 The history of autism is definitely an interesting one. If you haven't read books such as Neurotribes, you may not be aware of just how far back autism history really goes. So today we're going to be watching a video called The History of Autism, very apt, of course, from the history scope, the history scope. Let's go for it guys. Autism is often misunderstood by most people in society. People have made movies with incorrect stereotypes. Therapists have heard autistic children as a means of treatment and non-autistic doctors who have made completely nonsensical theories about autistic people while not listening to autistic people. Good start, Lovidia. This is going to be a bit more nuanced than I expected. Interesting. So I imagine that there's going to be a bit of the socio-political cultural stuff embedded within this. I'm excited now. And this has created an image of autism in a lot of people's minds that is completely incorrect. And so in this video I will talk about the history of autism, from when it was first identified to all the accurate, crazy, or downright silly theories created about us. And we will talk about how this has affected autistic people and the autistic community. This video is going to be a bit different from my other videos because this video is deeply personal, because I am autistic. Good lad. This means that there will be personal examples from this video from autistic people because there isn't a single type of autism and so my own personal experiences aren't enough. And I hope that non-autistic people will not only learn history but also to better understand autistic people by the end of this video. So before one can talk about the history of autism, one needs to understand what autism actually is. Yes. In its simplest form, autism is classified as a developmental disorder. What this means is that autistic people develop differently in their childhood than other people. With the results that our brains become slightly different than those of non-autistic people. Very true. In the womb we develop due to a cocktail of potential genetic and environmental factors. I think usually it's termed as neurodevelopmental but I suppose it serves the same meaning. This creates both issues and advantages. For example, autistic people process their senses differently. Sounds, lights, smells and other senses are much more intense and as a result autistic people get overwhelmed more easily. When I go to the shop for example, the lights are too bright, the music too loud and the smells are too much. And so I get overwhelmed and need to wear earphones or headphones to block out all the noise. But it also creates unique advantages for me. Because I am autistic, I think everything through step by step. So any task becomes a series of small tasks planned out in my head. And because I think in such a step by step method, I am able to explain very complex subjects in a very simple piece by piece method so almost anyone can understand. I love that. I think that's great. It's taken more of like the neutral kind of approach to autism. I think that's a very good way to go about doing this. This is going to be good guys. I'm excited. It's going to be cool. I decided to use disability to explain history and now I am a successful YouTuber. Good luck. And autistic people tend to have very strong interests in very narrow topics, such as someone who really likes cars, learns everything they can about them and as a result is able to be a much more proficient car mechanic than non-autistic people would be. Some autistic people are even able to accurately draw complex engineering blueprints by memory. Although these types of superhuman abilities are not common among autistic people. We aren't superhuman beings. At least I am not. But who knows, maybe after my Covid vaccine I will level up enough to gain- I love that meme. It's great. It's poking fun at that old vaccine myth. You don't like neurodevelopmental? Why is that? The show I'm- oh yeah, who's for you talking about? Hulu has a show, Life and Beth. It's a couple where a guy ends up getting diagnosed as autistic. Interesting. This has done very well so far. Of course, it is, isn't it? So this is actually an autism video. This is like an inception. We've got an autistic streamer. We have autistic people in the chat as well as other people. I know some people are not autistic. And we're also watching a video of a YouTuber who is autistic. Wow. I mean, we do that pretty much all the time. I don't know, it's a new concept. I think it's just- it's interesting because I didn't expect them to be autistic. Because it's not like a dedicated sort of autism channel. But it should be good. Indedibility. We communicate differently. For example, autistic people are generally more direct. We are generally very honest while finding it difficult to maintain eye contact. This is because it's a lot more exhausting for autistic people to look someone in the eyes than it is for non-autistic people. And so autism has both positive and negative aspects, just as being non-autistic has- I wouldn't say that eye contact is necessarily a negative thing. It's only really negative in the sort of greater social context. Like particularly talking to neurotypical individuals. Also the honesty thing. I'm not really sure if it's really a sense of