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4:55am October 13, 2014

madeofpatterns:

thinking that expertise matters is not inherently elitist or classist or ableist

the fact that we don’t have access to actual learned autism experts is a *problem*, it’s like that because we’re not a research priority and doctors tend to have tons of misinformation. Not because expertise wouldn’t help us. It would. If we had actual access to it.

The fact that peer support tends to be all we have is a bad thing, not a good one.

We are a research priority. A huge one. The reason there are so many crawly experts is because in psychiatry anyone can get published if they set things up right, no matter how hare brained their theories are. Also because many studies that are not about autism at all, tie themselves back to autism in order to get funding. So the lack of expertise has a lot to do with the poor standards of psychiatric research. But autism is a very high priority within that research, so it attracts even more shoddy research.

I do think there’s a lot of elitism in the field as well though. People who won’t listen to autistic people who are actual experts (maybe not trained formally, but with enough experience under our belts to count as experts, not people who regurgitate Uta Frith or their own personal experiences only) and that kind of expertise that autistic people can acquire, is never recognized even when some of us are more expert than some of the most famous autism experts out there. And that’s elitism.