Recently I’ve developed an appetite again for reading about autism, but the trouble is that the more I read the more confused I get. Over 70 years since it was ‘discovered’ there still seems to be no agreement as to what autism is.
If you go to the 2013 DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association, their latest version, you get pages of explanation. I’m just wondering whether it can be defined in a sentence. What about dictionaries? Here is what you get at dictionary.com:
A variable developmental disorder that appears by age three and is characterized especially by difficulties in forming and maintaining social relationships, by impairment of the ability to communicate verbally or nonverbally, and by repetitive behavior patterns and restricted interests and activities.
I suppose that sums up the current consensus, if you can say there is one, but it doesn’t inspire me. What seems to be missing is the concept of aloneness that Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger were talking about in the 1940s. That’s why they both chose the term ‘autism’, which derives from ‘autonomy’ and ‘autonomous’.
They didn’t agree on the symptoms though. For example, Kanner found his autistic subjects almost all suffered from language impairments. Asperger found no language impairment, the reason, I believe, that Asperger Syndrome was created in the 1980s to be autism without the language impairment.
Starting with those disagreements, the criteria used for the diagnosis of autism has always been contentious. The psychological community’s position on it still seems fragmented. Different psychologists seem to be talking about different conditions.
That makes me think of schizophrenia. Before Kanner and Asperger, autistic children were often diagnosed with schizophrenia. For a long time schizophrenia seems to have been a catchall bin for a variety of enigmatic psychological impairments, resulting in large numbers of schizophrenics.
Schizophrenia is diagnosed less now, and every now and then the debate starts up again whether to scrap it altogether. I sometimes wonder whether we won’t eventually see that happen with autism too. Maybe fifty years from now we’ll be using another term.
But the original core trait of autism, the sense of aloneness, seems to me to be the one trait that should guarantee its survival.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I think the sense of aloneness – the solitary nature of those individuals who lack not only social skills but also an appetite for social experience – may sometimes be perfectly natural. Nature is full of solitary species – bears, badgers, skunks, owls, hawks and eagles, all the cats except lions, foxes, etc. Among the apes, there are the orangutans and gibbons. It seems highly likely to me that in the distant past the mind of early hominids may have been predominantly of this kind. Animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, has suggested that autism may be the basic mindset of all mammals.
But if autism is a natural leftover of our past, does the “war on autism” make any sense?
By the way, why is there no “war on shyness?” It can be very disabling. But I suppose when up to half of the population experiences shyness, according to surveys, we can’t declare it to be a disease. We can’t afford to put half the population into treatment.
But many autistic people are shy. Which goes to show you that this debate is circular and apparently never-ending. I’m just finishing The Ethics of Autism by Deborah Barnbaum, which is a survey of contemporary philosophers thinking about autism. If you thought the debate was complicated, wait until you see my coming posts about this book.
Alan Conrad 