Autism is NOT a disorder

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Back in the '60s, homosexuality was considered a disorder, correlated with pedophilia. This 1961 educational film by Sid Davis perfectly captures the common perception of homosexuality at the time :



Back then, some therapists employed aversion therapy to "cure" male homosexuality. This typically involved showing patients pictures of naked men while giving them electric shocks or drugs to make them vomit, and, once they could no longer bear it, showing them pictures of naked women or sending them out on a "date" with a young nurse. Needless to say, these cruel and degrading methods proved entirely ineffective.

Homosexuality became officially listed as a mental disorder in the DSM with the publication of the DSM-II in 1968. When the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder in 1973, 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it.

The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance" for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) only removed homosexuality from its ICD classification with the publication of ICD-10 in 1992.

The evolution of the status of homosexuality in the classifications of mental disorders highlights that concepts of mental disorder can be social constructs that change as society changes. Today, the standard of psychotherapy in the U.S. and Europe is "gay affirmative psychotherapy", which encourages gay people to accept their sexual orientation.

Personally, I don't see any reason why a similar shift in perception isn't possible for Autism.

Gee, I wish I could tell my child with minimal language, poor motor skills and developmental retardation that they are not disabled --- that autism is not a disability but just NT conspiracy to "crush weakness".

When I'm saying that Autism isn't a disorder, I'm not saying that someone with Autism can't possibly disabled.

Let me repeat my position :
* Autism can result in one or more disabilities (mutism, intellectual disability, social anxiety disorder, ...), but it doesn't per se
* Autism can result in one or more extreme talent (talent for maths, talent for art, great memory, ...), but it doesn't per se

Also, note that DNA research suggests there are literally hundreds of kinds of Autism! !

If the disorder exists only when interacting with other people, then why is it located in only one of the parties to the interaction? Why not both? Or in the interaction itself?

It's like saying that if one party speaks English and the other speaks Japanese and the two aren't understanding each other, then the problem must automatically lie with the Japanese-speaker because, well, everybody understands English if you speak it slowly enough, loudly enough and wave your arms a lot.

Totally!

Also, consider this :

From Wikipedia:

That is the social model of disability. It applies to every disability, not just autism. According to your arguments about autism not being a disability, everything else that's considered a disability is not a disability as well. Just replace "autistic" with "deaf" and your arguments would still make sense. Autism is just as much a disability as any other disability.

That's incorrect. EVERYONE who is deaf has a very specific unambiguous disability : the lack of hearing. This disability is totally independent of context. It's omni-present.

This is not the case for people with Autism... at all! Again :
* Autism can result in one or more disabilities (mutism, intellectual disability, social anxiety disorder, ...), but it doesn't per se
* Autism can result in one or more extreme talent (talent for maths, talent for art, great memory, ...), but it doesn't per se

I agree with this 100 percent. Many deaf people don't consider themselves to be disabled because they get along fine in deaf communities. Hearing isn't necessary for them to function. But other humans can hear, so in human society it's a disability. The same can be said for certain types of dwarfism.

@ aspiesavant
Just because you keep reposting the same statements, and quoting the same "resources," doesn't make anything that you say correct. It's still incorrect.

"Autism" is defined by medical professionals. It's a medical term. It's an arbitrary way of figuring out which people are disabled by a group of symptoms. So you can't redefine autism according to your viewpoint.

By definition, autism is a disorder. It's not a normal human variation. It's a major deviance from the norm which causes disability. Lack of normal human social skills, which all normal humans possess, is a disability, regardless of whether you think it is. So are the other behaviors.

Go try to create a society of only autistic people and see what happens. Nothing would get done because too many people would be spending all day working on special interests regardless of whether they were productive. Many people would forget to bathe, forget to complete tasks, forget to eat because they were too busy with special interests, irritate other people with their inability to deal with change, insult other people and start fights by not knowing when to shut up, bore other people with rambling diatribes about their special interests, be cold towards others when they needed sympathy, be reclusive because they didn't feel like interacting with people, etc.

