It is often that I run into articles portraying autism as a thing, a noun that we reliably apply to name a condition effecting 1 out of ~55 children in this country. In using a noun to label a child it is assumed that the child “has autism”, along the lines of someone “having diabetes” or a “having pneumonia.” This noun use of the word, in turn, plays into people’s vernacular use of “has” as being part of or in possession of some trait, condition, psychological state (e.g., “has schizophrenia”). This could not be further from the truth and has devastating effects on both the individuals and the families of those individuals presenting with the syndrome. It also sets up the parents of children who present thusly for abuse and thievery by those who would profit off their anxieties and hopes as they search for a “cure’ or correction to their child’s presented developmental trajectory.
The thievery of this narrative consists not only of money, as parents are encouraged to buy vitamins, maintain gluten and casein free diets, pay for equine and dolphin “therapy,” search for brain-based centers of the disorder, etc., etc., but of the time available to their child for participating in empirically demonstrated and supported learning therapy that is taken up by empirically weak or unproven programs such as Speech Language and Occupational Therapy. Why is this? Generally, it is because these services proclaim close alliance to and overlap with the broader medical profession that has demonstrated a growing empirical effect in correcting and understanding a wide range of human ailments. Autism is not yet one of those “ailments” that fall within this effective area of diagnosis and treatment.
What do we know about autism? We know that it is understood as a syndrome, a collection of behavioral expressions and tendencies that are noted on a checklist, much like the “diagnosis” of ADD, and that these “data points” are feed into a statistical program that calculates the best fit lines that minimize the overall variance of these data points. The resulting three dimensional cloud of variance is then given a name (“autism”) that might as well be “Bob”. Bob, you see, is just that, a cloud of variance within a mathematically formulated “factor space”. None of this, of course, identifies a biological state uniformly indicative of a causal or underlying factor or influence. This variance, by the way, is the only valid point held within the current “neurodiversity” movement — that all children labeled as having “Bob” present differently from each other.
So, when I read pathology oriented articles and therapy promotions — despite a genuine motivation to understand, guide, help and provide hope — I lament about how they move parents away from truly understanding that their child presents with a learning challenge, a challenge in learning about causal relations (which can be taught), temporal relations (which can be taught), spatial relations (which can be taught), ordinal relations (which can be taught). However, the instruction that needs to be provided is highly sophisticated, and relies on our best understanding and organized implementation of the science of human learning. It is through this science that children who present with “Bob” learn to speak with meaning, listen with understanding, and come to engage in life-long learning.