“Autism exerts a grip on the public imagination because it disturbs something that is core to being human. That is why it intrigues. In the social world in which we live, the capacity to read social situations and respond appropriately can mean the difference between popularity and loneliness and smooth the route to professional and social success. Autistic people lack this capacity – the uniquely human skill of forging relationships – and can face a lifetime of loneliness and isolation as a result.
One of the most basic, yet still unanswered questions is how common it is. A disorder characterized by "an inability to read social situations" is not easy to diagnose. In some people autism is disguised by high intelligence and may go unrecognized throughout their lives. They are the brilliant but eccentric professors who, when not investigating Etruscan archaeological remains or complex mathematical formulae, are playing quietly with their train sets in the attic.” So the Independent of London
Here is a serious problem due to the fact that autism has devastating effects on the life of individuals and families and these effects are lifelong enduring. A fatal sickness has a foreseeable development which may end in death. Autism has no foreseeable development and it may linger for decades without dramatic changes in the intensity of the condition. This encourages the desperate research of remedies even if they do not exist at present and the marketing of costly approaches totally devoid of substantive scientific validation. There has already been the Bettelheim case which has been debunked only after the death of the culprit nearly five years ago (though his books are still circulating and being reprinted in paperback all over the world). There are institutions with many means who claim that they have “treated” with success and “cured” thousands of children, and there is the powerful lobby of psychoanalytic schools, who are in strong decline but still not extinct, there is lacanism still powerful in France and Latina America, and then there are sheer quacks.
To eradicate from popular culture second hand discredited notions about autism should be a task to be finally undertaken with determination and relentless insistence.
16 Nov 2007, 5:35 pm