honesty. I think it's probably better characterized as just- I suppose it is to be honest to a certain extent, but it doesn't always mean that we don't lie or we don't tell the truth. You know, I think honesty sometimes, like it's very hard for me to try and explain what that there is perhaps a better word for it maybe. But hey, as positive and negative aspects. And because of all these things, autistic people sometimes need help in order to live a happy life in a society created for everybody else. This isn't anything bad. After all, everybody needs help in their lives. But the help each person needs is different. And in the case of autistic people, we usually share the same kinds of struggles in life, and therefore require a different type of help than non-autistic people. Just as, for example, men and women require different kinds of help throughout their lives. Yeah, I guess so. I think when it comes to support, I think it's important to point out that that's why it's classified as a disability quite often, because we do need sort of non-traditional kind of help that most people would require. But in some things as well, we can find areas in life particularly quite relatively easier, I would say. It's a good video so far. I like the fact that they're kind of taking this positive negative spin. It's always good to see. Me neither, I can't lie. Yeah, I can't lie about 99% of things. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, I used to not like tell white lies. I don't know if you guys have experienced that, but a lot of neurotypicals use white lies like really, really often. I think they did some study about how many times people lie in a day. I think taking that lens of things, I think we're probably less likely to lie just sort of generally all the time. Oh, I think we can be the best liars. I am not saying that we can't do it. It's obviously going to lend itself to a lot of individual variation. But I think when it comes to like oddist opinions that aren't sort of tempered by different social situations, I think it can make sense that we might be considered to be honest in those circumstances. But I do know a lot of what is it people who do lie quite compulsively. So, you know, I'd like to see a study on this. Maybe we should look at a study at some point. See if there are any statistics on this or whether it's just kind of sort of an interpretive thing, you know, I can lie sometimes can't lie to answering a question. Interesting. I cannot lie unless I have to. Then I'm very good at it. I need to do it for good reasons though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I do use white lies nowadays. It's something that I've learnt to use. It makes me really uncomfortable doing them. I can always feel really icky about it. It doesn't feel very comfortable, but I think in some situations it can be important. Thank you to Auditing of Autism for becoming a member. Much appreciated, my friend. Welcome to the Auti Legion, of course. White lies are different than lies. I still fit. They still have the same effect on me. White lies. I find them really difficult. It's taken me a long time to feel comfortable with them. I think generally I only really use them with strangers, people that I don't know. People that I do know very well tend to get the brutal, true honesty. No matter the circumstance. I will be very, very upfront and honest to a point. Sometimes it does upset some people. For other people, they appreciate that when they ask me a question, or opinion, they'll know exactly what I think. In broad terms, what autism is, we can look at its history. The first time autism was specifically addressed was in 1908. The term autistic was used to classify schizophrenic patients who were severely withdrawn. Yeah. This would set a trend until the 1940s, where autistic people were often diagnosed with something called childhood schizophrenia because the physician thought that autistic people who didn't seem to be interested in the outside world were very similar to schizophrenic patients who would seclude themselves from the outside world. And as a result, a lot of autistic people were incorrectly labeled as schizophrenic. Yeah. I think there's a clinician or a psychologist called Sikureva. Maybe they're German or Russian. I can't remember exactly where they were from. But I mean, it wasn't just that. There was different places around. I think there was one guy, there was Sikureva, obviously talking about it as childhood schizophrenia. It was also Kanna who developed this kind of Kanna's autism, which was mostly looking back at it, looking at history. A lot of people think that it was kind of like a marketing thing, because he sort of assigned himself as being the only person who could diagnose it. And usually a lot of his, he would sort of characterize it as being like white boys, usually from like middle upper middle class families. So I think he earns a lot of money from it. And then of course, there was the old Hans Asperger who sort of understood kind of a different sort of grouping of autistic people who he deemed to be Asperger syndrome. So I think there was like these three, three different areas. There might be more, but just from memory. That's what I can remember. And this is but the first of many theories about autism, which proved to be