Nice to have another explanation to send people.This classic is the one I have used in the past:
The Space Race and the Cold War created conformity culture in America and in Canada in a way that didn’t happen in Europe and other parts of the world. Conformity culture is a lot of the reason why behaviorism, not just ABA, but all behaviorism remained popular, even when it was being debunked in America, because schools changed after Sputnik launched. They really did.
They really became focused on performance, grades, tests. Funding was tied to how kids did on tests. Everyone was expected to march along like a little robot, whereas schools were a freer place before then. I think that that is part of it, this aspect that Lovaas came up with in the post-war period, was this idea of autistic kids becoming indistinguishable from their peers. I think that’s more important in American and Canadian society than in some other societies.
This is an interesting insight, and one that extends outward to a lot of other issues in our part of the world.
Also, can confirm this, as someone who was told repeatedly in the 1960’s that I ‘owed it to my country to go into math and science’ because I was unusually good in those areas. The Cold War hung heavy over everything.
Pretty damned funny, if you ask me.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent comments on autistic Americans sparked massive backlash from the community last week. Now, there’s news that the National Institute of Health’s new autism study is collecting private medical records from Americans. Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, provides his perspective on the impact RFK Jr.'s rhetoric and latest actions are having on the autistic community during Autism Acceptance Month.
This was The Assembly, a special aired on the BBC last Friday to mark the end of Autism Acceptance Week. Michael Sheen was interviewed by a group of autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people. I hadn’t known anything about it, until a friend on Facebook shared the clip. She posted it with the message: This will melt your heart.
This, in essence, sums up my chief gripe with autistic people on television. Whilst I’m pleased we’re getting on the box more — which is a brilliant thing, by the way — I’m constantly in awe of how we’re packaged to appeal to certain audiences. Non-autistic audiences. And as it turns out, the wholesome stuff really sells.
I’ve always felt the opposite of wholesome. Growing up, I became convinced I was an evil villain that had somehow been miscast in her own life. Because I spent a lot of time analysing other people, there was a period where I genuinely believed I might be a psychopath. Bar the fact I felt exceptionally guilty about everything; mainly the staring at everybody too much, and then insulting them without realising it. That, and I struggled to get through Crimewatch (and then finally lost it when some poor old man got bludgeoned with a hammer). I determined I must just be the rare emotional sort.
We love to see autistic people as childlike. Unsurprising, perhaps, considering every other stock image of our neurotype is a toddler lining his toys in a row. Take Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum, a show set with the premise of autistic singles navigating the dating world. The cast includes Disney enthusiasts, a man who loves teddy bears, dinosaur lovers. Every scene is accompanied by a tinkling, jingling score, not so distant from that nice Channel 4 show where they rehome dogs. To viewers, autism becomes an endearing, puppy-like manner of being. And that’s hardly true. Certainly the numbers of us admitted to psychiatric hospitals and taking our own lives would suggest otherwise.
Autism infantilisation happens on screen because it reflects how we tend to get treated in reality. It’s even prevalent amongst healthcare professionals. My autism assessor insisted on speaking to me like I was a child hiding under a table, despite establishing earlier in our conversation that I’d got a degree and had taken the day off work to be there.
The Autism Curve
Diagnoses of autism have been rising exponentially. Arguments and conspiracy theories abound about why. So what’s behind that steep upwards curve?
I’m willing to bet that a) there’s less of a stigma attached to being on the spectrum, and b) diagnosis procedures have improved immensely over the past couple decades, along with how it’s handled post-diagnosis- for example, people diagnosed on the spectrum are no longer put into institutions or have fatal ‘accidents’ happen to them in childhood.
(I’m pretty certain that my roaring case of ADHD also came with a small side of autism; my own research seems to indicate that there are a lot of co-morbidities between the two, and a few of the indicators in how I behave and react to things seem to indicate that I might have a very mild iteration of it.)
If you consider that the diagnosis itself didn’t exist in the U.S. in the medical textbooks until 1980, that means anyone born about 1975 or earlier wouldn’t have been diagnosed. So, ages 50 and up. And yes, that age group is one of the biggest factors – possibly the biggest – in the burgeoning numbers of new diagnoses.
My wife’s uncle (who must be in his late 80’s or early 90’s now) was actually tied up in school, I bet due to some sort of ADHD. I met him a few times years ago, and I can believe he had it.
Because an exponential curve can look a lot like the beginning of a sigmoid, and given noise, it can continue to be mistaken for one well past the inflection point and into the long approach to the upper asymptote.
Of course, most disease vectors are also sigmoids of a sort, it’s just that their upper bounds are higher. Something which spreads from person to person and will eventually affect everyone has an upper asymptote of 1, with increasing and decreasing rates dependant on transmissibility and population density. Which are basic concepts we should all know from a few years ago, or from playing Plague Inc. At first the spread is slow because there are only so many people to pass it on, but as it spreads the number of people infected goes up faster and faster… but eventually it will be harder and harder to find someone who isn’t already infected, and those who are isolated may continue to be, so new infections will tail off, until it approaches everyone.
Only, with Autism and ADHD, it’s a different model: the people with the condition are already there, it’s the knowledge of the condition that’s changing. At first some doctor notices a person who is strongly affected. Then with a new eye they notice more. They, and others, figure out that these people all have the same thing, and that it hasn’t really been described before. They figure it out, they spread word, and more people are identified, with less overwhelming signs. After a while the awareness gets to the point that people who have the condition start to wonder if it’s describing them and their problems. More awareness, more pride, more awareness, until most folk who have the condition are identified, and finding those adults who are hiding it is harder and harder. Bingo-bango, a sigmoid curve with the upper asymptote at more or less the actual prevalence.
But the alarmists don’t care about any of that. They zoom in so you can just see the alarming increase, and hide the scale so that you can’t see the slope, you can’t see how long it takes to rise to the inflection point, or the slope at that point. You can’t see the height of the graph, to tell between something rising to an asymptote of 0.4, and to an asymptote of 0.04. And they’ll helpfully interpolate an exponential fit onto the data, hiding that the inflection point is well and truly past and the detection rate is already down again.
So… yeah. We know what “The Autism Curve” is: it’s a sigmoid. We’re still learning what its upper bound is, but we know it has one, and it’s not what the alarmists want you to think it is. Which is besides asking whether it would even be that bad if it were.
What could go wrong?
Sadly, considering that access to a human therapist is becoming more and more difficult, the question rapidly becomes “Is an AI therpist worse than no therapist at all?” This question will be answered, but not terribly soon.
ELIZA was good enough for my crazy dad, ELIZA is good enough for me.
The important thing is to develop the spyware, and flag records for expert review, to allow proper diagnosis of drepetomania and sluggish schizophrenia.