Dispelling Autism Myths

~ Laura

I'm really glad that some very smart people are writing articles explaining that autistic people aren't crazed killers who lack empathy.

I debated writing an article like that, but I couldn't do it. It was too personal and too emotional. How could any rational person believe that my son or his friends could ever be capable of that? Is there really that much ignorance and bigotry out there? Ugh. I just had to walk away from all that. 

Emily Willingham and Priscilla Gilman did a fabulous job informing people of the scientific facts without desolving to blubbering incoherence, which is what I would have done. 

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Dispelling Autism Myths”

  1. Those are good articles, clarifying some issues (cognitive versus emotional empathy, neurological disorder versus mental illness) that I had never thought about.

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  2. Autistic people have trouble with sensory overload and nonverbal people have trouble because they can’t explain what’s bothering them. This can lead to behavior problems, but it’s not calculated evil. I saw a 6 foot tall teenage girl have a major meltdown at the swimming pool last week. She couldn’t tell us what the problem was and her mother wasn’t there to help. She threw some floatation thingies in the pool and sobbed at the edge of the pool. It was a little scary, because she was so big. But we weren’t worried that she would hurt us or any of our kids. We were upset FOR her, because she couldn’t tell us what was wrong. She was a two year old in a 20 year old body.

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  3. Now that I’ve actually met a psychopath (former student), I know the difference for sure between the kind of narcissism and lack of empathy that characterizes psychopaths and the challenges of people with autism. But I still get caught in the problem of perspective-taking and theory of mind. I know E still has this issue. He’s a sweet kid who’s eager to please, but he also has no idea that someone else might think differently than he does. That said, he lives in an eternal present and doesn’t really think ahead (or backwards) very well; he most often acts on impulse unless he can activate an already known protocol of rules/procedures and isn’t overly stimulated so that he forgets them. I can’t see him really ever planning any kind of attack, no matter how frustrated or angry he ever got. At this point in his life, at least, he cannot think ahead that far.

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  4. I think the flaw is imagining that we can predict the likelihood that any individual will be a mass murderer. At the research level we can talk about statistics and characteristics. At that level, as others have pointed out, there’s no link between autism and mass murder (though I’m not finding a good cite for what I want, which is the statistics).
    On the other hand, schizophrenia is associated with an increased likelihood of violence/homicide (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000120). But, even schizophrenics are highly unlikely to commit murder. In the case of schizophrenia, less than 0.5% of individuals experiencing their first psychotic episode had committed a serious act of violence.
    When we look at the characteristics of people who commit heinous acts, we could, find that even, say 100% of the shared a particular trait, but that wouldn’t mean that the trait predicted the act. In an extreme example, 95% of mass murderers are male, but it’s certainly not true that being male is a predictor of mass murder.

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  6. FWIW, Laura, it would never occur to me to be fearful of your son or any other autistic child, even post-Newtown, even though I don’t have personal experience with autism. Your blog is one of the reasons why. I think (hope) that most people would say the same. Warm wishes and a virtual arm-squeeze to you and to precious Ian.

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