as small as a world and as large as alone

10:46am August 8, 2013

batshitserra:

click the cut for a little american autism history lesson and an explanation of why i don’t believe asperger’s syndrome should be a separate diagnosis.

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A bit more history.

It was NOT until then autistic ppl were thought nonverbal and intellectually disabled.

Almost all of Kanner’s patients were verbal and had an IQ over 90. One was 140 or 150 or something. Some were indistinguishable from Asperger’s patients. Many went to college.

For a long time, it was thought that autistic people could not have a low IQ. Autistic ppl with low IQ got diagnoses of different childhood psychoses.

THEN, after a few decades, the stereotype of autistic children as totally nonverbal and with low IQ came about.

Don’t believe me, go to the university library and read all the old literature from the forties through the eighties yourself. That’s what I did.

History gets forgotten really fucking fast. People assume that people thought about autism in the fifties the way they thought in the seventies and eighties. In the fifties there were maybe twelve different childhood psychoses and autism was only one of them.

Even in the seventies some professionals thought normal to high IQ was required for Kanner autism.

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