The Power Threat Meaning Framework

Just a few assumptions which I’d like to correct. I don’t think that people with an autism diagnoses who do not have learning disabilities are fakers. I don’t think that lived experience is unimportant and should be dismissed. I don’t think that the early psychiatrists who defined autism were right, and more recent definitions are wrong. I don’t have an agenda to cut benefits. I don’t think that the medical model is the best approach for helping distressed people or understanding behaviour. I do not reject the social model of disability. I’m not out to destroy people whose opinions I disagree with. I don’t think that autistic behaviour is caused by poor parenting nor should be blamed on the child. What do I think? Autism is a description, not an explanation. It was created, rather than discovered. It gives a name to a cluster of behaviours but no one has found an underlying genetic, neurological or cognitive difference shared by everyone with an autism diagnosis and no one without one. A descriptive category like autism can and does change over time - and so it’s up to us as a society to decide where the lines should be drawn, and to work out the costs and benefits of that.  In order to do that effectively, we have to be able to talk about the competing interests and conflicts involved. This is actually an uncontroversial opinion among scientists who study autism and the wider psychiatric classification system. It doesn’t just apply to autism, it applies to most psychiatric diagnoses.  There’s (a lot) more, but that’s why I wrote a book.