Eugenics and the Origins of Autism

2015

The metamorphosis of autism, 2017

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2012

Letter to the editor in response to Michael Fitzgerald's controversial allegation that one of the two pioneers of autism-Leo Kanner-may have been influenced by an earlier paper by the other autism pioneer-Hans Asperger-without acknowledging the debt, and that Kanner may even have been guilty of plagiarising Asperger. In correspondence, Professor Fitzgerald has suggested that I ''consider doing my take on the matter''. This is it.

Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century, 2019

Clinically, autism spectrum disorder (henceforth, autism) has been described as a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition characterised by impairments in social interaction, communication, and rigidity in thinking. Additionally, autistic individuals are typically characterised as having executive functioning difficulties (i.e. self-regulation skills), sensory processing problems (i.e. the brain processing information from the senses), difficulties with sleep and food, limited theory of mind (i.e. the ability to see things from the point of view of others), and the possibility of various co-morbid mental health conditions. 1 Despite such descriptions,

Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience, 2016

Autism is a very complicated diagnosis, both with respect to recent discoveries on its functional genetic basis, as well as the historical path its analysis has taken. The present work takes a unique perspective in examining how we may view changes in the development and history of autism through a broader lens that incorporates the often ignored bi-directional interaction between science and cultural attitudes, and what this may imply for future research and treatments.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2017

2020

This innovative book addresses the question of why increasing numbers of people are being diagnosed with autism since the 1990s. Providing an engaging account of competing and widely debated explanations, it investigates how these have led to differing interpretations of the same data. Crucially, the author argues that the increased use of autism diagnosis is due to medicalisation across the life course, whilst holding open the possibility that the rise may also be partly accounted for by modern-day environmental exposures, again, across the life course. A further focus of the book is not on whether autism itself is valid as a diagnostic category, but whether and how it is useful as a diagnostic category, and how the utility of the diagnosis has contributed to the rise. This serves to move beyond the question of whether diagnoses are 'real' or social constructions, and instead asks: who do diagnoses serve to benefit, and at what cost do they come? The book will appeal to clinicians and health professionals, as well as medical researchers, who are interested in a review of the data which demonstrates the rising use of autism as a diagnosis, and an analysis of the reasons why this has occurred. Providing theory through which to interpret the expanding application of the diagnosis and the broadening of autism as a concept, it will also be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, social work, disability studies and childhood studies.

Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2020

In 1943, a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner published a groundbreaking description of 11 children, in which he made the case in vivid detail that

The papers in this collection represent an important step forward in the ethnographic study of autism. Their focus on sociality and social context is especially important today as so much of the attention paid to autism in the scholarly literature and in the media concerns advances in neuroscience, cellular and molecular biology, and does not examine the non-medical aspects of autism. The field of genetics, to cite just one example, offers an enormous range of possibilities for using genetic variations to identify the alleles and mutations that influence neurological development. But as the papers in this collection suggest, we can take the medicalized, genetic approach to autism too far, to a point at which a disease construct is so profoundly fetishized that we fail to question the validity of the construct, and to see its cultural constitution. Medicalized approaches to autism, at least as autism is now conceptualized as an expansive spectrum, also risk making a disease out of traits that are likely distributed in varying degrees among the general population, obscuring the positive characteristics of autism that contribute to human diversity and creativity, neglecting the possibility for new forms of sociality to emerge, and diminishing the role that autism can play in forming new social identities.