Highlights from this month’s ASHA conference

A couple of weeks ago, before the Thanksgiving festivities, I went up to Boston for the American Speech Language Hearing Association Convention, to present, along with Bronwyn Hemsley, Howard Shane, and Ralf Schlosser, a talk entitled “Conceptualizing and Upholding a Communication Bill of Rights for Individuals who are Minimally Speaking.” These rights, of course, include the right to evidence-based communication methodologies, as opposed to one or another variants Facilitated Communication.

While there, I attended a few other talks. One of these was an alarmingly jam-packed talk on a fashionable new theory of language learning known as Gestalt Language Processing. Some individuals, especially those with autism, are purportedly a type of person known as a “gestalt language processor,” otherwise known as GLPs. What this theory adds to the long-standing recognition that many language-impaired individuals with autism resort to echolalia before acquiring basic vocabulary is… unclear to me.

Except in as much as Gestalt Language Processing Theory insists that echolalia is a building block of the language acquisition process, as opposed to a product of associative learning that clever therapists have long tried to shape into more meaningful communication—long before Gestalt Language Processing proponents started telling them that that’s what they should be doing.

And except in as much as Gestalt Language Processor purportedly means something more mystical than someone who takes a while to get beyond associative mappings between oral patterns and situations to intentional, linguistic communication.

But these days, we’re all about Gestalt: holistic thinking, the Whole Child, the big picture. So Gestalt Language Processing resonates. And it’s therefore not surprising that the two GLP talks were very well-attended—one of them even filling up the overflow room—even though the empirical data offered up in support of any of the various non-obvious claims was exactly zero.

Another popular presentation topic, at least as far as ASHA’s gatekeepers were concerned, was Structured Word Inquiry. A group of SWI proponents were awarded three different sessions. I only attended the last one, which had been assigned to the latest time slot and therefore was not perhaps as well attended as the others. Here I heard the usual evasions regarding how exactly SWI’s trademark learning tasks—morphological analysis and investigations via etymological dictionaries—help novice readers decode basic words like “cat” and “mat”, as well as the usual confusion of decoding skills with encoding skills (spelling), and the usual failure to explain what exactly students get out of using word matrices to “build words.” Taking words apart may help understand their meanings, but what does building words up do?

I was tempted to ask two questions, but refrained:

1.       Why does SWI make a distinction that no one else makes between historical roots and what it calls “bases” (such that the historical root in “electricity” is Latin “electrum” or Greek “ēlektron”, meaning “amber”, while the “base” of "electricity", which most people consider its route, is “electric”) at the same time that it broadens the concept of etymology to include stuff that no one else would include: that is, not just the origin of words, but contemporary coincidences like the “ear” in “hear”?

2.       How does SWI’s “word sums” (re + sign + ation à resignation) handle ambiguous words like “unlockable”?

Another overflowing talk I attended was “The Conundrum Behind the Missing Autistic Girls: Masking, Double Empathy, and Theory of Mind.” This talk echoed the oft-heard claim that girls are underrepresented in autism diagnoses because they’re better at masking. While critiquing the DSM for including Theory of Mind deficits in its latest criteria for autism (Is that true? I’m not seeing this anywhere), it finds justification for the notion that masking is common in autism in the following statement that is included in the DSM:

Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).

“Masked by learning strategies”, of course, is not the same as the deliberate masking of social eccentricities in order to “pass” as “neurotypical”—the latter sense of “mask” being that promoted by those who claim that girls are underrepresented in autism diagnosis. The underlying assumption, to the extent that there is a coherent, underlying assumption, seems to be that autistic girls are more driven/able to “pass” themselves off as typical girls than autistic boys are driven/able to pass as themselves off as typical boys.

The talk also discussed the research on Double Empathy, which, as I discuss in my book Students with Autism, to the extent that it holds up at all, holds up only with high functioning individuals who share similar interests.

The general thrust of the talk seemed to be the increasingly popular notion that autism, for all the masking, does not involve social deficits, but rather anxiety and an insufficient sense of “safety” (the purported basis for the restrictive, repetitive behaviors). As evidence for this, the presenters cited late-diagnosed women who seemed to have no trouble empathizing with the needs of their toddlers. Hmm.

The term “presuming competence” also came up, which pretty much tells us everything we need to know about where these people stand with respect to disability rights and autism. As Howard Shane pointed out in our presentation, citing Jason Travers, presuming competence risks undermining the rights of individuals with autism, particularly those who are minimally speaking.

