The Science and Fiction of Autism

[lightreads]

The Science and Fiction of Autism by Laura Schreibman


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Researcher/clinician paints a pretty thorough but accessible picture of autism, from symptomology to history to treatment modalities, with one of the better breakdowns on clinically-verified treatments versus wild speculation that I've seen in a while.

There's only one huge, overwhelming problem: it's a book about autism that fails completely to be about autistic people. Clinicians talk a lot here, and neurologists, and parents, but not a single autistic person puts in a word. This book is pretty much the epitome of the medical model, and there isn't a blink of acknowledgement that there are other paradigms at play, that some persons with autism are rejecting full-time residential treatment and proclaiming their autonomy and rights to live as they are, just as an example. Writing a book about autism in the twenty-first century that never even mentions neurodiversity is pretty shocking to me.

It's a good book, for what it is, but you have to know what that is before reading it.

View all my reviews >>

Comments

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

There is a small but slowly growing number of autistic spectrum people going into neuroscience and autism research now, but that's a pretty new development. Otherwise, yeah, you're stuck with *points up* this sort of thing and Temple Grandin, who, I love her books, but a human neuroscientist she is not.