And the result would be a totally non-productive society where everyone went around pissing each other off, isolating themselves, and not bothering to produce enough children to replace those who die. Because children require social interaction to produce, and they need to be paid attention to and not neglected in favor of special interests. I don't think there is any way at all a purely autistic society would be successful.

But a deaf society would likely be very successful. They actually are probably less disabled by a lack of hearing than autistic people are disabled by their symptoms.

Also, obsessive interests, rigidity, and repetitive behaviors do cause disability for many people. So do the sensory issues.

I disagree.

Let's imagine a hypothetical society where the vast majority of people are deaf. People would communicate with sign language and society would be built in such a way that hearing is not nesesarily to live in it. Such a society also wouldn't care about things like noise pollution, a loud construction operation could be going on next door in the middle of the night and nobody would care. If someone in that society could hear they would be considered disabled because they need special acomidations like a sound proof bedroom in order to sleep and they can be startled and annoyed by things that other people don't notice. Hearing also wouldn't be very advantageous in such a society as it is built in such a way that hearing isn't necessary to function.

Here is how someone who is not deaf in such a society might be discribed:

Hearing disorder is a disorder characterized by hyper-sensitivity to vibrations in the air. People who suffer from it are very annoyed by very slight vibrations and they can even be woken up with a start from something as minor as a pan being hit with a spoon on the opposite side of the house. When exposed to vibrations powerful enough for normal people to feel they often have to cover their ears. If someone you know has hearing disorder you can help by letting them sleep somewhere that is padded so that vibrations are dampened, and avoid doing anything that may cause too much disturbance in the air. Fortunately this condition is easy to cure, it has been found that significantly large vibrations can make these people develop a tolerance and let them lead normal lives.

This logic can be applied to any disability, including autism. Autism isn't really that different from other disabilities, because is one.

Last edited by mikeman7918 on 18 Apr 2016, 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As I said, everyone who is deaf has a very specific unambiguous disability : the lack of hearing.

Name one unambiguous disability that everyone with Autism has.

Who was it who said that "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed"? what ever happened to that person?

And just because you keep ignoring every argument I'm making, that doesn't make my arguments any less valid!

Repeating the same nonsense doesn't make it true. Believe what you want to believe, but stop expecting other people to accept the illogical nonsense.

Whoever said a disability has to be "unambiguous"? Deaf people actually are less disabled by their lack of hearing than autistic people are disabled by a lack of normal human social skills and other problems.

"Ambiguous" is really a relative term. It depends on what a person considers to be ambiguous. Deaf people do not always completely lack hearing. So what is "deafness?" A lack of hearing, hearing that is slightly impaired, totally impaired? Where's the line drawn? Is one person with slightly better hearing not deaf, while another with slightly worse hearing is deaf? What is "normal" hearing anyway? Isn't the line that's drawn between normal and abnormal arbitrary? If you look at it that way, deafness as a disability is also ambiguous.

There is no such thing as an unambiguous disability, it's all dependent on society. Bacteria are blind and deaf, they can't think or reason, they have no limbs, and they can't do much of anything. So are bacteria disabled? No because all other bacteria are like that too and they can function as a bacteria just fine as they are, but if any of those traits applied to a human then they definitely would be considered disabled because functioning as a human in human society as we know it requires certain abilities. There is no such thing as an unambiguous disability, autism related or otherwise.

Last edited by mikeman7918 on 18 Apr 2016, 5:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.

No one is ignoring your arguments. We are refuting them, and you are still repeating the same things as if they weren't already refuted. Your arguments are illogical, and don't fit the facts. They are simply your opinions which aren't backed up by facts.

Believe what you want to believe, but don't expect others to believe in nonsense.

That's just it. You keep telling the same lies over and over. I refuted them already. I also refuted the sources. Now I'm ignoring them because they are invalid to everyone except you.

Get a Master's degree in Psychology, publish some valid research papers in an equally valid peer-reviewed psychological journal, and then maybe I'll start considering your arguments as something other than fallacious and irrelevant.

Until then, no amount of thread-spamming and repetition on your part will add even one iota of credibility to your claims.

Deal with it.