incorrect. In fact, throughout this video, there will be a lot of outdated theories, offensive theories, or theories that are complete nonsense. But the first time autism was actually researched directly was in 1924 by a childhood psychologist named Grunja Sukareva. She published six reports on children she described as having schizoid psychopathy. The reason for this name is that she too noticed that these autistic children had a disorder whose clinical picture shares certain features with schizophrenia, but which differ profoundly from schizophrenia. She continued her research into autism for the next 50 years, fight for the rights of children with disabilities and disorders to receive proper treatment in the Soviet Union. And she developed a theory of autism, which is very close to how autism is described in today's psychiatric journals, publishing her research in both Russian and German. Yet despite being nearly a century ahead in the field of autism, her work was not quoted in later studies, and would only be acknowledged outside the Soviet Union in 2013, when her studies were translated into English. Whether she was ignored because they just didn't realize she was talking about autism, or chose to ignore a woman in a highly sexist society, remains unknown. However, as a result, knowledge a century ahead of its time was lost to humanity. And so for the next pioneer in autism, we have to go to the Nazis, because they promoted a system whereby certain people would be given the right to live and have children, while people whom they decided were undesirable, either had to be killed as soon as possible or were allowed to live, but not allowed to have any children. Yeah, it's the whole eugenics thing, isn't it? I don't think it was just just related to autism. I think there was a lot of different factors involved in that. Well, you know, as you can imagine, sort of from World War II. The doctor who started diagnosing children as schizophrenia, new hands, as per his research, but disregarded it. Yeah, I think there was some kind of strange, sort of back and forth between a lot of the different sort of autism researchers, just from from what I've read. I really highly recommend after this, if you do want to learn more about kind of the history. I think like the first sort of historic autistic figure that people could sort of more accurately describe as autistic through their behaviour, and it was written about a lot, like came before that. I don't really know what the name of the person, it was like some wizard, he had like a big spire in his back garden, did all sorts of different scientific and sort of mathematical based tests and things like that, very interesting character from what I read about him. But if you do want to learn more about kind of that side didn't get a bit more insight into history of autism, I highly recommend a book called Neurotribes by Steve Silberman. I did a podcast with Steve Silberman after finding and reading his book. It was really, really sort of interesting to get that kind of insight. He was talking a lot about kind of his experiences within Silicon Valley, sort of talking to all the tech entrepreneurs and stuff. Yeah, I think that's a good book to read 100% or at least check out the podcast. It was I think the end of season two perhaps, really good episode, quite a short one. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician and a member of the Austrian Fascist Party, that was later incorporated in the German one after Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, and he sent multiple children to be killed for being impure. During such research, I'm pretty sure that prior to, I do believe from looking back at the history, from reading Neurotribes and talking to Steve, they conducted that research prior to when the place that Hans was at, like the Vienna Institute got taken over. They did that research prior to them coming over. I think that there was this particular speech that was highlighted that Hans made, I think, to some of the German officials, which did sort of separate these two groups and the latter group would obviously be subject to Eugenics, which is awful. I'm pretty sure that's how things panned out though. Do you know what year that was? No, I can't remember. I'm really not good with years. I'm good with some pieces of information, to be honest, not the best of history either. So don't hold me to my explanations. Neurotribes is a really good resource, very highly rated by the autistic community as well, sort of co-developed and sort of fact-checked and read by autistic people before being published. First, that various children had similar characteristics which differed from anything he had seen before. Just like Tsukereva, Aspager noticed the similarities with Schizophrenia and also came to the conclusion that the children under his care were different. The children he studied did not have linguistic problems like many autistic children have, but he did notice they seemed uninterested in other people, spoke more like grown-ups than children, were clumsy and walked differently. And this was an interesting point many other researchers wouldn't notice for years to come. Autistic people often walk differently, walking more sideways like penguins do, find it harder to maintain their balance when closing