Autistic people: different, not less

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Journalist Steve Silberman informs us, that Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger identified Autism separately. The crucial difference is that Kanner had the fortune to publish his work in Baltimore, while Asperger had the misfortune to publish his in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and this accident of geopolitics lies at the tragic core of Silberman’s ambitious and meticulous history “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. During his many years at the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, Hans Asperger studied more than 200 children he would ultimately treat for what he called autistic psychopathy. Some were prodigies who couldn’t make it through school; others were more disabled and were shunted into asylums. But what they all had in common was a family of symptoms — “social awkwardness, precocious abilities, and fascination with rules, laws, and schedules” — that Asperger recognized, right away, made up a continuum, one occupied by children and adults alike, and he viewed those differences as cause for celebration, not distress. When he finally shared his findings with the world, the only reason he focused on his higher-­functioning patients, Silberman admits, was a chilling function of the era: The ­Nazis, on a mad campaign to clean the land of the “feebleminded,” were putting to death institutionalized children carelessly. In so doing, Asperger accidentally gave the impression that autism was a rarefied condition among young geniuses, not the common syndrome he knew it to be. Meanwhile, in the United States, a brilliant, energetic child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner was developing a radically different picture of autism, one that stipulated the condition was uncommon and unique, affecting only young children (anyone older was schizophrenic, psychotic — anything else) and, though biological in origin, somehow activated by cold and withholding parents. “By blaming parents for inadvertently causing their children’s autism,” Silberman states, “Kanner made his syndrome a source of shame and stigma for families worldwide.” Thus the history of autism was written, paving the way for a decades-long attempt to cure, rather than adapt. The autism pandemic, in other words, is an optical illusion, one brought about by an original sin of diagnostic parsimony. The implications here are staggering: Had the definition included Asperger’s original, expansive vision, it’s quite possible we wouldn’t have been hunting for environmental causes or pointing our fingers at anxious parents. But he traces his history with precision, and along the way he treats us to charming, portraits of historical figures who are presumed to have had Asperger’s, including Henry Cavendish and Nikola Tesla, who when pressed by two elderly aunts as to which one was prettier, apparently replied that one was “not as ugly as the other”). At its heart is a plea for the world to make accommodate those with autism, not the other way around, and for researchers and the public alike to focus on getting them the services they need. They are, to use Temple Grandin’s words, “different, not less.” Better yet, indispensable: inseparably tied to innovation, showing us there are other ways to think and work and live. It’s an apt metaphor for our culture’s evolving attitude toward autism: If the light bounces off something a little differently, it can be seen in a whole new way.