NEUROTRIBES: THE LEGACY OF AUTISM AND THE FUTURE OF NEURODIVERSITY - STEVE SILBERMAN

I should have read this years ago. When it came out in 2015 it made a splash. Lots of reviews and NPR interviews and I was certainly not uncommon to see it’s substantial girth being lugged around at coffee shops. I’ve always been interested in autism and neurodiversity generally but, honestly, I found the topic daunting and confusing. I knew some autistic kids growing up and their presentations were so different I couldn’t really wrap my head around how they all had the same condition. This belief was reinforced and deepened when I began working with kids in the foster care system who are, disproportionately and unsurprisingly, autistic. I went through lots of trainings, both formal and informal and heard that if-you've-met-one-person-with-autism-you've-met-one-person-with-autism line a lot and tried my best to get my head around how some of those “afflicted” seemed to be withdrawn and non-verbal while others talked more than any kids I’ve ever met. Why was it useful to think of these kids as having the same “thing”?  Shouldda read this book. It’s much more of a history than an overview of the current thinking. It spends much of its considerable length tracing how different doctors working at different times/places as well as on different “ends” of the high-functioning/low-functioning axis came up with different terms, all describing, roughly, the same underlying condition. We get Kanner’s Syndrome, Childhood Schizophrenia, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Symbiotic Psychosis, Asperberg’s Syndrome and others before the recent synthesis of all of this into Autism Spectrum Disorder. I worked with a lot of kids that those terms would easily apply to. The book does a good job arguing for a view of Autism that thinks of it as based in a different way of thinking, that all or most of us have some access to, that is, to some degree, “turned up” in some people. Sometimes this gives us geniuses, other-times it gives us the sorts of people who used to (and still do) die in nightmarish state-institutions. There’s very interesting parallels drawn between the blind community’s and the transgender community’s (anecdotally, I do see a lot of pro-neurodiversity signs at transgender marches/political actions) struggle for rights, especially in their emphasis on changing the environment and attitudes of “regular” people to make society more accessible, rather than trying to force the individual into society or remove them totally. As I said, the book is long, there’s lots of tangents, like the ends and outs of how RAIN MAN got made, that could have been cut to make it more digestible. However, the shift in thinking that “neurodiversity” implies, the demolishment of the hierarchical, and ultimately eugenic, idea that there’s an “ideal man” or an “ideal brain” (this is the idea that underpins racism and nationalism and fascism and a host of other terrible ideas), is major and has huge implications. It takes a long time to trace this thinking and I’m glad Sliberman took the time. I still work with autistic folks (adults now, the autistic are over-represented, and under-diagnosed, amongst the homeless) and this has definitely helped me sharpen my thinking and diversify my tactics. I’d recommend it if you interact with autistic people, or want to think critically about where they fall on the neurodiversity spectrum. 1906 human brains.