ABSTRACT
A number of the major controversies surrounding autism have already been discussed in Parts I and II of this book. The complexities surrounding diagnosis and the differences of opinion about treatment, for example, are frequently very controversial, and arguably there has been no greater controversy than the damage done to those with autism, and their families, during the period when psychoanalytic approaches to the condition dominated medical thinking. But it is the contemporary controversies and the arguments of the here and now that I want to focus on in the final third of this study. Roy Richard Grinker has termed the discussion of autism at the start of the twenty-first century as a “perfect storm” (Grinker 2007, 172) of competitive claims to knowledge. Such a storm has arisen because of a number of interrelated factors, all a product of the increased attention the condition has received in the last decade. These include the widening of the diagnostic criteria for autism and greater referral to doctors, but also the juxtaposition of such advances in medical knowledge with the opinions of those non-specialists who, often because of a perception of autism’s history, cannot bring themselves to trust that knowledge. They also include the substantial increase in media coverage of the condition, in which any new autism development has frequently 76received widespread comment and opinion, whatever its veracity. To repeat something that has been a dominant theme of this book, these controversies stem frequently from what we don’t know about autism; the space that the absence of consensus has created has made it easy for argument and counter-argument to flourish.
