non-autistic "experts," describing people from the outside without considering their intentions, point of view, or self-descriptions. It never seems to engage with the autistic individuals in question, merely to explain in neurotypical terms behavior which appears freakish or odd from the outside. For example, when a cat narrows its eyes that means it's happy and trusts you. To a human, that expression means hate or anger. That is the human's perception, but not the cat's intention. Neurotypicals frequently assume their perceptions are our intentions. They see our need for isolation, routine, and special interests as selfish, odd, or wrong (largely because they make the neurotpical feel bad or confused), when these behaviors are there for us to be happy and productive. When our coping mechanisms are taken away, we might have a meltdown, which is only normal. A neurotypical person will marvel at the "surprise" of a meltdown after taking away our coping mechanisms as a way of "correcting" behavior. No wonder they're confused.

Diatribes aside, I guess the point is: is autism really too hard to describe, or are we just trying too hard to be reductive?

This^^^^^. It feels like such a relief when I read something by Temple Grandin, an aspie blog, well written posts on wp. How can we be more out there as the experts that people refer to in order to learn about autism?

Very few people understand enough math to understand a proof of Shannon's Theorem, which has allowed engineers to develop the Internet. If you are an engineer, it is a very useful tool for weeding out bad inventions, science, and engineering. Without it, talented engineers would be just as lost as the fellow who wrote that article about autism cited by the OP.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ion-theory

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Commu ... 0881335541
Principles of Communication Engineering
by John M. Wozencraft (Author),‎ Irwin Mark Jacobs (Author)
A graduate level textbook.

The orbits of the planets don't make much sense if you put the Earth at the center of the Universe.
But people believed that for a long time.