The new age of autism
Neurodiversity movement is helping adults find a sense of community and purpose
Alanna Whitney was a weird kid. She had a strange knack for pronouncing long words. Anchovies on pizza could send her cowering under a table. Her ability to geek out on subjects like Greek mythology and world religions could be unsettling. She drank liquids obsessively, and in her teens her extreme water intake landed her in the hospital.
Years later, she found a word that explained it all: autistic. Instead of grieving, she felt a rush of relief.
“It was the answer to every question I’d ever had,” she recalled. “It was kind of like a go-ahead to shed all of those things I could or couldn’t do and embrace myself for who I am.”
So it came to be that Whitney, 24, was arranging strawberries and store-bought cookies on platters at New Westminster’s Queensborough Community Centre for a celebration of “Autistic Pride Day,” her shoulder-length hair dyed mermaid green to match her purse and sandals. A bowl of orange earplugs sat nearby in case any of the guests found the ambient sounds overwhelming.
Whitney is part of a growing movement of autistic adults who are finding a sense of community, identity and purpose in a diagnosis that most people greet with dread. These “neurodiversity” activists contend that autism — and other brain afflictions such as dyslexia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated, but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted.
The movement is not new. But it has gained a foothold in the cultural mainstream as the discredited debate over autism-causing vaccines has subsided and the voices of autistic adults have emerged, amplified by social media and the blogosphere.
“The new autistic person is being born in media, and it’s someone who is very empowered, even if they need a keyboard to speak,” said Steve Silberman, a journalist and author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, a book coming out next month.
Some longtime autism activists are wary of the neurodiversity movement, which they say promotes the idea that autistic people are not sick but simply quirky and geeky. Autism, which affects one in 68 American children, ranges along a very broad spectrum, with the most severe forms leaving people unable to speak and in need of assistance with everyday functions.
Even milder forms leave people struggling with spoken language, repetitive behaviours such as flapping or rocking, and extreme responses to routine sensory experiences. Medical costs and therapies for autistic children typically cost families thousands of dollars a year,
The new autistic person is being born in media, and it’s someone who is very empowered, even if they need a keyboard to speak.
STEVE SILBERMAN JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
“I would love my kids to be functioning enough to say, ‘I don’t need to be changed,’ ” said Kim Stagliano, the mother of three autistic daughters and a prominent advocate of the widely discredited idea that childhood vaccines contribute to autism. Stagliano’s daughters are so impaired that she must bathe them and “tend to their monthly feminine needs.”
Neurodiversity is appealing, she said, because “it’s a more palatable way to look at a diagnosis that scares the living life out of anyone who sees it. They want to think that sound in the night is a branch against the window, not a robber. But autism is that robber.”
Neurodiversity advocates object to the approach of many mainstream autism activists, including the large non-profit group Autism Speaks. Such groups, they say, are more focused on cures and making autistic people act “normal” than on improving their quality of life.
Neurodiversity advocates, by contrast, consider people with autism a minority group, albeit one with extra challenges that might need accommodating. They compare themselves to the gay rights movement and to the protesters trying to improve police treatment of AfricanAmericans.
“It’s like an emerging civil rights movement,” said John Elder Robison, an autistic writer whose memoir, Look Me in the Eye, was a bestseller. Among his best known accomplishments is developing special-effects guitars for the rock band Kiss. He now serves as the neurodiversity scholar in residence at the College of William and Mary.
“Neurodiversity is the recognition that autism, dyslexia, ADHD are just inborn neurological differences,” he said. “Those
differences carry with them gift and disability. Society needs the exceptional thinkers that the neurodiversity world produces.”
The movement is thriving online, with blogs and Twitter chats devoted to everything from autistic representations in film to autistic women to people who are both autistic and gay or transgender — referred to as “neuroqueer.”
Many in the community say they get along particularly well with other autistic people, and not only because of their shared struggles and common traits. There is no pressure to maintain eye contact, which many autistic people avoid. They don’t mind if their companions need to rock or flap — a soothing or expressive repetitive motion they refer to as “stimming.”
The Vancouver chapter of the non-profit Autistic Self Advocacy Network is particularly active. As head of that chapter, Whitney has focused on bringing the thriving online culture into the real world. That’s why she organized a gathering for Autistic Pride Day, which is celebrated every year on June 18.
It was a modest affair, less a celebration than a quiet conversation over carrot sticks and cheese cubes. Predictably, perhaps, it was awkward at first.
Eventually, the group settled into a natural rhythm. The conversation veered from Game of Thrones to supermarket waste and literal interpretations of the Bible. A compact man in a black baseball cap participated enthusiastically by scribbling his thoughts and questions on a small notebook that he thrust around the table. A tiny woman with black hair down her back chimed in quietly, her hand stroking a plush dog inside her purse. A couple of guests played with “stim toys” — little puzzle- like gadgets to chew or subtly occupy their hands.
Whitney glowed. The first time she came to a gathering like this, she said, she had the distinct feeling these were her people.
Growing up in rural Ontario, Whitney did not have a word for her unusual behaviour. Worried about spoiling Whitney by giving in to her nitpicky demands, her mother held back in a way that both women now feel bordered on neglect.
“If we had known she was autistic,” her mother, Wendy Hunter, said, “a lot of things would have been different in our lives.”
As a child, Whitney also experienced what she and others would call the positive aspects of autism. She plowed through books on obscure subjects. She had an uncanny memory for idioms, which she would interject randomly into conversations. There were also the tantrums, which sometimes tore the family apart, she said.
As an adult, Whitney struggled to hold down a job. But since her diagnosis three years ago, she has tried to follow her bliss. She has immersed herself in art — not just painting, but photography, poetry, keyboarding, singing jazz and blues and even rapping. The walls of the home she shares with her mother are filled with images of hands and brains clipped from magazines. She is planning to start a soapmaking company to help make ends meet.
She has challenges, she said. For example, after dinner, she needs a sweet to “literally remove the residue and grease from my tongue.” Without it, she sometimes dissolves, rocking vigorously or crouching under a table. Still, she says, hers is a beautiful life. “I love being autistic,” she said. “It’s fun.”