Changing gender norms as cause of the IDEA of "autism"?

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I don't understand this. Lorna Wing's work to define and determine the prevalence of autism was a false start? The research that led to the DSM-IV and DSM-5 was just random?

And as you point out, the research is continuing with new and larger datasets and tools. To say that autism research was untenable in 2016 is, well, untenable.

Could it have simply been selection bias? Asperger was working in a progressive school for children with special needs. He was observing a large population of children in an educational setting and noticing patterns of behavior in a subset. Kanner was in a clinic. He was seeing children with sever disabilities that could not be diagnosed/treated by other doctors and were sent to him.

There was a cultural difference between the men. There was also a difference in personality. And their training could have been very different. However, selection bias can easily account for the children they were exposed to, which would have influenced their concept of autism.

But Kanner did not promote Asperger's work. He sat on it. All the information that was going into the world was through the lens of Kanner. It was but accident that Lorna Wing rediscovered Asperger much later on.

No, I should have been more specific. The research into possible causes of autism was mostly a lot of irreproducible false starts.


It was indeed mostly untenable, as Dr. Wendy Chung explains in the first part of the video that Dvds posted here.


Indeed Robert Chapman's main point has to do with selection bias (although he did not use that term). In Dr. Asperger's case, the most important relevant question is how and why the children at his school were deemed to be sufficiently disabled to need to attend a school for children with special needs in the first place.


Correct. Kanner did not have a use for Asperger's work, except for a few basic ideas therefrom, because the overall social and cultural situation here in the U.S.A. was different.

The author alludes to a golden age of autism in the past where autistic people were more accepted.

I have a hard time believing that a society that sent kids to work up chimneys and be poisoned in match factories, where wife / child abuse was accepted, would be
kind to those who had communication difficulties and had trouble standing up for themselves

I should point out that Robert Chapman...wants to build an autistic community/culture.

That is depressing--and a little bit ironic.

Why?

Why is it depressing or why is it ironic?

Both.

Personally, I have another hypothesis about why the concept of "autism" arose when it did. I think a big factor is the development of mass education.

Before mass education, I would imagine that most children learned their social skills explicitly from their parents and other relatives. After the advent of mass education, children were expected to learn more and more of their social skills on their own and with each other, on the playground. After a generation or two of this, an inability to pick up social skills in the latter way began to stick out more and more as a disability, whereas previously it had been a non-issue.

That might one of the reasons why the concept of "autism" began to emerge in the 1940's.

Then, in the late 1970's and early 1980's, a lot of middle-class women moved into the workforce, resulting in the rise of pre-school. Thus, middle-class kids were now expected to pick up social skills on their own at an even younger age, and, if they didn't, parents heard about it from their kids' pre-school teachers. Hence the great expansion in the number of kids deemed to be "autistic."

But I think there's some merit to Robert Chapman's hypothesis also. Before the 1990's or so, it was more-or-less accepted that certain professions (engineering, computer programming, accounting, library work, museum work, proofreading, etc.) were havens for "nerds" or "geeks" -- terms which then meant "socially awkward" as well as "intellectually-oriented." There was then a sharp rise in social expectations in the workforce, for everyone, including programmers and engineers.

I thought Chapman's idea about Nazism having something to do it was far fetched. I think most societal changes have driven the increase in the growth of autism diagnosis. The primary one being less acceptance of an it-is-what-it-is education of struggling students.

In the early history of autism in the US, autistic kids were often excluded from public schools. An impressive series of changes to the US educational system have occurred since then. Certainly this has been the main driver in getting more US kids diagnosed. I had no IDEA (actually a name of one of the acts) there were so many legislative acts improving education for us: Special education in the United States

The irony is that culture is the problem, at least by the hypothesis he presents.

The other is serious.

Chapman is an advocate. He has his own agenda. I don't agree with his narrow conception of autism and advocacy always presents a narrow perspective (it is the nature of the thing). Yes, he does recognize some other aspects, but in very passing ways. But I would not be one of the voices that would be heard in his world. I am certainly not looking for a leader to follow.

I don't fit the NT world. Chapman's autistic world does not sound like a place for me either. So where?

I am looking for a broader framework to think about autism. An open system, not a closed one.

Of course, I could just be going through a rough patch and am feeling pretty low. I find few people in the NT world that can deal with complexity. I don't find it much different with Chapman.

Living in a vacuum is tiring. Kindred souls are hard to find.

That is the depressing part...

The autistic community is not homogeneous, ideologically or otherwise. We have plenty of debate here on Wrong Planet, for example, on all sorts of topics. Do you feel somehow excluded even here on Wrong Planet? Also, the autistic community does not revolve around any one particular leader.

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Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

When I was little, special ed did not exist. After my year of kindergarten in the local public school, my parents were told that I had to either (1) repeat kindergarten or (2) attend a smaller, non-public school. Luckily my parents were able to send me to a small Lutheran parochial school.

.

After 2nd grade my parents were told the school could not help me, they were given the choices of 1. Home school me 2. Private school. They found a Yeshiva that accepted me. The public school readmitted me for fifth grade. I believe if my parents were not teachers the recommendation would have been institutionalization.

So how did you two fit in with the rigid settings of a classroom environment?

Fortunately I was young enough to miss School corporal punishment as it was scrapped by the time I started school. Many others older less so