The first autism

2017

This book is dedicated to my father, Robin Evans (1944-93). vii Contents List of figures viii Acknowledgements x Introduction: Perceiving, describing and modelling child development Part I The first autism: The observation and description of child development before 1959 1 The first autism 2 The first autism controversies 3 Inside the Maudsley Child Psychotic Clinic in the 1950s Part II How autism became autism 4 The transformation of social life and the transformation of autism in the 1960s 5 How do you measure a social impairment? 6 Epidemiology, epidemics and autism as a global health crisis Conclusion Abbreviations for Archives and Government Acts Bibliography Index viii Figures 1 Facsimile of the first page of 'Condition on Admission' form used to collect information from children in the psychotic clinic in the 1950s (MHCP/ A) 2 Chart, 'The psychotic ego with its defects and defences', from Elwyn James Anthony, 'Group therapeutic techniques for residential units', Case Conference 4, no. 6 (1957) 3 ' A ward for imbeciles in a mental deficiency hospital', c.1956, from Leslie Hilliard and Brian Kirman, Mental Deficiency (London: Churchill, 1957) 4 Table, 'Mean percentage scores on 24 behaviour items', from Victor Lotter, 'Epidemiology of autistic conditions in young children', Social Psychiatry 1, no. 3 (1966) 5 Graph comparing verbal coding ability in 'normal' and 'autistic' children, from Brian Hermelin and Neil O'Connor, Psychological Experiments with Autistic Children (Oxford: Pergamon, 1970) 6 Uta Frith's early jigsaw tests for pattern detection, from Uta Frith and Brian Hermelin, 'The role of visual and motor cues for normal, subnormal and autistic children',

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2014

While the origins of child psychiatry in Britain can be traced to the interwar period, contemporary concepts and methodological approaches to pathological mental development in children were not created until the 1950s and 1960s. It was at this time that one of the most salient and lasting diagnoses in child psychiatry, autism, was established through a network of intellectual, institutional, and legal changes in Britain. This article argues that the work of child psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital was central in driving these changes and uses archival sources from this hospital, along with other legal and intellectual sources, to explore attempts to conceptualize pathological thought in infants in the 1950s and 1960s. When the first epidemiological study of autism was published in 1966, this finally established the autistic child as a scientific, demographic, and social reality in Britain.

The metamorphosis of autism, 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.

2015

The metamorphosis of autism, 2017

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,

History of the Human Sciences, 2013

This article argues that the meaning of the word 'autism' experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how 'autism' was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant child psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Jean Piaget, Lauretta Bender, Leo Kanner and Elwyn James Anthony. Theories of autism were then associated both with schizophrenia in adults and with psychoanalytic styles of reasoning. The closure of institutions for 'mental defectives' and the growth in speech therapy services in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged new models for understanding autism in infants and children. The second half of the article explores how researchers such as Victor Lotter and Michael Rutter used the category of autism to reconceptualize psychological development in infants and children via epidemiological studies. These historical changes have influenced the form and function of later research into autism and related conditions.

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