S02 Ep.9 - Changes in the Concept of Autism, Francesca Happé CBE
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- What do we know about autistic women's experience of menopause? Is there any link between being an older mother/older parents and having a autistic child or is there no proven correlation?
These and many more questions were put to Francesca for episode 9 of our new series!
This podcast followed her lecture ‘Changes in the Concept of Autism’ which was given on 28th February 2024.
You can find information about her lecture here:
www.gresham.ac...
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The lecture was fabulous! Thank you
Is paternal age a causative factor? Or do some people with autism just marry later due to later development with social skills and have kids later than neurotypicals? This would mean it's a confounding variable not a causative variable.
I don’t think the Amish suffer from the autism “seen”problem, but they’re are plenty among the modern lifestyle population. It helps bolster the twists and turns of the environmental impact that comes with subdividing the medical communities that suits the narrative
Interesting comments at the end. Autism will always be defined by behaviour, rather than biology.
I feel like there might be some contradiction in this declaration that autism is a behavioral diagnosis. Autism Spectrum Disorder, perhaps. That can make sense in the context of diagnosis for the purpose of treatment. But autism itself? Especially after explicitly stating that autism itself is not the target of cure or corrective treatment? And the (or so I had thought) modern understanding of autism as a neurological condition?
In fact, if you remove that seemingly arbitrary barrier, it’s no longer problematic to have a person genetically identifiable as autistic who doesn’t display autistic characteristics. I’ll even go a step further and say it is the arbitrary adherence to autism as a behavioral diagnosis that perpetuates the social stigma and mischaracterization as an intellectual disorder that have become so systemically attached to autism in the first place.
The whole concept of autism is arbitrary. What counts as an autistic trait is arbitrary, especially if there's no biological link between those traits?
@@ERobbins1234 I’m not following. Who is saying there is no biological link?
@@shapeofsoup Who is saying there is a biological link? In the main lecture, Happe said there was no genetic link between the traits. If autism is defined by behaviour rather than biology, there’s no requirement for an autistic person’s traits to be biologically linked.
@@ERobbins1234 I think you might be extrapolating more than she’s saying. Autism is a neurological condition. Autistic traits are fundamentally neurological. The problem diagnostically speaking is the only way we currently have to identify those traits is through behavioral observation. Those observations are symptoms of autistic traits that then require further context to diagnose/identify as autistic traits. Put another way, autism is *not* a behavioral condition, but it is diagnosed via observation of behavior because we simply don’t have a better way to diagnostically identify it.
Tangentially, this is why self-diagnosis is valid, given the individual has the information and context to do so, because who can better identify a person’s sensory experiences and thought processes than the person actually experiencing them?
@@shapeofsoup Would people who want to self identify as autistic even know what the autistic traits are, and would they be able to compare their traits to the average person? We could end up with a situation where half the population self identifies as autistic, just because they sometimes find socialising hard work, or because they like routine and dislike loud noises.