their eyes and generally under-performance sports compared to their non-autistic counterparts. Yeah, I mean they're not being able to balance while closing your eyes thing. I think that's that's more related to like vestibular or proprioceptive hyposensitivity. Definitely something that I experience. However, to say that I mean maybe we don't generally progress in sports, but some of like the world's top athletes are autistic. So it doesn't mean that we can't be good at sports. I think we can actually be very, very good at sports, but you know maybe in general just based on our individual sort of sensory profiles it might be somewhat more difficult for some people. Isn't that dyspraxia? Yeah it's kind of an interesting one. The whole dyspraxia thing because like I haven't really come across anybody. I've been trying to find people who are dyspraxic but are not autistic. I can't find anybody or dyspraxic and not ADHD. I just can't find anybody who is just dyspraxic and it's very weird because a lot of like the cognitive sides of dyspraxia align very closely to some of the presentations of autism. So I'm not too sure. I suppose you could consider maybe dyspraxia at all. I suppose you consider dyspraxia as maybe like vestibular, proprioceptive, hypersensitivity maybe. That's how I higher how I sort of conceptualize it but it might not be the best way. There might be other mechanisms other than sort of sensory processing differences. If sport is a special interest why not be good at sports? Yeah, I think if because there's a lot of autistic traits we actually make us better at sports sort of in the long term. You know like particularly if you are if you like routine, if you're in a routine of going to sports practice obviously like you're going to do a lot better than neurotypical peers especially during childhood because you'll attend every single session. There is like stuff to do about hyper focus you know sort of different learning styles sort of especially like within the martial arts world being sort of atypical in like the movements that we have. Perhaps not making as much eye contact sometimes eye contact can be like a tell for some people in combat sports. Very interesting. Yeah, I just thought I stuck to sports my whole life. I mean there's definitely disadvantages to me in combat sports. I did tend to fall over quite a bit when I was throwing kicks so my balance is not the best but I can do some crazy techniques and kicks it just really depends you know I need to be focused on it I think that's the main thing. He coined the term autistic psychopathy to describe the traits he saw. This would later be called Asperger syndrome but just like Tsukereva Asperger's work would largely go unnoticed by the wider world until the 1980s because when World War II ended Asperger's work was buried along with much of the rest of the research funded by the Nazi government and so we arrive at the third and final pioneer in early autism research. Another German speaker named Leo Kanner. Kanner had read about Asperger's work over the course of his career and decided to focus on autistic children while he was working in the USA. Being the first scientist in the western world to do research on autism he became the first person to actually have his work recognized widely by other psychologists. Just like with Asperger and Tsukereva his first patient was also diagnosed with schizophrenia but Kanner also realized that the children in his clinic were different from every schizophrenic patient he had ever seen before and so he diagnosed this patient with a new condition which Kanner called Kanner syndrome that would later be known as autism. You gotta you gotta bring it to the psychologist who name name things based on their own their own name. It's a bit strange it's like coming across a new species like if I came across like a new species mosquito I'd call it Edie's Henlean. I don't know how I feel about that. I mean would you guys do it if you come across like a new thing would you would you call it your name? I don't know it feels a bit like I suppose it's a good way of getting your name out I suppose but originally I mean if psychopathy is just mental illness not necessarily violent or sociopathic. Oh thank you for telling me that you're a user. It is quite strange although maybe I'm making that link because a lot of the sort of early characterization of autistic people were along the lines of like lacking empathy which is something that you see a lot in particularly psychopathy when it comes to like adaptive empathy not very good at that. Yeah that's that's why but that that's good to good to know thank you for telling me that. He didn't stop there instead he studied 11 other children who each seem to be autistic and so Kanner began to write about them to create a theory on autism. He noted that the children seemed to each be living in their own private world ignoring the people around them they could amuse themselves for hours by repeating certain arm movements while at the same time they would get panicked by something like their favorite toy being moved from their usual place without their knowledge. He published his work in 1943 and that was the first time people outside Russian and German speaking circles would hear about autism while Kanner was aware of Aspek's work