AUTISM AND NEURODIVERSITY: FROM IGNORANCE TO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The man who discovered autism ( Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger), conceived of it as a way of thinking that brings blessings as well as hardships. But then psychiatrist Leo Kanner claimed credit for Asperger's discovery and introduced a much harsher view of autism, paving the way for decades of brutal and abusive treatment as well as the idea of autism being disease. But over the past two decades, a growing number of adults on the autism spectrum have rejected this train of thought and called for non-autistic "neurotypicals" to respect and accommodate "neurodiversity."
The idea of an autism causing a person to become completely distant, cry out loud and bang their heads against the walls actually came from what was considered to be “treatment”. Parents were urged to put their autistic children in psychiatric institutions where they had to stay in psych wards for adult psychotics. Imagine a child, barely twelve years old in a straight jacket, sitting alone in an isolation room for weeks on end. It paints such a gloomy picture that one might even go as far to call it torture. That is why they started harming themselves, it wasn’t the “disease” causing them to bang their head on the walls, it was the so-called treatment.
But people didn’t know that, and a guy named Ivar Lovaas started giving kids electric shocks to stop their stimming (repetitive movements used by autistic people to reduce stress). At one point he even recommended that mothers use cattle prods on their children to suppress harmless autistic behaviours such as echolalia (an autistic way of learning language). Everyone genuinely thought that if autistic children were left alone they would chew off their fingers.
However, when non-institutionalised autistic people like Temple Grandin, Peter Guthrie and others came along, the notion of autism being as destructive as it was thought to be was proved wrong. With movies like Rain Man being inspired from their life stories, people began to become more and more aware. Temple Grandin started to go to autism parents’ conferences where the parents had never seen autistic adults as most of them were in institutions. Temple started explaining what it was like being autistic and began unravelling her autistic mind to parents who had never imagined something like it before- things like having a meltdown and sensory sensitivity. Till now, it had always been neurotypical people dictating what autism was like and how it felt. But now, there was an actual autistic person to help them understand their children better. So autistic adults started crashing parent conferences and correcting the clinicians and parents about what being autistic was really like. They didn’t want to be in a neurotypical environment and have extremely inaccurate and false information spread. An autistic guy at one of these conferences (JIm Sinclair) appeared on a panel where he was talking about autism with parents who bombarded him with questions. He described the experience as, "a self-narrating zoo exhibit." He didn't want to be a bundle of cells being observed, scrutinised and analysed under a microscope. He just wanted to meet other autistic adults and connect with them.
So, they created Autreat, an environment designed by autistic people for autistic people. They created online communities and started answering questions from parents. The most frequently asked question from psychiatrists was if the syndrome could persist into adulthood. Temple Grandin’s first book (Emergence) was known to be written by a “recovered autistic person”. But everyone soon realised that there is no “recovery”. From then on, autistic people began to be associated with disabled people who could easily relate to their stories.
From there emerged neurodiversity, a movement about treating different people as just what they are- different, not disabled. Unlike the medical model, it became more about acceptance rather than treatment. ASD and other conditions were not meant to be ‘treated’ or ‘recovered from’, they were to be understood and maybe even appreciated. Because autism doesn’t mean you’re a high-functioning person, OCD doesn’t mean you’re a cleanliness freak, and other neurodiverse conditions don’t make you any less or more. It just takes a little awareness and accommodation to make everyone feel and be equal.
By Sia Agarwal
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