We've called autism a disease for decades. We were wrong.

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Most people think of autism as a disease, a major impediment of which an increasing number of children are "victims." But over the past two decades, a growing number of adults on the autism spectrum, myself included, have rejected this frame and called for non-autistic "neurotypicals" to respect and accommodate "neurodiversity." We believe that autism is a natural and in many ways desirable variation in how people think, not a great evil to be stamped out.

To neurotypical people, this may seem like a shocking reversal. But as science journalist Steve Silberman writes in his new book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, the man who discovered autism, Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger, conceived of it similarly, 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.

Silberman and I spoke about the book, the history of autism, and the growth of the autism rights movement on Friday. An edited transcript follows.

Dylan Matthews
People have a image of autistic people as these completely nonverbal children banging their heads against the wall. How did that stereotype emerge? Why is the public image of us so far off?

Steve Silberman
What society thought of as the natural course of autism was actually a very skewed view of what happened to autistic people when they were put in institutions. For decades, the recommended course of treatment for autism was institutionalization.

Parents were routinely told they should put their child in an institution, quietly remove their photographs from the family albums, never speak of them again, and enlist in decades-long courses of psychoanalysis to think about why they were motivated to wound the developing psyches of their children.

When children were put in institutions for the rest of their lives, it wasn't like they were put in specialized autism wards. There was no such thing, with very few exceptions. They were mostly put on psych wards for adult psychotics. Oliver Sacks worked on such a ward, Ward 23 at Bronx psychiatric, in the 1960s. He told me that some of the children and young adults would be put in straight jackets and isolation rooms to sit in their own waste for weeks on end. The children and young adults became self-injurious, which is not a surprise at all. If you treat people brutally, they'll react in extreme fashion.

Then Ivar Lovaas came along at UCLA. He was giving the kids electric shocks to suppress stimming [repetitive movements used by autistic people to reduce stress]. At one point Lovaas and Bernard Rimland recommended mothers buy cattle prods to use on their children at home to suppress relatively harmless autistic behaviors, like echolalia, which turns out to be a distinctively autistic way of learning language, not some problem that needs to be extinguished.

The reason they were willing to do that is because they earnestly felt that if the children were left alone they were end up chewing through their own fingers, as children in institutions did. The notion that autism was a fate worse than death was inextricably intertwined with institutionalization.

This is a long deep article... the rest is here>>> http://www.vox.com/2015/8/31/9233295/au ... r-asperger

...Does Bettelheim and Mama Freezers come in here ???

Autism is not a disease; it's not caused by bacteria. It is more a neurological "disorder."

Depending upon how autism manifests in any one person, it could range from being a very severe disorder to not a disorder at all.

OP - I think that if you are doing a copy and paste of an article then you should be more clear.

It took me a while to figure out that is what you have done here. It's important to remember what happened in the past but don't forget how far things have improved since those dark days.

I disagree. IMO, it's both.

We know that ASD brains are uniquely hard wired. I know that intestinal dysbiosis causes or exacerbates ASD symptoms. I also hypothesize that said gut bacteria imbalance may be the cause of the alternative brain wiring during development in the first place. Science will eventually tell us one way or the other.

Very true, each ASD person is different.

Even though it is 35 years since I watched Ivor Lovaas psychologically, physically and emotionally abuse a vulnerable autistic 13 year old boy in the name of therapy, in front of an academic audience, I still physically shudder when I see his name mentioned anywhere. It brings that horror I witnessed flooding back, visually.

I did not want to share this planet with such a man, nor anyone like him. I did not want people in real life to think this is what psychologists are like. The ego of that man was so immense, it seemed to have no room for self-perception and shame. And no-one ever said "STOP". And that makes me shudder too, all these years later.
I felt the shame that he was incapable of feeling. Such a person has dehumanised themselves.

I just think of it as a passive base trait that I was born with it. My only problems seem to stem from how I'm expected to interact with mostly all encompassing Neurotypical world. It could be said to go both ways, they have problems interacting with me and I with them.

I also am currently reading Neurotribes