Professor Uta Frith’s recent challenge to the breadth of the autism spectrum has opened an important debate. Her subsequent suggestion that Chris Packham “cannot be autistic”, in part because of how brilliantly he communicates, raises an equally important question: who gets to determine what autism is, and from whose perspective?
ION believes these questions deserve serious scientific examination but that the scrutiny must run in both directions.
If autistic people are considered too heterogeneous for autism to remain a meaningful category, what exactly is the supposedly “neurotypical” population against which they are being compared? How heterogeneous is that population? And why are intellectual disability, communication differences, physical conditions and support needs so readily absorbed into descriptions of the severity of an autistic person’s autism when we would never describe a non-autistic person with the same characteristics as “profoundly neurotypical”?
Our new paper, “Neurotypicality: Has It Lost Its Meaning and Is It Leading to Misclassification?”, turns the research lens around.
It asks whether the problem is really that autism encompasses too much human variation or whether science has relied for too long on an assumed neurologically homogeneous human norm that has never itself been adequately demonstrated.
Perhaps it is time not only to study autism differently, but to study neurotypicality too.