 

 

 

Another Side Effect of FC: Alternative Facts

 (Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

Besides the communication rights violations, opportunity costs, and false abuse allegations emanating from facilitated communication and its variants (Rapid Prompting Method, Spelling to Communicate) there’s another cost: the various ways that FC warps people’s understanding of autism.

In previous posts, we’ve spent a fair amount of time on two types of misinformation that FC et al. perpetrate about autism.

1. The deliberate misinformation perpetrated by FC “professionals” that autism is a disorder of movement and/or of initiation and/or of intentional action rather than a socio-cognitive disorder that severely limits language acquisition.

2. The implicit misinformation emanating from facilitated messages about the sophisticated verbal and literacy skills of minimally-speaking autistics.

Besides these, however, there’s another kind of misinformation about autism that we haven’t yet spent much time considering here. This is the misinformation that is transmitted whenever a facilitated message purports to be a testimonial about how “we autistics” experience the world.

Before I go any further, I should note that not everything that facilitated “we autistics” messages say misrepresents autism. Indeed, some of what’s known about autism has, only naturally, seeped into the consciousness of facilitators and then seeped out subconsciously through facilitation. So long as a diagnostic symptom, or stereotypical autism characteristic, isn’t problematic for FC, it can freely, and indeed frequently does, show up in facilitated messages.

Only about half the diagnostic criteria, Category A of the DSM-5 criteria, are problematic for FC: those pertaining to deficits in social awareness and social interaction. That’s because intact social awareness and social interaction are prerequisites for the high levels of social awareness and language skills on display in FCed messages. But symptoms from the other half of the diagnostic criteria, Category B in the DSM, aren’t so problematic. That’s because these relate to restrictive/repetitive behaviors and sensory sensitivities/interests: symptoms that don’t inherently challenge the validity of FCed messages.

Accordingly, some “we autistics” messages have discussed a preference for sameness and routines, a detail-focus, an intense interest in letters and words (aka “hyperlexia”), an enjoyment of puzzles, anxiety-provoking sensory sensitivities, and calmness-fostering obsessions. Inasmuch as these are characteristics of autism that have been verified independently of FC-generated messages, their repetition in FCed messages is harmless. On the other hand, such messages may contribute to a warped understanding of the specific person being facilitated (who may, for example, not actually have any interest in letters).

Somewhat more concerning among facilitated “we autistics” claims are those that repeat the “we autistics” claims made by independently communicating autistics. In Thinking in Pictures, for example, Temple Grandin describes how when she hears the word “Great Dane,” she doesn’t visualize an abstracted Great Dane, but instead sees images of every Great Dane she’s ever met. Facilitated messages from Carly Fleishman have made similar claims about people’s faces and about how in autism “all the images come at us at once” (Fleischmann, p. 376). While some researchers have observed what’s called “stimulus over-selectivity” in autism, whereby individuals with autism appear more likely to notice and remember details than general features, there is no evidence that Grandin’s testimonials about being hit with a large number of specific images (e.g., of Great Danes) describe a general characteristic of autism.

Similarly, claims made by the autistic savant Daniel Tammet (2007) about how he sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures may have been one of the driving forces behind the frenzy of claims about synesthesia by facilitated autistic individuals (discussed in this post), but there is no evidence that synesthesia is any more common in autism than outside of it.

Some of these facilitated “we autistics” claims, however, go further and are commensurately even more detached from reality. In the sensory arena, one could easily get the impression from some of the facilitated “we autistics” messages that being autistic is like tripping on LSD. Sometimes it’s a bad trip, as suggested by one of Carly Fleishmann’s facilitated messages:

Autism feels hard. It’s like being in a room with the stereo on full blast. It feels like my legs are on fire and over a million ants are climbing on my arms (pp. 233-234).

A facilitated message attributed to Naoki Higashida (of The Reason I Jump) is similarly trippy:

It’s not quite that noises great on our nerves. It’s more to do with a fear that if we keep listening, we’ll lose all sense of where we are. At times like these, it feels as if the ground is shaking and the landscape around us starts coming to get us, and it’s absolutely terrifying (Higashida, p. 51).

