Getting Real About Autism
It's not a discipline problem or a diversity issue. It's a disability.
by Amy S.F. Lutz
June 1, 2009
On the third floor of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore is a locked ward called the Neurobehavioral Unit (NBU). This unit is the last stop for kids with the most severe behavior problems — some are so self-injurious they must wear padding on their
arms so they won't bite themselves until they bleed; others are so aggressive staff members must wear helmets and chest shields during therapy sessions. At any given time, according to Dr. Lee Wachtel, medical director of the NBU, the majority of the kids
on the unit are autistic — as is my ten-year-old son, Jonah, who was on the unit from January 17 to December 2, 2008.
Some of the autistic children are quite high functioning, but many are completely non-verbal, incontinent, and seemingly able to do little
else than flap their hands or spin in endless circles. I think of those children every time I read the latest in the recent flurry of attempts to re-imagine autism as anything less than devastating, and wish the proponents of these theories could spend some
time on the NBU. Maybe then they would realize how naïve and dangerous their efforts to minimize this epidemic actually are.
It might seem easy to dismiss the extreme examples, those blowhards who reduce afflicted children to undisciplined "brats," as Michael Savage called them last July, or "junior morons," according to Denis Leary
in his book Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid. And I do trust that most people will hesitate to take Denis Leary's advice on . . . just about anything. But the fact remains that an autistic child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store doesn't look much different from a
spoiled brat throwing a tantrum in a grocery store, and I can certainly imagine how comments such as Leary's and Savage's might reinforce the secret suspicions of those who have seen autistic children only during their most fraught and hysterical moments.
An autistic child throwing a tantrum doesn't look much different from a
spoiled brat throwing a tantrum.Harder to reject out of hand are those who mask their self-indulgent opinions as intellectual discourse, such as Owen Thomas's post, "Autism, the Disease of the Internet Era," which was featured on Gawker in January. Thomas re-conceptualizes autism as a
metaphor for our alienated, internet-obsessed age, asking, "Are we all perhaps a bit autistic? Is the Internet turning us into robots, unable to express our emotions without mechanical help? . . . Needing to type ':-)' to communicate our pleasure may give
the tiniest hint of what the disease may be like."
Suffice it to say: no, it doesn't.
Thomas supports his philosophical musings with a claim very popular amongst the autism nay-sayers: "The consensus seems to be that we're seeing more autism cases because we're more primed to look for its symptoms. In other words, we see autism everywhere
because we want to." The idea that the astronomical rise in autism cases over the past decade has more to do with perception — with increased awareness, or allegedly expanded diagnostic criteria — than a legitimate increase in the number of affected children
is echoed in David Safir's editorial, "Hype Around Autism," which appeared in 2007 in
USA Today. Dr. Safir suggests, "In the 1990s the definition of autism began to change to include many children with a milder collection of symptoms . . . it is not helpful to artificially create an 'epidemic' by changing definitions."
©2009 Amy Lutz and Babble Media
About the Author
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Amy S.F. Lutz's work has appeared in dozens of
literary journals, including Cream City Review, The American
Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and Mid-American Review. She and
her husband have five children. She and her sister chronicle their two-family household in the blog whoelsewantstoliveinmyhouse.com |
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