Petra It's a year now, still in a dark place's Reviews > NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

Finished. Very long review. Apologies. Skip to paragraph 3 ** for a horror story. The book was hard to rate. Some of it is as bad as a 1-star: excreble writing when he's giving far too much detail about the irrelevant (to the book) discoveries of the 18thC scientist Henry Cavendish whom he confidently diagnoses as Aspergers. 3 stars for most of it where the research is general too narrowly focused on too few people but quite in depth for them and 5 stars for giving away such appalling things as the typo in DSM III.

People forget that DSM is a for-profit company. It made $10M on DSM III. It had 25 committees of people searching for evidence of at least 25 different symptoms of autism. They were well paid as professionals. They consulted all kinds of people from teachers to those therapists qualified by attendance at a day's seminar in some hotel ballroom. In other words, everyone involved had a pecuniary interest in diagnosing autism in as broad a way as possible.

** But to the terrible typo. For those who might be autistic or have aspergers or might not but definitely seemed to have something, there was always PDD-NOS. The intention was that children being diagnosed would have a certain number of symptoms from list A, from list B and list C. However, instead of 'and' the word 'or' was substituted. The author reckons that 75% of all children diagnosed with PDD-NOS didn't in fact have anything.

Hans Asperger said, a long time ago and his words have been nearly forgotten, trampled on and now totally ignored, not to pathologise eccentricities! Just because someone is weird doesn't make them mental! Forget that, they're all on the spectrum now.

I was going to write a long and well-argued (hopefully) review of the book and of own my own opinion that Aspergers and Autism are not related at all. But I'll keep that for another time and stick to reviewing the book (view spoiler)[in as much as I ever stick to the point (hide spoiler)]. I do think that a lot of children so diagnosed don't have autism at all and grow out of it (or according to many therapists are 'cured') in much the same way that 90% or more of the kiddies put on Ritalin turned out to be normal adults. The incidence of ADHD in America in children is higher than anywhere else in the world. But the figures for adults are more or less the same in all the countries of the West.

By all evidence that I've seen and read, Aspergers is most often just a personality type, that is unless you want to diagnose almost the entirety of Silicon Valley and perhaps computer people in general with having it. Would we even be so advanced in electronics without these people? In any case, quite a few of the 'symptoms' of Aspergers are common to Prosopagnosia or face-blindness (I have it so I know) which is only just being recognised and most people with it just think they are bad at remembering people, but there is more to it than that.

If a child has hobbies he is really into, he's encouraged and parents' say things like, 'the way he's always taking apart things, you could see he's going to be an engineer'. If a child would rather just play with one good friend, then that friend gets invited over more for tea and parents' say he's a bit of a loner. If the child is really good at maths, parents praise him. But once he has a diagnosis of autism, suddenly he's not got a hobby he's mad keen on, no that's perseveration, his kind of sociability is now inability to communicate, his ability with maths is an unhealthy autistic obsession. And so it goes... It's a self-fulfilling diagnosis.

So overall, it's quite a good book on the history of the diagnosis of Austism and relatively recently, Aspergers. But it isn't really about Neurotribes at all.

A final thought. If we stopped thinking of neurotypical people as normal but thought of them as the most common personality type, or the most usual, then those who were different would not be abnormal, but unusual, rare or even, as say A+ is in the world of blood groups, just uncommon. There would still be those who were definitely abnormal, Autism wouldn't go away, but people who are different wouldn't be labelled and if there were enough of them in each group, might get special ed. As in - a group of nerdy loners that don't like playing games in the playground, could be taught together in their favourite academic subjects and everyone would be a winner. Teachers, children and society. In any case it's better than making them depressed and feeling bad about not fitting in by labelling them abnormal.

Notes on reading the book(view spoiler)[ Even though the author was intent on including own evidence to support that, there were enough signs when hUpdate It's getting better. I'm on to Vienna and Asperger. The problem I have with the book is I think Aspergers is a) misdiagnosed most of the time and b) it isn't related to Autism at all and all I'm reading is the conventional viewpoint and absolute disdain for unconventional therapies which I more or less share. The author writes well but it does seem to be confirmation bias all the way through. He has an agenda and includes only that which fits into it.

An interesting point. Firstly that Sweden removed the mercury preservative from it's vaccines back in 1987 and Japan banned the MMR altogether. Their rate of autism is on a par with other countries using the same diagnostic criteria, it hasn't dropped. The vaccine thing was proved to be a hoax and Wakefield a charlatan. He was actually employed to prove that the vaccine caused damage and had produced his own vaccine to sell in place of the 'damaging' one, but still the myths linger on. Is it because autism is generally diagnosed at age 2, past the age of vaccines, and the parents must have someone or something to blame?

______________

This started off well and then meandered into a very long biography of the very famous and quite asocial 18thC scientist Henry Cavendish The detail with which the author went into some of Cavendish's experiments was not only irrelevant but boring, which is worse in a book.

I understand that Silberman was trying to prove historically that Cavendish had Asperger's Syndrome, but all it proved to me was the author's confirmation bias. Everything that could point that way was to be included and anything that didn't dismissed. An example: Cavendish was supposed to not like women at all, not want to deal with maids even, let alone get married. But then the author mentions as an aside he was very friendly with Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. I was happier when he got back to modern times and living people. (hide spoiler)]