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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2023
Neurotype, culture or disorder, the first symposium’s closing dialogue began with language
In short
Asked what autism is, speakers at the close of the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne described a brain style and a culture, and split on whether the word disorder should stay.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, opened the closing dialogue of Australia’s first Autistic Pride Day Symposium with the most basic question available. On 18 June 2023, in Melbourne, he asked the day’s speakers what autism is to them, and the answers set out the language problem that ran through the rest of the conversation.
The first panellist Gold asked said autism is a neurotype or a brain style, a way of describing neurological differences in how people interact with the world and how they perceive it. A second speaker built on that. Autistic people have a unique neurology that is different from the norm, the speaker said, one that is very sensory driven, with its own communication style that differs from the neuronormative population. Some autistic people, the speaker added, like to think about being autistic as a culture, recognising communication differences, sensory preferences and the other things autistic people do as part of who they are, in the way a cultural difference is.
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Sources the story draws on
- DSM-5: What Happened to Asperger's? (opens in a new tab), The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds, Massachusetts General Hospital (Ellen Braaten)
- The misnomer of 'high functioning autism': Intelligence is an imprecise predictor of functional abilities at diagnosis (opens in a new tab), Autism, vol. 24, no. 1 (Alvares, Bebbington, Cleary, Evans, Glasson, Maybery, Pillar, Uljarević, Varcin, Wray and Whitehouse), record on Griffith University Research Repository
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