ABOVE: SAM CHIVERS FOR SPECTRUM
One paper from 2005 likened autistic children to great apes, and another from 2016 stated that language problems in autistic people stem from “a failed domestication of the human brain.” Linguist Steven Pinker famously compared autistic people to robots.
Monique Botha felt nauseous reading these descriptions. Botha had dug up these papers several years ago as background for a master’s thesis at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Botha was investigating why people with autism have a high incidence of mental health problems—and hypothesized that stigma had something to do with it. Botha was diagnosed with autism at age 19 and thought that having the condition provided an important perspective as a member of the group being studied. But in diving into the scientific literature on the topic, Botha realized the field suffered from some fundamental problems.
The slights went beyond ugly parallels ...