But in another of Naoki’s facilitated messages the autism trip assumes a more positive shape:

Every single thing has its own unique beauty. People with autism get to cherish this beauty, as if it’s a kind of blessing given to us. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we can never be completely lonely. We may look like we’re not with anyone, but we’re always in the company of friends. (Higashida, p. 60)

Many of the messages attributed to Naoki give the impression that time, in particular, is psychedelic—or, at least, experienced by autistic people completely differently from how it is experienced by the rest of humanity.

For us, one second is infinitely long—yet twenty-four hours can hurtle by in a flash. (Higashida , p. 63)

We who have autism, who are semi-detached from the flow of time…” (Higashida , p. 67)

[W]e are a different kind of human, born with primeval senses. We are outside the normal flow of time.” (Higashida , p. 71).

[W]e are more like travelers from a distant past (Higashida , p. 111)

These and other “we autistics” claims seem to stem from some combination of:

1. Attempts by non-autistic people to exoticize autism (much as we Westerners used to exoticize the East)

2. Attempts by non-autistic people to endow some of the harder-to-explain behaviors of minimally-verbal individuals with some sort of higher-level purpose, and

3. The effects of some of the more contagious memes emanating from 1 and 2.

For example, there’s this facilitated message from Carly Fleischmann about stimming, or self-stimulatory behavior:

Drs. have the definition of stimming wrong. Stims are when you make or create output to block sensory input or overload. (Fleischmann, p. 376)

And on self-injurious behavior, Carly is cited as saying that she slaps herself to “stop herself from doing something she knows she’s not supposed to do.” (Goldberg & Putrino, 2009).

Regarding another common autistic behavior, wandering off, there’s this message, attributed to Naoki:

We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world. Then eventually we get lost, and have to be escorted back to the place we were at, or the person we were with, before. (Higashida, p. 93)

A number of messages attributed to Carly Fleischmann address another common autistic symptom, appearing not to pay attention:

I listen to everything… If a TV is on and I am in another room, I still listen to it or if people are talking I like to hear what they are saying even if they are not talking to me. Like I say all the time, just because it does not look like I am paying attention does not mean that’s the case. (Fleischmann, p. 343).

Elaborating this notion, Carly purportedly has this to say about why autistic individuals look away from people’s faces:

The more I look someone’s face, the more pictures I take. Because I take so many pictures, my brain or, as in my example, the camera gets full. I am no longer able to process the pictures or images and I am forced to turn away. That is way, for most people with autism, you will see their eyes wondering of face moving in a different direction when you are talking to them. (Fleischmann, p. 365).

Addressing a question from a mother about her son, Carly reportedly types:

When I was young I couldn’t look directly at things. I looked at the corner of my eyes and even though u think he’s not looking he is.

The theme that emerges from these facilitated messages is that “we autistics” are attending to everything, including people’s words and faces, even if it looks like we aren’t: the opposite of what the research has shown.

“We autistics” messages also contradict research showing autism to involve challenges in processing information, especially complex information (Williams et al., 2006). As Carly purportedly says:

Doctors would like to tell you that we have a hard time processing information. It’s not really true, our brains are wired differently. We take in many sounds and conversations at once. (Fleischmann, p. 322).

In addition, “we autistics” messages contradict research showing autism to involve major difficulties with linguistic comprehension, including reading comprehension. Here, for example, are two messages attributed to Naoki:

The reason we need so much time isn’t necessarily because we haven’t understood, but because by the time it’s our turn to speak, the reply we wanted to make has often upped and vanished from our heads… Once our reply has disappeared, we can never get it back again. (Higashida, p. 18)

Some of you may think we read aloud with a strange intonation, too. This is because we can’t read the story and imagine the story at the same time. Just the act of reading costs us a lot of effort—sorting out the words and somehow voicing them is already a very tall order. (Higashida, p. 17)

The implication of this last message is that an autistic individual who reads aloud in a way that suggests lack of comprehension nonetheless does understand when reading quietly to him or herself.

Finally, “we autistics” messages contradict the definition of autism as a social disorder—along with all the research supporting this. Here are three more messages attributed to Naoki:

Our feelings are the same as everyone else’s, but we can’t find a way to express them. (Higashida, p. 21)

The truth is, we’d love to be with other people. But because things never, ever go right, we end up getting used to being alone, without even noticing this is happening. (Higashida, p. 27)

We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people’s unhappiness, that’s plain unbearable. (Higashida, p. 44)

Collectively, most of the above messages are FC-friendly. They suggest that what might look like signs of an absent intellect actually serve a higher-level purpose. They suggest, as well, that autistic individuals are attending to language and comprehending it, and attending to information and processing it. They say, explicitly, that autistic people are at least as sociable and empathetic as the rest of us. And they offer, finally, an explanation (really, a pseudo-explanation) for the sophisticated linguistic, social, and intellectual content of so many facilitated messages. Of course, the underlying reasoning is circular, since facilitated messages that say things that support the validity of FC are valid only if FC is valid.

