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by skissane
1138 days ago
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I'm certainly not trying to defend the guy. If anything, I think a lot of people in the "autism community" want to defend him (even if only to a degree), in part because they feel some emotional attachment to the label of "Asperger's" and are trying to shoot down the argument "we shouldn't use that label because it is named after a Nazi collaborator" For all of Asperger's sins, he was too humble to actually name a disorder after himself – he called his disorder "autistic psychopathy". Lorna Wing renamed it after him, because the word "psychopath" had become very stigmatised, and Asperger was using it in an older and broader sense than current discussions of "psychopathy", which is prone to confuse the uneducated layperson. Wing was actually one of the people trying to defend Asperger–before her death, she wasn't aware of the further historical research published on this topic after she died, and who knows whether she would have revised her position if she'd lived to see that–it is understandable she'd want to defend one of the major decisions of her career–and she was (at best) dimly aware of this aspect of Asperger's history when she made that decision I will admit to myself sometimes using "Aspergian" in describing some of my own personality traits, not because I necessarily agree with the term, but simply because it is a useful shorthand which my listener is likely to understand, and as much as I'd love to dump all these details and more on them, it risks overwhelming their time, attention and comprehension |
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On the other hand, Autism Spectrum Disorder basically doesn't exist, it was designed specifically to cover as many possible definitions of Autism such that nearly anyone, under the right circumstances, could be labeled as Autistic and be given expensive treatment, and I think there is something dangerous in people self-identifying with this label as it only feeds into the larger psychiatry-industrial complex. It's similar to depression--some people legit can't get out of bed in the morning, but the drugs we use to treat it are handed out like candy, are not approved to be used for the terms that they are, and don't even perform better than a placebo.
The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent--everyone is "perverse," as Freud famously elucidates in his theory--its just that those who are labeled as "other" under the system get exploited, and everyone else, for fear of the same fate, hide all their psychological proclivities from everyone except from their most intimate acquaintances. And there are some who are lucky enough to avoid both fates, but they are rare among the ruling class, and the commonality of ostensible abnormal psychology among the working class is considered a "problem" to be solved by endless mental health facilities, treatment programs, etc. meanwhile the real pains of being a working class American forces many into addiction, and what they are offered can do nothing much to alleviate the underlying problems which led them there (often times problems, as in the case of the opioid crisis, generated by the very corporate structure which also drives people to treatment for their addiction).
I learned about all what you discuss because I wanted to find a genealogy of "Autism" as a why of critiquing it as a medical category. But I don't know, as I said there is definitely some constellation of symptoms and ways of treating them that would fall under an Autism diagnoses, its just that how such a diagnoses came to exist was not through some pure empirical scientific process but a historical, social process that can't be disassociated from the other socio-economic realities.