The burgeoning diagnoses of Autistic children in recent years leads to the most important question: Is our environment and lifestyle leading to more cases of autism or is the change in the definition of autism that has brought many more under the fold.
NeuroTribes looks at this question and many other similar questions as Steve Silberman goes back in time to investigate the first cases of autism and how it all started.
Steve Silberman is an American writer based in San Francisco, CA. Silberman is best known as a writer for Wired magazine, where he has been an editor and contributor for 14 years. In 2010, Silberman was awarded the AAAS “Kavli Science Journalism Award for Magazine Writing.”
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
Author: Steve Silberman Pages: 544 Publisher: Avery; 1 edition (August 25, 2015) ISBN-10: 158333467X, 978-1583334676
The first couple of chapters show the current state of Autism in the US population. Parents share the stories of struggle with their children’s peculiar behavior and how they found innovative ways to help development of their kids.
Autistic kids were for a long time simply bunched together and labeled as feebleminded with no hope and the only possible future of being an inmate at an institution for the mentally ill.
Movies like Rainman helped create awareness about autism, but labeled all autistic kids as genius. So if you are autistic, you have to have something special and genius about you. An average autistic wouldn’t get any special attention or consideration. That is the problem with movies like Rainman. Although they create awareness, they also create stereotypes that do not help anyone.
Autism or the peculiar behavior got the attention of researchers and doctors in the time just before World War II. In What Sister Victorine Knew, the author shares this initial investigation and observations done by Asperger in Vienna and his approach to resolving these issues.
Another psychiatrist, Kanner, observed similar behavior patterns in the US, slightly later. Asperger’s approach to managing autism was radically different than that of Kanner, who initially blamed parents for the development if this condition. World War II destroyed much of the research conducted by Asperger and Kanner’s view of Autism gained prominence early on. This more or less diverted all the attention from children to external factors, which you will read in The Invention of Toxic Parenting, and set back autism research for many years.
This commentary on two different approaches will give the readers insight into the current dialogue around autism. You will also hear stories of people who now can be defined as autistic. People who gave us some of the biggest invention in the last century and people who thought of a world much ahead of their times.
Although the book talks of research and the progression of views about autism, the language is not scientific. There is very little jargon and any reader from non medical background can understand what the author is trying to communicate. By talking about the autistic children and their families, the author ensures that the text is not a drab commentary of one finding after another.
More than anything else, NeuroTribes shows us that we need to accept that autistic children are different. They perceive the world in different way. Years of research has shown that each autistic child is different and needs different kind of environment to flourish. Acceptance of what is can help parents provide the child the kind of education and environment that it needs to develop. Denial and hunt for a cure will only create rife and make managing autism difficult.
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