Tag: autism

A comprehensive review indicates that children exposed to antipsychotics in the womb face an increased risk of ADHD and developmental delays.

Commonly used autism interventions, such as ABA, have been found to be both ineffective and abusive, inflicting trauma on those subjected to them.

Your diagnosis should serve YOU. Not your parents, your doctors, your teachers, or the next door neighbor. We should be fighting for a future where the person being labeled has the ultimate say over how doctors and therapists view them.

Autism is an umbrella diagnosis at this point. The broadness of the diagnosis doesn’t tend to be useful to clinicians. But it is very useful to the individuals who live with it.

Because the “scientists” who study, categorise, and establish guidelines for autism can’t find anything definitive, they resort to scientism. Over time, it becomes part of our cultural “common sense.”

Yes, we need to drastically reform the foundational assumptions that govern the ideologies that pervade our systems, but many now know the truth about what is happening, and transformational approaches have been sprouting up organically in the rich soils of human creativity.

A clinical trial finds Prozac no better than placebo for improving repetitive behaviors.

Researchers, publishing in Toxicology Research, review the evidence that antidepressant exposure in the womb is linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in humans.

Researchers experimenting on mice found that exposure to fluoxetine (Prozac) in utero resulted in behaviors considered in animal studies to be analogous to autism in humans.

Neuroscience researchers find no differences in brain connectivity between children with diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and those with no diagnoses.

The conversation about what truly constitutes “autism” is an ongoing one. Although I resist the label personally, I do not begrudge anyone for identifying as autistic, or seeking out an autism diagnosis. Leaving this discussion within the domain of medicine is limiting. That’s why a new discourse is emerging, not among doctors, but among activists who push for autistic self-advocacy.

A new study explores the interplay between social stress and quality of life for individuals self-identified with high-functioning autism.

From WIRED: "Ben Draper, who runs the Macomber Center for Self Directed Learning, says that while the center is designed for all types of children,...

From BESE: While several recent articles and blogs have argued that social media can have a negative impact on our mental health, many members of the...

The neurodiversity movement is a public relations campaign that emphasizes the positive qualities associated with some presentations of autism—creativity, increased tolerance for repetition, enhanced empathy, and exceptional memory—while erasing or minimizing the experiences of autistics who are severely disabled.

Autism is now simply assumed to represent a real, tangible, identifiable ‘thing.’ But no one is asking the obvious question: On what evidential basis can you conclude that autism represents a natural category that can be differentiated from other natural categories? According to the real science, autism should be seen as a fact of culture, not a fact of nature.

From The New York Times: Although the official diagnosis of Asperger's disorder has recently been dropped from the DSM, it is still included in the...

In this piece for Aeon, Bonnie Evans chronicles the history of the diagnosis of autism, from its establishment as a marker of dysfunction and impairment to the...

In this interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, cultural theorist and philosopher Erin Manning discusses neurodiversity, a movement that seeks to depathologize traits, experiences, and...

New research, based on data from almost a million children in Denmark, suggests that children of mothers who use antidepressants during pregnancy are more likely to be diagnosed with autism and psychiatric disorders.

Does maternal SSRI exposure increase the chances that a child will develop characteristics associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)?

This week on the Mad in America Podcast we launch our series on forced treatment, interviewing antipsychiatry scholar Bonnie Burstow and neurodiversity scholar Nick Walker. Central to both Nick and Bonnie’s work is the concept of cognitive liberty, or freedom and integrity of the mind.

New clinical case studies have found that many young children who spend too much screen time—on TV’s, video games, tablets and computers—have symptoms labeled as “autism.” When parents take away the screens for a few months the child’s symptoms disappear.

Gemma talks about her experiences with psychiatric drugs and the difficulties that parents of children with special needs encounter when they seek treatment for emotional or psychological distress

From Thinking Person's Guide to Autism: For decades, autistic and developmentally disabled people have been conditioned and coerced into behaving like neurotypical people, including suppressing...