In this blog post I consider whether the neurodiversity movement should be extended to animals. Neurodiversity is defined in many different ways but as a general characterisation I shall use this definition which is drawn from interviews with autistic adults. It “encompass[es] both human biological differences in cognition, brains, and genes while also serving as an activist tool for change toward acceptance and inclusion of autistic and other neurodivergent people” (Kapp 2020, p.viii, Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement). So the question is whether this general notion should be ..read more

Lancaster University Politics, Philosophy and Religion department runs a masters level module named What is Philosophy. On some weeks of the module a different academic within the department talk about their research and how it relates to more general questions about the nature of philosophy. I did a session upon how philosophy of psychiatry relates to the lived experience of service users. Given my own background as an autistic individual who primarily researchers autism most my examples of services users related to individuals diagnosed as autistic. Within many different areas of philosophy ..read more

I have been following the reaction to the Spectrum 10K project by monitoring the #Spectrum10K and #StopSpectrum10K hashtags (Spectrum 10K is a project aiming to gather the DNA of 10,000 autistic individuals). I have often seen the claim that the depression and anxiety which many autistic individuals experience cannot be caused by autism. Therefore, if we want to reduce the level of depression and anxiety in autistic people there is no point studying the causes of autism. In this blog post I will analyse this claim. It is commonly claimed that many autistic individuals have such high levels of ..read more

There has been a lot of hostility to the Spectrum 10K project on twitter. In this blog post I will reflect upon this, alongside mention some additional aspects of Spectrum 10K which I have not seen commented upon. Some autistic people are against all biological investigation of autism. For example, they might think it is eugenicist, a waste of time or a far lower priority compared to changing society. So it makes sense that people with these views would reject Spectrum 10K. However, given the level of hostility to Spectrum 10K, it seems that lots more autistic individuals are against all biol ..read more

I recently had published (in the European Journal for the Philosophy of Science) an article defending psychiatric diagnoses (click for the open access article). I aimed to use a philosophy of science named scientific perspectivism to position psychiatric diagnoses as being between realism and relativism, that is, between psychiatric diagnoses being mind-independent entities out there waiting to be found and them being arbitrary conventions. I will outline my motives for writing the article in this blog post. Psychiatric diagnoses have been described as being arbitrary, inventions and made-up ..read more

On the 19th of November 2019 a workshop on subtyping autism was held at LSBU. The hosting organisation was PARC (Participatory Autism Research Collective). With help from individuals from PARC and LSBU, myself, Chloe Farahar and Annette Foster organised this workshop. The workshop lasted two and a half hours. There were five talks, each lasting twenty minutes followed by ten minutes of questions. Some papers argued against subtyping, some argued for subtyping and some looked at specific subtypes (or, in my own case, looked at multiple specific subtypes when I outlined the history of subtyping ..read more

On the 19th of November (16.30 to 1900 at London South Bank University (LSBU)) I am hosting (with collaborators) a workshop on subtyping autism. This was the initial call for papers: Prior to and after the publication of the 2013 DSM there was much controversy over whether Asperger’s syndrome should be removed from the diagnostic manual. Members of the neurodiversity movement made contributions to this debate, drawing upon their lived experience of being autistic and their knowledge of the ways in which being diagnosed can be (or is not) beneficial. This conference aims to ..read more

Re-Thinking Autism contains, to my knowledge, the most sustained attack upon the diagnosis of autism found within a single book. The editors claim it is the first book in the field of critical autism studies. It contains 17 different papers which are grouped into three areas, namely ‘What is autism’, ‘Deconstructing autism’ and ‘Challenging Practice’. The editors see critical autism studies as focusing on two questions. Firstly, is the diagnosis of autism valid and secondly, is it useful. Most articles are very critical of the diagnosis of autism. Since I felt I benefited immensely from being ..read more