In a Different Key: The Story of Autism

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great resource! Donvan and Zucker are very careful to write solely on the history of autism, without giving any judgement about the different ways it has been diagnosed, treated, and portrayed throughout the years. Still, it gives enough personal accounts and individual cases to make the book interesting and the reader invested. While I had a particular interest in autism, it brings to light the fact that neurological/mental disorders really are more of a socially agreed upon constraint. The outlines of what makes a person acting "normal" is blurred by levels of understanding, available technology, education, even (and maybe especially) money. Donald Triplett, the first case of autism recorded, is a case in point: by living in a small town and being privileged to grow up in one of the richer, more influential families, Donald was able to live a fulfilled life with support and understanding by those around him. The ending chapters explain that those diagnosed with autism don't advocate for a cure as their parents did in past organizations, they just want to be accepted for who they are. Books like this are important gateways to allowing that to happen.

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that many children with autism relied on their sense of touch more than they did hearing or seeing.

The inconsistency in deciding what autism looks like would persistently undermine certainty about who should be counted.

that while children with autism may miss some of the intricacies of language and the meaning contained therein, they were strikingly capable of deriving meaning from information provided through nonlinguistic means.

genetic inheritance mattered in autism.

Psychologists used the term “Theory of Mind” to describe an individual’s awareness that others possess independent mental states—thoughts, dreams, beliefs—distinct from the individual’s own.

specific traits Asperger ascribed to the boys. They made little eye contact, their gazes directed “into the void.” Extremely literal-minded, they missed other people’s nonverbal signals—the raised eyebrows, the shrugs and sighs, the half-finished sentences. They also tended to be physically clumsy, a major liability when it came to sports, thus exposing themselves to more teasing and ostracizing.

their well-developed language skills were consistent with another characteristic common to all the boys: they were intellectually whole.

“What I am saying is that we need to realize that not being able to speak is not the same as having nothing to say.”

One of the autism community’s favorite adages has long been “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism,” which captures the essence of the problem even as it affirms the complex variability of autistic traits. It is this enormous variability of autistic traits that makes defining autism so challenging.

But something even more fundamental was in play, which related to having Asperger’s: online, eye contact didn’t matter. Or any of the other ephemeral aspects of nonverbal speech—the eyebrow raises, the subtle changes in intonation that were part of conversation in the real world and that had always caused trouble for Alex and his community. Pure communication by text, however—the idiom of the Internet circa 2005—liberated Wrong Planet’s users from that burden. Overall, for anyone who struggled with facial and vocal cues, the Internet was an equalizer, because in a chat room, no one knew you had Asperger’s.

“To pursue normalization” by use of such methods, Ne’eman wrote, “forces us into a struggle against ourselves.” Above all, Ne’eman, and the neurodiversity movement as a whole, rejected any scientific endeavor whose ultimate target was finding a “cure” for autism.