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There’s been a lot of press in the last few days around Dame Uta Frith’s critical remarks about the autistic spectrum concept. Last month, another old school autism heavyweight, Simon Baron-Cohen, voiced the same concerns in the FT, in an article that an autistic friend described as “a bit like Nigel Farage writing a piece in the Guardian about the benefits of immigration”. The Baron-Cohen article and the Frith interview were upsetting, disturbing and disappointing to many autistics and advocates, setting the clock back decades and trying to reverse hard-won progress.
Both Frith and Baron-Cohen think the diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) has become too inclusive, and for Frith it is now “completely meaningless”. It should be limited to refer to a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder, with communication difficulties and restricted behaviour.
Note how this rigid definition is in itself highly limiting, effectively dictating that once you’re in a neurodevelopmental box, that’s where you’ll stay, so shaping conceptions about prognosis and cementing ‘looping’ effects, whereby definitions of behaviour become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Ex cathedra definitions like this leave no space for change, or for recognising that what some take to be restricted behaviour may actually be fruitful and productive for the person and those around them. Similarly, they ignore how evaluations of communication are almost always set by neurotypicals, and that autistic people have plenty of ways of communicating that need to be acknowledged and endorsed rather than pathologized.
