My Autism Pages
What is Neurodiversity?
Educating the Health Professionals: the challenge for parents.
This is a talk I delivered at the one day conference AUTISM: Challenging Issues; Continuing Ignorance, Thursday 14 June 2001 at Regent’s College London. There is very little I would change if I was to deliver this speech again. Most of the problems remain. Even though there has been a noticeable improvement in diagnosis, awareness and educational provision, parents still report the same frustrations that I experienced when raising my son. Autistic adults continue to be misunderstood and have their needs ignored.
One change I would make is to drop the term “co-morbid” when discussing many of the problems that occur alongside autism. There are congenital conditions that occur more commonly in autistic children than in the general population. But they only affect a minority of autistic children and the majority of children with these disorders are not autistic. I have moved away from a medical model of autism towards a model that explicitly embraces the ideas of autism acceptance and neurodiversity which I explore elsewhere in these pages.
Until I see sound scientific evidence to the contrary from independent researchers, I have no reason to believe that biomedical problems have a direct connection with autism, either as a cause or a consequence. They should still be taken seriously. Some clinicians still assume that distressed and challenging behaviour is an inevitable corollary of autism when similar behaviour in otherwise “normal” children would prompt further medical investigation and treatment. They are wrong to do so. On the other hand the autistic child may have atypical responses to illness or injury that disappear when the source of their distress is addressed. We should not take this to mean that our interventions are directly addressing their autism.
This whole area is the subject of public debate and scientific investigation. I merely note my changing viewpoint here. I expect it to continue to change in the light of further developmnets in our understanding of autism.
Am I supping with the Devil?
Here is an article I wrote for HE-SPECIAL-UK about six years ago. They are a group of families who have been brought together by their common interest in Home Education - and their shared experience of having children with special educational needs.
Understanding Autism
A slightly edited version of this article first appeared in ‘The Teacher,’ journal of the National Union of Teachers. December 2000
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