Ben Preiss
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Amanda Baggs is a 27 year old autistic woman who can’t communicate verbally and isn’t fully capable of taking care of herself. A lot of people don’t have an understanding of the condition, but she wouldn’t let that defeat her. She posted a YouTube video in an attempt to raise awareness which ended up receiving over 375,000 views. She clearly lets the world know that she can speak eloquently (with the help of text-to-speech) and explain her world to us. Amanda envied the progress of gay rights and wanted to do something similar for the autistic. “I remember in ‘99,” she says, “seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is.” The message, as Wired put it, is “We’re here. We’re weird. Get used to it.” Her message is getting out thanks to the attention that her video has gotten; it is bringing surfers and doctors to her blog and changing the way we look at autism.  This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn't be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.
A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. "If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago," says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, "I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong."
(wired)References: ballastexistenz.autistics.org, wired Filed In: |
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