A (Brief) Timeline of Autism

While some people think that autism is a modern condition born of a desire to be “special,” it has been around as long as humans have been.The first mentions of autism are actually in folktales. The most notable example being the “changeling child.” Supposedly, fairies would steal children and replace them with one of their own, leaving the human to die in the woods while the fae child was raised by humans. These changelings would act similar to human children, just a bit odd. They would often stare into space, spend long stretches of time pacing/spinning in circles, refuse to speak, and throw “tantrums” well past the expected age. All of these are symptoms of autism, or at least related to autism.

Grunya Sukhareva was a Ukrainian woman who worked with autism long before Hans Aspergers “discovered” it. Her first paper on schizoid psychopathy, what they called autism at the time, was published in 1925.  She ran a “hospital-school,” which functioned like a boarding school and a psychiatric research center, in the early to late 20s. In her reports she would describe what her patients struggled with and their deficits not as flaws to be fixed but as just parts of them and their condition. She would also mention, at length, their strengths. While, to this day many scientists ignore girls when studying autism, she included young girls in her study. While less girls were included than boys, she was over a century ahead of her time by including them in her research.

One of the most notable names in autism research is, unfortunately, Hans Aspergers. He was a nazi scientist who coined the term Asperger’s, which he used to refer to autistic individuals who were “high functioning” or without an additional learning disability that he found worthy of his special attention. The other children who he deemed autistic but not having asperger’s were euthanized. This amounted to hundreds of children being killed. The ones with aspergers weren’t safe, though. Hans would conduct experiments of… questionable morality on these patients. He stole some of Sukhareva’s work, added his own poorly conducted research, and published it. He is a large part of the reason why autism research is as stunted as it is and why there is a large eugenics movement against autism.

A large portion of the autism eugenics movement has its roots in a singular study from the 70s that has since been redacted and the scientist who published it has been stripped of his credentials. The snowball effect of this has been parents terrified to vaccinate their children from deadly diseases because they may develop autism. It is here that I would like to mention that autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, meaning it is caused by how the brain develops in the womb and cannot be caused by any incidents after birth. The fear around autism as if it were a death sentence and not a way of being has severely contributed to the negative stigma around it, even with non anti-vaxxers.

In the modern day, the internet has played a huge role in autism and the awareness and culture surrounding it. Many autistic people who have been unable to communicate in the past have found that the internet provides a way for them to express themselves  and share their experiences in life with others. In recent years, there has been a huge movement for self-advocacy from autistic individuals all across the spectrum. With social media movements such as #actuallyautistic promoting not just the awareness of the disability but also the acceptance of it.