A few more FC-friendly “we autistics” messages on various topics include:

1. A message attributed to Naoki reinforcing the FC-friendly notion that autism involves difficulty controlling one’s body:

[W]e don’t know our own body parts so well (Higashida, p. 33).

2. Another message attributed to Naoki about how we should ignore the spoken words of autistic individuals, which often are at odds with the messages that are facilitated out of them:

Please don’t assume that every word we say is one we intend.” (Higashida, p. 19)

3. A message, attributed to Carly, about why she types with only one hand (the one-handed typing that characterizes FC, as we’ve noted, is easier to cue than two-handed and, especially, ten-finger typing):

I had a hard time using both hands and if I would bring my left hand up to help me type I found it got in trouble. So I would concentrate not only on typing but on keeping my hand down and out of trouble.” (Fleischmann, p. 368).

4. Another message attributed to Carly about how she has a photographic memory (which would explain why facilitated individuals don’t exhibit reading behaviors when they’re actually still reading—something I discussed, along with the non-existence of photographic memory, in one of my recent posts).

I have a photographic memory that allows me to look at an image or a page of a book and memorize it in seconds.” (Fleischmann, p. 383)

5. A message, attributed to Tito Mukhopadhyay, that supports some of the contorted reasoning made in support of the FC variant known as the Rapid Prompting Method, “invented” by Tito’s mother:

[E]ach Autistic person tends to develop one particular sense organ through which he tries to perceive the situation. (Iversen, p. 70)

6. Finally, a message, attributed to Grant Basko at a webinar sponsored by the National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (screenshot below), about how much of what people consider to be autism symptomology is actually the result of the trauma of not being able to communicate:

I have worked for years to overcome my trauma responses. However, I wish I had been able to work with researchers who were willing to consider that significant trauma are often unfairly folded into a list of autism symptoms. (Blasko, 2023).

This last message is part of a more concerning trend: FCed messages that call on researchers to include FCed individuals as research collaborators. Other FCed messages along these lines are found in a recent commentary in Time Magazine, attributed to Hari Srinavasan, entitled Who Autism Research Leaves Out. This commentary includes a call for technology to address the purported movement challenges faced by autistic people.

 [W]hy not explore technology that allows for movement for those with autism, similar to neuroimaging equipment used in sports injuries or movement-disorders such as Parkinson's?

Given that autism is not a movement disorder, this would be tremendous waste of resources.

Besides wrong-headed advice for researchers, there’s wrong-headed advice for practitioners. Here is one last facilitated “we autistics” message from Naoki:

People with autism may look happier with pictures and diagrams of where we’re supposed to be and when, but in fact we end up being restricted by them. They make us feel like robots, with each and every action preprogrammed. What I’d suggest is that instead of showing us visual schedules, you talk through the day’s plan with us, verbally and beforehand. Visual schedules create such a strong impression on us that if a change occurs, we can get flustered and panicky. (Higashida, p. 107)

The message I want to get across here is: please don’t use visual things like pictures on our schedules, because then the activities on the schedules, and their times and timings, get imprinted to visually on our memories.” (Higashida, pp. 107-108).

People who don’t live with autism often think that the rest of us won’t be able to understand the plan for the day just by listening. But give it a try, and although we might ask you the same questions over and over, we will get the hand of it, and ask you less and less… being shown photos of places we’re going to visit on an upcoming school trip, for example, can spoil our fun. (Higashida, p. 108).

People who actually work with autistic individuals, as opposed to those who facilitate messages out of them, have found visual schedules to be extremely helpful. They are a core feature of  TEACCH, one of the most successful teaching interventions for autism, and common feature of autistic support classrooms. They are a way to circumvent both the oral language deficits and the aversion to uncertainty that the above paragraphs claim don’t exist.

Spoil our fun? Far from it. What’s actually at stake is the anxiety of the unpredictable, a side effect of the restrictive/repetitive behaviors and interests that comprise Category B of the diagnostic criteria for autism. Following this particular “we autistics” message could cause real harm to vulnerable autistics.

