Autism has become a really big deal in recent years. It’s been coming since The Big Bang Theory became such a big hit and the number of people diagnosed with autism has boomed higher than the harbor economy when the navy’s in port. Rightly so, too. We all need to be aware of, and accepting of, and appreciating autism this month, this week, or tomorrow or all three or maybe even all year long?
First things first, though. Around Ye Olde Blogge it is Autism Appreciation Month and we’ll celebrate by posting a post about autism every week! Okay, stop laughing. Seriously. You can stop now. I know we’ve been erratic in our posting these past few months, but this is different. Okay, maybe not different, but I have plans, ya know? Plans.
Second things second, the only agreement there seems to be is that April is the time for autism things.
It all started a long long time ago (2007), the UN decided that it could help improve the lives of people with autism by designating a day to focus on them and their needs.
WORLD AUTISM AWARENESS DAY
- PRESIDENT HANDSOME JOE has gone and done proclaimed 2 April 2023 as World Autism Awareness Day!
- THE UNITED NATIONS has World Autism Awareness Day listed as an officially recognized and celebrated day on its official calendar of officially recognized and celebrated days. It is the 16th time they’ve done it.
- AUTISM SPEAKS starts its World Autism Month by recognizing World Autism Awareness Day.
- AUTISM SPECTRUM AUSTRALIA does World Autism Understanding Day.
All of that seems very official and important and shows widespread agreement, except for those Aussie blokes mucking things up with their World Autism UnDeRsTaNdInG Day. Still, that should settle things, right?
Except, you know, it doesn’t. We have a whole slew of folks marching forward with their Autism Awareness Week and then we’ve got folks using understanding, acceptance, and appreciation!
AUTISM AWARENESS WEEK
Simultaneous to establishing World Autism Awareness Day, folks somewhere decided that autism needed more than a day, it needed a week, World Autism Awareness Week was born. It is the week before World Autism Acceptance Day, so this year it was 27 March to 2 April. Damn, missed it. Not even being on the far side of the International Date Line can rescue us from that miscue.
- THE NATIONAL AUTISTIC SOCIETY (UK) has its Autism Acceptance Week! Aak! There’s another dissenter. Are we sure these people represent autistics? I know not all people with autism are the same, but a lot of us, I have it on good authority, like rules and sameness and regularity and predictability. We’re looking at you, NAS!
- BEYOND AUTISM is another UK organization that stages evens for Autism Acceptance Week!
As the day and week succeeded in raising awareness of autism, the goals of what we’re doing with it changed. It is now acknowledged that we need to have more acceptance than awareness. We have ample awareness, I guess. Recently, activists have started using Autism Acceptance Month/Day/Week. You know, progress.
It seems like Autism Acceptance Week is a mainly a British thing. It seems like a good idea. Autism is a spectrum disorder that has a wide variety of symptoms so that severity and symptoms can be mixed and matched endlessly producing (probably) a situation where no two autistics are the same.
Of course, the AmErIcAnS weren’t going to be out done. If the Brits had an autism week, then we’d do them one better and have a whole doggam month!
AUTISM AWARENESS MONTH
Okay, okay, maybe the Americans weren’t upstaging the Brits, AGAIN. Maybe the Americans started their whole thing A LOT earlier than the Brits. Maybe they started in 1972 with National Autistic Children’s Week sponsored by The Autism Society. When it morphed into a whole month has been lost in the ether of Interwebs. If you know, you should post it in the comments; otherwise, I’m going to figure it was in 2007 to up stage the Brits when thirty plus years after the fact, they got their act together and piggybacked on the UN’s day thing.
- THE INTERAGENCY AUTISM COORDINATING COMMITTEE (IACC) is an entity buried deep in the bowels of the Byzantine bureaucracy of the US gov’t to do something with autism. Somehow in someway it is connected to The Office of Autism Research Coordination at The National Institutes of Mental Health. Anywho. They celebrate Autism Awareness Month like good Americans should, not some measly week or day.
As you can imagine every monkey and their uncle that has anything to do with autism is fundraising right now in the name of raising awareness or acceptance or something about autism. There really is no need to list all of the organizations, I don’t think. Maybe there is. I don’t know. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
WHAT IS AUTISM and WHAT CAN I DO?
If you’re wondering what exactly autism is, What Health has a pretty good one page explainer.
If you’re scratching around for something to do on weekends in April, check out:
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Image Attribution
“48:365 World Autism Awareness Day” by mattbeckwith is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The Psy of Life 
Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack – Autism Month
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Well, that is a wide spectrum of proclamations and activities around the wide spectrum that is Autism. My first introduction to the subject was an article in the March, 1959 issue of Scientific American, “Joey: A Mechanical Boy”. (I was 14). At that point, Autism was not being distinguished from Schizophrenia. https://www.weber.edu/wsuimages/psychology/FacultySites/Horvat/Joey.PDF
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I’m amazed that you remember the title and the year. I’m also amazed that Autism Awareness Week dates from the 1970’s. I had no idea that it was anywhere near that level of awareness. I didn’t learn about autism until the 1990’s and that was AFTER I had received my masters in social work.
