I interview Steve Silberman about his bestselling book, Neurotribes

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I am not so sure. I have never thought of my wiring as a problem. The physical awkwardness for sure...and my limited interests....but not the cognitive functioning which if anything, I have long seen as a precise state of being. And something which has given me an incredible accuracy at making sense of things in ways that are life affirming enough to minimise my downside. And I have never been a pompous ass...I have always striven to be courteous and user friendly in the way I deal with people.

But right through life, I have invariably had to deal with dumb fcvks basically....to the point that any achievements (I am pretty much a self starter and will try anything) were destroyed. So for once in my life, I took myself into a corner, used my wiring to really empower myself (and I mean REALLY) and now I will set forth to get the best I can from this life.

Armed with my skill, my next challenge as I see it is to up my ante on the pleasant factor and see whether it is possible to get myself a silver tongue. If you want to fully function in the NT world I believe and not in just another cognitive ghetto like IT, it gets a lot more complex and challenging and I for one, wont accept ghettoes.

I wouldn't necessarily call IT a cognitive ghetto. Ghetto is too pejorative. It's more of a niche. As such, I quite like ours.

The road to a marginalised groups full access to the worlds bounty is not an easy one. As a socialist I believe in empowerment and I apply that philosophy in my life. But bearing in mind the wide range of needs on the spectrum, Alexs efforts in raising awareness are certainly very positive and good education resource for us all.

This book was on my wishlist, but now I'm definitely purchasing. I look forward to reading, along with Oliver Sacks autobiography. Thanks for the great interview.

My copy came in the mail a couple of days ago.

You did this interview? Kudos. So cool.

For those who haven't started reading it yet, the UK publisher has posted the introductory chapter online as a teaser.

https://medium.com/@atlanticbooks/neurotribes-13b162247fc5

Is the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of medication explored in this book?

This sounds like a fascinating book, so thanks for posting it here Alex.

One thing puzzles me, though. The author talks quite a lot about setting the record straight about Hans Asperger being the first person to identify, investigate and treat autism. I actually thought that this had been established quite some time ago? Obviously there was always a certain professional 'rivalry' been his and Leo Kanner's adherents, but as far as I'm aware, the discovering of the condition has long since been attributed to Asperger - hence the syndrome that bears his name.

But maybe this is a European perspective.

You may be right with regard to it being a European perspective. In the U.S., Kanner has traditionally been seen as the father of the diagnosis. I don't think this has changed much, actually.

What Silberman is trying to show is how the prevalence of Kanner's vision of Autism has framed the discussion of Autism as a rare condition instead of the ASD spectrum we have in the DSM today. The impacts of that have rippled through the past 60+ years to where it appears like we have a recent Autism epidemic (to uninformed outsiders) because we're finally catching up to what Asperger theorized in the late 1930s.

While I read the book, it makes me upset to think of just how far Autism awareness and acceptance could've come if not for Kanner's dominance in the early literature. Like we're 60 years behind where we could be because of it. Of course, this mood could be because I'm currently in the middle of the chapter surrounding ABA.


A what-if that's been bothering me while I read concerns the question of "What if Georg Frankl never left Kanner's lab?" Could Frankl have caused Kanner to lean more toward the spectrum model if he stayed on staff longer than he had?

I may get some flak for this but in my view, there is something fundamentally unsound in the notion that awareness precedes the civilised treatment of all members of a society. In fact it is has proven to be something of a false premise when one looks at the treatment of other marginalised groups such as blacks or wormen or even the Jews for that matter where after very lengthy periods of awareness, the basic problem of access to economic equality (and our problems at their most basic are bread and butter issues) still persists.

Whilst talking about the issues is good and a vast improvement on the silence to date, society needs to fundamentally change in terms of how it sees inclusion before we can make any real advances across the entire spectrum. To the degree that the least able of us can contemplate inclusion, despite their profound differences.

What is even more astounding is that Kanners ideas took root despite no real proof...a sort of medical equivalent of climate denial and quite flawed.

Thanks very much for these interesting insights. It's rather what I thought. As you rightly say, it's tragic that so many decades have been spent almost standing still, when with a more nuanced approach to diagnosis we could have reached the current position a long time ago.

Regarding the European view, although Hans Asperger is credited with discovering autism, there are quite significant differences in its therapeutic treatment here. While there is a lot of innovation in the UK, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, France - where psychoanalysis is enormously influential - still regards people with ASD as mentally deficient or 'ret*d', and for the most part consigns them to institutions where they are not-infrequently treated as insane. Very few children with autism are educated in mainstream schools in France, and the whole diagnosis process is bizarre to say the least. This approach is also found in Eastern Europe - but unlike France, they at least have the excuse of having lived under Communist isolation for fifty years.

Great interview!

What kind of things do you think people are unwilling to speak out about?

Last edited by Adamantium on 24 Sep 2015, 9:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The book at times is a joyous read but at other times a very painful read.

Thanks for sharing.

[quote="alex"]I think our unwillingness to speak out about things also hinders our cause. And when we do speak out we are not always the best at doing so in an appealing way".


In comparatively recent decades women, gays, people of colour, ageing people, people oppressed by apartheid, have all rejected and challenged the standard negative portrayals, and, realising their value and right to respectful inclusion, shaped new, positive images, publicising these widely, loudly and actively, without self-censure and shame, and so changed society’s concept of and relationship to them; so then there was space for real conversations, for mutual understandings, for advocacy to be heard and open closed doors.

We can do the same. But first, before you can speak out compellingly, in a way that is meaningful and will be heard, you have to start with what's in your own head, and toss out all the old shame and shaming and stigmas and can'ts that have been internalised and taken root there, and replace it with that fire of inner confidence which can take charge of the narrative in situations, speaking the once-silenced voice, the previously unheard things, which can name what has happened accurately, and what must happen with clarity.

That's what the third wave of women's liberation did: women responded to the call to form small groups to raise their consciousness of how they had been trapped in stereotypes which limited their opportunities and their growth.

Once that "group groundwork" has been established, from it flows that strong inner sense of personal self, the strong realisation of what is possible, the strong desire to engage in the change process, to change both one's own life, that of the group, and that of generations to come. It starts with a vision of possibility, and it seems as if Silberman may have kickstarted that! Ideas tend to meet their time, and when they do, the competent and articulate leaders tend to appear, and the momentum just grows and grows.

I haven't read the book yet, so I would really like to know if these issues are addressed in it, and if so, how. It's the pivotal one as I see it. Steve Stilberman seems to have created a momentum, an opportunity that could be the start of something, if enough people seize the political advantage that could flow from this book's reception.

On transformative moments:


‎The greatest fear in the world is of the opinions of others. And the moment you are unafraid of the crowd you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom."
— Osho

"The most important day is the day you decide you’re good enough for you. It’s the day you set yourself free."
— Brittany Josephina