But some autism experts are eager for us to listen to “we autistics” messages like this one. Invoking neurodiversity, for example, Dawson et al. (2022) argue that:

[C]linician training curricula can include writings from autistic individuals on topics such as sensory experiences to ensure that autistic lived experiences are appreciated and incorporated into clinical practice.

To some extent this is reasonable. Considering writings that are clearly authored by autistic individuals can be helpful in informing practice—provided we don’t overgeneralize from one person’s experiences. But in this day and age, where nearly everyone appears to be falling for at least the more subtle variants of FC, it’s easy to imagine that some of the “writings from autistic individuals” will include things like the extremely misguided advice on visual schedules that was facilitated out of Naoki. After all, Dawson herself has apparently fallen for at least one (and possibly two) facilitated individuals.

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REFERENCES

Blasko, Grant. NIDCD (2023, January). Panel of stakeholder perspectives. Minimally Verbal/Non-Speaking Individuals With Autism: Research Directions for Interventions to Promote Language and Communication. National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders. https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=48737 (11:00-15:30)

Dawson G, Franz L, Brandsen S. At a Crossroads—Reconsidering the Goals of Autism Early Behavioral Intervention From a Neurodiversity Perspective. JAMA Pediatr. 2022;176(9):839–840. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.2299

Grandin, T. (1995) Thinking in Pictures. Doubleday.

Fleischmann, A.  (2012). Carly’s Voice. Touchstone.

Goldberg, A., & Putrino, L. (2009, August 5). Teen locked in autistic body finds inner voice. https:// abcnews.go.com/2020/MindMoodNews/story?id=8258204&page=1Fleishman, Carly’s Voice

Higashida, N. & Mitchell, D. (2013). The Reason I Jump. Random House.

Iversen (2006). Strange Son. Riverhead.

Srinavasan (2023, July 31). Who Autism Research Leaves Out. Time Magazine. https://time.com/6299599/autism-research-limited-essay/?fbclid=IwAR1LvNbl0BjKCwGpGjJpXFAiVTOCVUmZEM2scV4gyJK148YdER2u-ob0EzY)

Tammet, D. (2007). Born on a Blue Day. Free Press.

Williams, D. L., Goldstein, G., & Minshew, N. J. (2006). Neuropsychologic functioning in children with autism: Further evidence for disordered complex information-processing. Child Neuropsychology: A Journal on Normal and Abnormal Development in Childhood and Adolescence, 12(4–5), 279–298. doi:10.1080/09297040600681190

Malapropism watch

Our ever-growing sloppiness in oral language--the result of diminished reading of sophisticated texts?--has spread into mainstream media and public radio. Here are some recent examples of usages that are not quite right... or worse:

• “downfall” for “downside"
• "turn the other cheek" for "look the other way" 
• "open a whole Pandora’s box" for "revealed something important" 
• "insurmountably" for "unequivocally" or "egregiously" 
• "that said" for "given that" 
• "long tail" for "long term" 
• "prima facie" for "ipso facto" 
• "gratuitous" for "fortuitous"

I imagine this is highly contagious and that we'll be seeing more and more of it.

FC-friendly trends in autism diagnoses

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org.)

As I noted in an earlier post, believing in FC means believing that autism is a sensory-motor/motor-planning/praxis disorder that cries out for facilitator support, as opposed to the socio-cognitive disorder that decades of clinical observation, research, and standardized diagnostic criteria have firmly established it to be. Also incompatible with our decades-old understanding of autism is the social content of many FC-generated messages, as seen in those I cited earlier:

• “my desire for friends” (attributed to Jamie Burke)

• “the social person that inside me I wanted to be” (attributed to Alberto Frugone)

• “the truth” that “we'd love to be with other people” (attributed to Naoki Higashida)

• “a big misconception” of liking objects more than people (attributed to Ido Kedar)

• the appearance of lack of social interest as “only a self-preservation mask” (attributed to Amy Sequenzia)

In my earlier post, I pinned most of the blame for the notion that autism isn’t a social disorder on studies that rely on online surveys: surveys in which individuals provide subjective self-ratings on questions about social motivation and interests. Such self-reports are highly unreliable, are skewed towards the mildest end of the autism spectrum, and potentially include significant numbers of individuals who have diagnosed themselves as autistic but who don’t actually meet the diagnostic criteria.

But in the last few weeks I’ve heard several anecdotes suggesting that clinicians, as well, are starting to get in on the game.  

