Orwell wrote:
"The views in science in medicine that being neurotypical is overall a more mentally healthy way to be?" What views in science in medicine? I just checked Tony Attwood's site... I just checked Simon Baron-Cohen's site... the two top Asperger's researchers in the world... oh look, neither of them considers it to be a disability and both point out the strengths often associated with AS and the potential contributions we can make to society.
There are in fact many researchers who do think autistic people (of all sorts) have strengths that non-autistic people don't. Michelle Dawson and Laurent Mottron have done a lot of research into this, and in my opinion have done some of the more accurate research (because Mottron was doing some research initially that still had a skewed view of autistic strengths that Michelle came in and corrected somehow).
The problem is, as soon as you point this fact out (which is just the same as saying that non-autistic people do better at some things than autistic people do), you'll be called elitist, grandiose, and delusional. Because apparently if you acknowledge anything that autistic people can do that most other people cannot do, then you're calling autistic people superior. Which of course isn't true. It's just a different pattern of strengths and weaknesses.
But if you say anything about non-autistic deficits or autistic strengths, beware, you're being elitist. And if you actually say accurately that there is science behind these things (some of it more accurate than others -- I'd trust Mottron over Baron-Cohen and Baron-Cohen over Attwood on sheer accuracy grounds, not on anything else necessarily -- and I think the whole debate over whether autism is "a disability" is entirely misguided), then you're apparently delusional too, because you're only imagining these researchers who talk about autism as something other than purely and unmitigatedly about autistic weaknesses and deficiencies (which do exist but are no more the whole story than they are about any other sort of person). Even though these people are
in the news and
publishing in journals and, oh,
president of the Association for Psychological Science (see
here) and so forth.
One of Gernsbacher's papers is interesting because it notes that whenever autistic people do better at a task than non-autistic controls, it is explained in terms of deficiencies even when there is no evidence for the deficiency or even there is evidence for lack of the deficiency.
How to spot bias in research (PDF) goes into great detail about how to look for this in autism research. (That one talks about how autistic people are more consistently accurate at some tasks, and schizophrenic people are more consistently accurate at others, than "normal" controls. But because of the labels of autism and schizophrenia being considered entirely deficiencies, they warped around the results to claim that the strengths are the results of certain deficits, even without evidence for this.)
Meanwhile here's another paper
Neural Diversity in which she says that a lot of the conclusions drawn in cognitive science research in general are the product of amateur psychoanalysis rather than actually following what the data show. That you would never know these were scientists and not really bad psychoanalysts.
There's another one,
Autism: Common, Heritable, but Not Harmful, in which she again talks about how all autistic abilities (such as in Block Design) are contorted into something wrong. Before reading the following, note that they use "superiority" as in "doing better at certain tasks," not as in "autistics are better than non-autistics". (And I know two of the authors, so please nobody claim to know what they "really" mean.)
Quote:
However, whereas K&M assert that Darwinian psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists "often go to torturous lengths to find hidden adaptive benefits" (sect. 1.1, para. 3), we assert that cognitive scientists often go to torturous lengths to occlude obvious adaptive benefits. The empirical literature is replete with demonstrations of autistics' superiority in numerous perceptual, reasoning, and comprehension tasks: Acros a wide range of age and measured intelligence, autistics perform significantly better than non-autistics on block design, a prominent subtest of Weschler-type scales (Shah and Frith 1993); on embedded figure tests, which require rapid visual identification of a target figure amid a complex background (Shah & Frith 1983); on recognition memory (Toichi et al. 2002); and on sentence comprehension (Just et al. 2004); and autistics are more impervious than are non-autistics to memory distortions (Beversdorft et al. 2000) and misleading prior context (Roper & Mitchelle 2002). Such superiorities are not isolated phenomena; some theorists argue that such superiorities abound in autism (Mottron et al. 2006).
Quite compellingly, each of these statistically significant demonstrations of autistic superiority is labeled by its authors as a harmful dysfunction. Autistics' superior block-design performance is labeled "weak central coherence," symptomatic of dysfunctional information processing in autism (Shah & Frith 1993, p. 1351). Autistics' superior performance on embedded figures tests is considered "consistent with the cognitive-deficit theory proposed by Hermelin and O'Connor (1970) ... due to a central deficiency in information processing" (Shah & Frith 1983, p. 618). Autistics' superior recognition memory performance is attributed to deletoriously "enhanced attention to shallow aspects of perceived materials" (Toichi et al. 2002, p. 1424); their superior sentence comprehension si described as being "less proficient at semantically and syntactically integrating the words of a sentence" (Just et al. 2004, p. 1816); their superior imperviousness to memory distortions is explained by "representations in the semantic network (that) may be associated in an aberrant manner (Beversdorf et al. 2000, p. 8736); and their superior resistance to misleading prior context is attributed to their perception being "less conceptual" (Ropar & Mitchell 2002, p. 652).
She also wrote
The True Meaning of Research Participation which talks about autistic people's role in shaping autism research, and the way we are normally considered as subjects but not as potential colleagues. (Stuff like this is why I was eventually asked to work with the very scientists that the original poster tried to send misleading information about me to, in an attempt presumably to get them to quit listening to my ideas about directions for autism research.)
And
On Not Being Human gets into the dehumanization of autistic people in a lot of the literature, as well as of other unusual people such as people with Williams syndrome (who often have extremely good language in some ways, but who were dismissed as "not human" once rather than used to challenge a theory about the way humans develop language).
Towards a behavior of reciprocity is another one that exhorts autism professionals to look at biases in their notions of what reciprocity is, and to reciprocate more themselves towards autistic people.
There's more there too. But I'm sure I'll be soon told that I'm hallucinating the existence of the president of the APS, and/or that she's the one being grandiose for daring not to be wholly negative about autism and other conditions and to urge people to at least attempt to be objective in science and recognize their own biases (including biases that state categorically that a certain sort of already-pathologized person has a purely negative way to be and that is all there is to the way they're wired). She's not autistic by the way, but she does have an autistic son, who communicates by typing and whose vocabulary at six or seven outstripped her own vocabulary as an adult language-researcher.
What puzzles me in all this is why it's seen as denigrating of non-autistic people to point out they don't have an absolute corner on every cognitive strength in the world. They don't. And that doesn't mean anything bad about them, many of these strengths are undoubtedly mutually exclusive and autistic people doubtless lose some in order to have the ones we do have. I would rather know what being autistic
really means, be it strength, weakness, or combination of both (the last the most likely), than have to deal with outdated stereotypes put forth by the sort of amateur psychoanalysts that Gernsbacher discusses. Those outdated stereotypes about autistic people's abilities, interfere with the understanding of who autistic people are and how we work, and understanding that sort of thing is important. Doesn't make us better or anything though, nor does it make abilities we don't have, pointless. (In fact I think there's probably a very good reason there's more non-autistic people in the world than autistic people, but this doesn't mean that autistic people do our best when brought as close to non-autistic as possible. The concepts of different strengths and different weaknesses without a value judgement put on this is beyond a lot of people, both autistic and non-autistic.)
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
06 Feb 2008, 1:31 pm
