COURSE: A Deeper Understanding of Autistic People - The University of Kent

To date, the vast majority of what has been said about autistic people is grounded in the idea that autistic differences are deficits. Autistic people are seen as defective versions of non-autistic people who should strive to become more like the non-autistic people who make up 99% of the population. Some have even suggested that being autistic is a disease which makes autistic people less human. Such ideas have underpinned autism research from its infancy in the 1940s.

Since the early 1990s however, autistic advocates have been challenging these assumptions and asking others to understand being autistic as a different way of being which should be respected. A key moment in early autistic self-advocacy was Jim Sinclair’s Don’t Mourn For Us speech in 1993, which asked for parents to stop mourning the loss of the non-autistic child they thought they would have. The full speech can be found here. Sinclair argued that autism should be understood from within the autistic perspective and in the years since a great number of people have lobbied to have autistic people seen as different rather than defective. This has evolved into the Neurodiversity Movement, a disability rights movement which sees being autistic (and other forms of neurodivergence) as a part of natural human diversity.