Lilac Hadar via Wikimedia Commons

The first came from a friend of mine who was looking to qualify his adult son for SSI benefits. The young man was born at 30 weeks gestation and has a broad array of cognitive challenges, particularly in quantitative reasoning and executive functioning. After reading a two-page symptom synopsis written by his parents, and without having met, let alone observed, the young man, the clinician diagnosed him with high-functioning autism. This, despite all the examples of sociability, charm, and conversational skills that the synopsis included.  Apparently certain of his difficulties—difficulties with judgment (excessive trust in strangers), with daily living skills (laundry, shopping, money management), and with fully communicating his needs to those who might help him—were sufficient for autism.

When the father re-iterated and re-emphasized the young man’s sociability, the clinician told him that the definition of autism has expanded beyond the formal criteria in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-5) and that lack of sociability is no longer a necessary symptom. She then cited a non-academic article, possibly this one, in which Jaswal and Akhtar tell readers of the New York Times that autistic people are just as socially interested as the rest of us. (In that article, Jaswal and Akhtar reference a journal article of theirs that we’ve critiqued here.)

The second report of an “expansive” diagnosis of autism came to me just two weeks later. A cousin of mine told me that her sociable but chronically inattentive, impulsive, and distractible teenage daughter was just diagnosed with autism. When she expressed skepticism, the clinician told her that autism now includes ADHD and that her daughter, who has long met the criteria for ADHD, now qualifies as autistic. The origin of these claims, as far as I can make out, is a warped understanding of a keynote speech presented at last year’s INSAR conference by neurologist Evdokia Anagnostou. Anagnostou reported on neuroimaging studies that suggest more commonality between high-functioning autism (specifically, what was once called Asperger’s) and ADHD than between high-functioning autism and severe autism. If anything, these results should result in fewer people being diagnosed with autism and more being diagnosed with ADHD; not in those with ADHD being reclassified as autistic.

Two additional reports of questionable autism diagnoses by clinicians came to me just a couple of weeks ago on social media. Two young people recounted being diagnosed as teenagers via a 45-minute interview with a clinician (a different clinician in each case) plus the interpretation by the clinician of online self-survey results from the Autism Quotient Test. Both the interviews and the survey consisted mainly of questions about current interests and levels of social motivation. This, despite the unreliability of such subjective self-ratings and the fact that, according to the clinical definitions of autism, symptoms must be evident in early childhood. As one of the people pointed out, it’s quite obvious how to answer the questions if you want to come out autistic. That’s because most of the questions transparently tap into one or other of the two DSM subcategories for autism: either the social category (Category A), or the restrictive/repetitive behavior category (Category B). Here are the first two questions:

1.     I prefer to do things with others rather than on my own.

o   Definitely Agree

o   Slightly Agree

o   Slightly Disagree

o   Definitely Disagree

2.     I prefer to do things the same way over and over again.

o   Definitely Agree

o   Slightly Agree

o   Slightly Disagree

o   Definitely Disagree

Of course, this diagnostic route does involve acknowledging deficits in the social sphere. But once you’ve gone through the motions and gotten your diagnosis, you can return to your default levels of sociability—and, assuming those levels are higher than the ceiling for autism, contribute to the growing impression that autism isn’t a social disorder.

Three current trends—FC promotion, FC-friendly research, and the urge by some non-autistic people in today’s identity-obsessed culture to identify as autistic—depend on willing away the social deficits in autism. So successfully has each trend fed off the others that collectively they’ve launched a broader trend that, apparently, even includes some of the professionals whom society has entrusted to diagnose autism. And those professionals are happily doing so, even in light of recent findings that should motivate a shift from autism diagnoses to ADHD, and even in individuals who have no apparent social deficits.

It’s probably too early to say how far this will go, but the effects, like those of so many other of today’s trends, will almost certainly be favorable to FC.

REFERENCES:

Autism Quotient Test. https://embrace-autism.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/#test

Jaswal, V & Akhtar, Nameera. (2018, July 13). How to Meet Autistic People Halfway By Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/opinion/autism-social-life-new-research.html

Jaswal, V. K., & Akhtar, N. (2018). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 42, e82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18001826

Lutz, A. (2022, May 22). New Research May Change How We Think About the Autism Spectrum INSAR keynote suggests brain differences correlate with cognition—not diagnosis.  Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inspectrum/202205/new-research-may-change-how-we-think-about-the-autism-spectrum