Both proved immensely popular with clinicians because they reflected the colourful diversity of their patient populations better than Kanner’s narrow model. In the late 1980s, Lorna introduced the concept of the “autistic continuum” (later rechristened the “spectrum”) to her peers, and the label of Asperger’s syndrome shortly thereafter. And girls with autism were still virtually invisible to the psychiatric establishment until the end of the 20th Century.įittingly, it was the mother of a profoundly disabled autistic little girl – the late British psychiatrist Lorna Wing – who finally loosened Kanner’s iron grip on the scope of the diagnosis. In the US, this meant that parents through the 1980s often had to bring their child to nine or 10 specialists before finally obtaining an autism diagnosis, which meant that few working-class families or families of colour were able to afford one.

He once bragged that he turned away nine out of 10 of the children referred to his office for a diagnosis of autism. Kanner wished to avoid dilution of “his” syndrome, and discouraged diagnosis unless children precisely matched the core features he described in 1943. The condition was defined very narrowly, and mistakenly thought of as rare – a misconception that Kanner, again, helped to spread. Until the 1980s, there was no “autism spectrum” as a diagnostic category. In fact, the primary contributor to the dramatic spike in autism prevalence in recent decades is the fact that a broad range of children, teenagers, and adults on the spectrum are able to get diagnosed at all. The image of the “refrigerator mother” proved indelible in the public imagination, and as a result, two generations of autistic children were warehoused in institutions, subjected to harsh punishment, restraint and brutal experimental “treatments.” In 1948, Kanner blamed his patients’ parents in Time magazine for triggering autism in their children by failing to offer them love and nurture. He was also wrong about several other crucial things. As I discovered writing my book NeuroTribes, Kanner was a controversial figure – for starters, his claims to have discovered autism first are unfounded others who came before him deserve more credit. One of the first myths was propagated by one of the men credited with identifying autism, child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. This cycle has repeated itself over and over again through the decades, often to disastrous effect on the lives of autistic people and their families. The history of autism is, in part, a history of myths: of myths enshrined as facts by medical experts, of myths shaping societal attitudes towards a highly complex condition, and eventually, of myths debunked by further investigation.

Silberman autism