I like the shift that the nomenclature — probably should’ve made that more central to the post — from awareness to acceptance to appreciating indicates about our approach to autism. Perhaps that will be in one of the weekly posts this months.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I remembered the title, but had to look up the year. That confusion of Schizophrenia and Autism almost certainly had a lot of kids diagnosed as Schiz who were Autistic, and significant misunderstanding of both conditions.
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During that era, American psychiatry had an amazing love affair with schizophrenia, so it is not surprising that they conflated autism with schizophrenia. I’m sure that many of the children who were lobotomized in that era were autistic. As I recall Howard Duffy — he wrote a book about his experience — was lobotomized in 1960. His description of his symptoms sound a lot like autism.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I think, in some degree, it was the arrival of effective anti-psychotic medications that made the difference. Before that, I can well imagine the difficulty telling the difference. Also, in order to define such a difference, you have to have a word for it.
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Howdy Bob!
Definitely, the anti-psychotics put an end to the barbaric lobotomy. Did you eve see the PBS documentary, “The Lobotomist?” Really, very chilling. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lobotomist/
The identification of autism in the decade or so previous helped free many children from those devastating diagnoses and treatments. I’m not very familiar with Rosemary Kennedy’s case. She was probably more bipolar than autistic, though.
Now that we’re moving away from trying to cure autism and more towards making a world that will take advantage of autistics’ talents and abilities, I think we’ll all be better off.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Autism is making progress in acceptance, although I do see lots of studies in Sci Tech and Neuroscience News about possible treatment approaches for Autism.
Lobotomy was horrific and popular. It helps to remember that Freud was looking for a way to treat “Hysteria” other than hysterectomy.
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Howdy Bob!
I’ve always had a lot of respect for Freud. He did a lot with the little that he had, and he’s had a tremendous impact on our culture. People who despise him for penis envy and the Oedipal complex still think of repression of memories and slips of the tongue revealing your true intent without actually realizing why. They also don’t know his contributions to early neurology and theories of the functioning of the mind. His thoughts on reforming how we treated people with mental illness were needed at the time.
People with autism are frequently of two minds when it comes to “cures.” One, of course, is that there is no need for a cure. Autistics are just fine. They make valuable contributions because of their “symptoms.” The other is that a cure will make life easier for everyone. It’s kind of like cochlear implants for deaf people. There are many who don’t want to lose their deaf culture by partially joining the hearing culture.
It is an interesting controversy. The Khmer New Year holiday starts next week. I’ll try to find both sides of the argument to present.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Another thing people tend to forget about Freud is that he always considered his method of treatment a stopgap until effective medication could be developed, that mental illness was biological and at base physical.
The argument between “cure” and “we’re fine” has a middle path of ameliorating the most severely disabling symptoms and helping people manage more comfortably.
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People forget that Freud was a physician and neurologist and approached the field from that perspective and using the scientific principles used at his time. They aren’t the same as the ones we’re using today.
There is some really interesting research into autism that is coming out right now. I’m hoping to digest some of it and report on it next week.
Jack
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Pulling together some of the new research info would be a good one.
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There’s been a ton of it. Not all of it fits nicely together, though.
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I wonder what the percentage might be of Auties in the relevant research communities. It really is an outpouring and on multiple tracks – genetics, toxic and infectious exposure, fetal development, functional MRI, and more.
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Howdy Bob!
In some ways that gets at the heart of the problem with conceptualizing autism as a problem. Where would we be as a species without autism? It used to be glib to say that the future belongs to nerds,, but it really is the past, present, and future that belongs to nerds.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I’m remembering an article I saw some time ago (can’t locate the link at the moment) which reported a study of the genetic differences between us and chimps and bonobos that relate to the cognitive differences and brain size and structure. Those differences have given us both our advantages and our capacity for what we call mental illness and a wide range of neurodiversity, and our evolution has been a balancing act between the functional and dysfunctional. I recall Bateson being asked what zero schizophrenia would look like. He said, “A very well programed computer.”. Zero Autism would probably be much the same.
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Howdy Bob!
I hadn’t been aware of that finding. Another way to think of it is that the hardware that differentiates us from the chimps and bonobos is a lot newer and hasn’t had all of the bugs worked out of it yet. Unfortunately, at the rate we’re going the bugs will probably get us before we get them.
It’s funny how we’re blessed with the most advanced and sophisticated organ ever evolved or created, and most of us refuse to use it or even learn how to use it.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Many of our most remarkable mental capabilities are both features and bugs. The same narrative imagination that can write great literature can also concoct conspiracy theories, for example. The only way around the problem is that horrible task, critical thinking.
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Thinking is hard, so we don’t do it.
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Yep
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