When Ari Ne’eman was interviewed in Wired he said Autistic individuals don’t need people worrying about causes and cures.
This is extremely disturbing when you realize that the number of people with autism is now at 1 in 110 babies born and growing. And unlike Mr. Ne’eman many of those (the large majority actually) will never be able to truly function on their own.
Mr. Ne’eman’s aim of improving quality of life and civil rights is laudable but it does not address those who are not going to be able to enjoy them and it does nothing to slow the rapidly growing population that is being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
Autism Spectrum Disorder runs a very large gamut from those like Mr. Ne’eman who are clearly generally able to function in normal life and hold even high powered jobs such as he does, down to those who may never be able to speak and do nothing but sit in a chair, rocking for the remainder of their lives. The problem is there are far fewer of those like Mr. Ne’eman then there are farther down the scale where they will need some level of assistance for the remainder of their lives and unless we address the causes and even perhaps cures then we are going to eventually find ourselves in a situation where a large percentage of our population is used to aid autistic individuals.
Quality of life and civil rights are necessary but so are find and eliminating the causes of Autism and perhaps even figuring out a way to cure those that have it. Most important of those though is eliminating causes of Autism so that we can drastically reduce the number of individuals who are forced to live with this disease. Second to that is the necessity of making sure that all individuals get the best opportunity to function to the best of their ability, through behavioural training to allow them to be able to function as close to self sufficiently as possible.
He also slam’s Dr. Lovaas for attempting to make autistic children “appear normal”. But again he misses the point that the ABA treatment developed by Dr. Lovaas actually helps a child or adult function within society by being able to care for themselves, earn a living, and generally be functional in society. It is the difference between being able to express themselves and hitting out at someone. In a child hitting out can be dealt with in an adult this is likely to lead to jail time, all simply because someone did not want to work to help make autistic children better able to express their feelings and issues and instead left them with a high frustration level that resulted in hitting out as the only method communicating.
Mr. Ne’eman’s ideas are great within the context of a high functioning autistic individual but the large majority of autistic individuals are not high functioning. We need to improve the focus on therapy and drastically improve the funding on both causation and therapy research and it needs to be done before we reach a critical mass where the number of autistic individuals requires more people caring for them then the available number of non autistic individuals.
Autistic individuals are not to be feared but they are not a situation we are able to ignore either. We need to find and eliminate the causes of autism and we need to help those who are not high functioning at least reach a level where they can function in society where that is possible.
On the subject of the new DSM-5 classifications I have mixed feelings. This is largely because as it is high functioning aspergers is considered the standard for autism when this is not reality. If this classification comes through one of two possibilities will occur.
1/ The low functioning end will be considered the standard and better treatments will be found because of it.
2/ The high functioning end will be considered the standard and less effort will be made into treatments because the need for it will not be recognized.
While ideally i would love situation 1 to be the result I would have to suggest that history suggests that this new classification system could leave those on the low functioning end fending for themselves.
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