While many think autism to be a disease, further studies over the past twenty years have seen that this isn't true. There is now a growing knowledge that autism is natural, calling for "neurotypicals" to respect "neurodiversity."
In a Vox interview on Friday between writer Dylan Matthews and science journalist Steve Silberman who wrote the book "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, it was revealed that autism had been diagnosed wrong by its "discoverer."
Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger, the man who discovered autism, saw it as more of a blessing rather than a hardship. However, psychiatrist Leo Kanner introduced it in a harsh light, therefore paving the way to the world's current and harsh view of it.
Silberman said:
"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.
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."
During the dialogue, Matthews asked if psychiatrist Leo Kanner had been aware of Asperger's research. Turns out, as Silberman revealed, Kanner's discovery of autism in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna had been false. Kanner already had two people with Asperger's on his core team during his supposed "discovery."
Silberman explained:
"In 1938 Kanner saw his first autistic patient, Donald Triplett, or "Donald T." But he didn't know what to do with Donald T, so he sent him to Frankl at the Child Study Home. At that point, Frankl had been seeing autistic children for a decade and knew exactly what was going on with Donald.
Frankl diagnosed Kanner's first three autistic patients. The mysterious synchronicity is not so mysterious; after all, Kanner actually had two of Asperger's core team with him when he "discovered autism."
The problem is that Kanner framed autism very differently than Asperger had...Instead of seeing it as a lifelong condition, as Asperger and Frankl did, Kanner framed it as a form of "infantile psychosis" and came to say it was caused by bad parenting."
Asperger's was re-discovered by Lorna Wing along with research assistant Judith Gould when they went searching for kids with IQs lower than 70, for the reason that these children would be facing difficult challenges and their families would need most help from the National Health Service.
According to Silberman, Lorna mostly saw children of psychiatrists and other academics where she noticed many children outside London with a few features of Kanner's syndrome, but who still required help. Other kids also showed varying manifestations of autism.
She then asked her husband to translate a paper by a Dutch psychiatrist then a light went on over her head: "This is what I'm seeing. What this guy saw in Vienna in the 1930s and '40s is exactly what I'm seeing in Camberwell."
From there, she and Gould were able to develop "autistic continuum," which turned into "autistic spectrum," after she reportedly thought of a Winston Churchill quote.
"Nature never draws a line but smudges it," by which he meant that nothing in nature is binary or crisp. Everything blurs into each other," Churchill said.
"Neurodiversity" then isn't solely about "high functioning people," but more of disability rights. In addition, disability activism isn't about leaving behind the people in wheelchairs but involving everyone in society, including "low-functioning" individuals.
In other autism news, a new test is proving to shed light on the genetics of autism, according to Reuters.
According to Stephen Scherer, who works at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto and who is the author of a new study, advanced genetic testing may pave the way for better tailored care for people with ASD or autism spectrum disorder.
People with ASD have difficulties managing their skills in social, emotional and communication situations. They also require a different set of learning experiences than most people
In the new study, Scherer and colleagues screened 258 unrelated Canadian children diagnosed with ASD using "chromosomal microarray analysis." The method reportedly looks for duplicated or missing chromosome segments wherein genes are situated.
The researchers found out that 9.3 percent had random or inherited genetic mutations, while 8.4 percent of the 95 children tested using whole-exome sequencing were found with genetic mutations.
Combined, the results reveal 15.8 percent in genetic mutations of ASD. A physical exam could possibly be used someday to predict which children with ASD have underlying genetic mutation, according to the researchers, as they wrote in JAMA.
Families might be encouraged by the new findings to participate more in large studies in order to provide researchers with needed data to help shape treatment of people with autism.
