Blog 7: The Ideological Effect on Autism

Hi everyone! This week, I focused on Part 2 of my progressive outline, where I started adding all my evidence from my readings to support my answers. Since I took notes directly on PDFs, I am simultaneously filtering between information that I need to support my responses and information that is interesting, but doesn’t really answer my main questions. Additionally, after finishing Part 1 of my progressive outline, I decided that instead of reading more books, I was going to do more research on certain areas that I think many of the books that I have already read did not cover. 

For example, I wanted to do more research on the phases of autism, and study how and why we made these shifts from autism. Why and how did we start to view autism in a more positive light? Was it because of the increase in research on autistic children and individuals? Was it because we started to get an increase of advocates that started to speak on their experiences? Having read a book written by a passionate researcher who studied autism from the 1940s all the way into the 2000s, Dr. Ritvo really highlighted the practices and diagnostics he conducted to study what made autistic children different from other children. I definitely will refer to his work when trying to figure out how our understanding of autism shifts. One of the pioneers in the autism and science field is Temple Grandin. She is most well known for coming up with a more humane way of caring for livestock and speaking about her experiences as an autistic person. I plan on watching a few of her interviews to not only hear about her experiences and what autism means to her, but to also hear about whether the perspectives of autism have changed between the 1940s and 1980s (when Grandin’s first book came out). 

As I continue to filter through my notes to add to my outline, I discover that a lot of information on our society is complex and stem from different ideologies and theories, all of which greatly affect how we view autism over time: fascism in Germany and Austria, neoliberalism in America and the UK, using the Medical Model of Disabilities, and so much more. With much deliberation, I have decided to focus specifically on these three ideologies and theories, as they were the most prominent in shaping how we view autism. Fascism shaped society to alienate those who were different from us; neoliberalism shaped society to believe that we are responsible for our health, that we can only adopt the “sick role” if we are striving to recover and if one’s illness has no way definite path of full recovery, they are stigmatized; finally the Medical Model of Disabilities shaped society to believe that disabilities stems from the person and that there is a treatment or cure that can be used or developed to “fix” themselves. All of these ideologies circle back to fitting into society, being normal, and any person that is abnormal is pointed out to be fit under a classification and are to be rehabilitated to fit into society. 

Thank you for reading, and until next week!