he purposefully chose to ignore his work. Yeah he just he just chose to be like mine's better I don't get to ignore his work. Yeah Kanner is an interesting one from what I've read. I hope they talk about like the way that Kanner sort of used autism as like a like maybe not a marketing thing but used it as like a like a cash cow would be interesting to hear. While we don't know the exact reasons for this choice it probably had something to do with the fact that Kanner grew up Jewish and Aspek was a fascist where the Kanner knew of Tsukereva's work however remains uncertain although they published and read the same scientific journals so might be sexism. Yeah over time psychologists from around the world would send children to Kanner's clinic to see if those children were autistic and Kanner continued his research into autism using these children as a subject. He noted that autistic people often like routines and get upset when that routine is broken. That autistic children have difficulties in social interactions and got upset over loud noises. However they had good memory and they were of average or above average intelligence. Now it is important to yeah I think good long-term memory. I mean I've come across some autistic people who have good sort of short-term working memory. I'm definitely not one of those people. I forget mid-sentence what I'm talking about quite often. They have like blanks so my brain just shuts off you know. I'd call it Mr Joe. What a mosquito. Mr Joe. I'd love that. That would be so cool. Of course I invented male chickens. Oh my god. You guys are funny. Note that no two autistic people are the same. Just as non-autistic people are not all the same. Some autistic people have good memory. Some have bad memory. Some are good at social interactions while others are not and some are smart and some are simply not. However Kanner's criteria for autism was so narrow that a lot of autistic children went undiagnosed in his clinic because of his lack of understanding. While today about one in 68 people are diagnosed as autistic Kanner thought it was closer to one in a couple of thousands and as a result he created theories that were entirely incorrect. For example because he concluded autistic children were intelligent that autism was therefore caused by an emotional disturbance. At the time psychologists thought that nearly all psychological conditions were caused by trauma. Yeah trauma in childhood. Have you guys heard of the refrigerator mother hypothesis? Oh my god. Like there are a lot of sort of characterizations that people make about autistic people which harm us but there are some that definitely do like touch on like the parents of autistic children. I've heard a lot of things from autism parents where like people in the public make like bad characterizations of them because like the child is like having a meltdown in public or even that they are the cause of their child developing autism. I think the refrigerator mother hypothesis is a pretty pretty bad one. It's kind of very much characterizing cold sort of unfeeling, unphysical mothers has been like the cause of autistic children. But I mean that nowadays looking hindsight we obviously know that we are like it's neurodevelopmental thing. It's not really something that you develop through experience during childhood. I've heard some wacky things from some psychologists like I think there's someone who said to me that like if your parents have an autistic child then you're likely to like instill autistic behavioral traits into like your other child who's not autistic. I've heard some wild theories from some psychologists. Yeah, craziness. People could learn coping as they grow aka childhood diseases thing. So they should cover and mask it well. Everyone else had autistic people back then were just the R word. Yeah, yeah. 44 watching A. Oh yeah, indeed. We've got a little crew going on here. Make sure to like it Beeps. It helps me. Or down. I'd do as you wish. I'm just reminding you that there is a like button below. That childhood. So he concluded that autism was the cause of mothers who didn't love their children enough. Dubbing the theory refrigerator mother for the cold attitude of the parents. Yeah. The interesting thing about this theory, however, is that kind of own research classified very few parents as cold, meaning that this theory was not only wrong, it was obviously wrong. But psychologists trusted his research and for a time the refrigerator mother theory was seen as the cause of autism until the 1960s. But this wasn't the only thing he was wrong about. He also thought that autism was a children's condition only. But why is this? Well, the reason for this is something called masking. Autistic people often realize early in life that they are different from other people. I don't know if it's just related to masking. I think that's a very heavy component of it. Although I think it's because a lot of the cases, a lot of like the focus of the research was done on children. There wasn't really much research being done on autistic adults. Because I mean, in the relative understanding of different psychological conditions, autism is relatively quite new, I would say. But yeah, masking obviously has a massive component in sort of hiding autistic traits from the outside world. I know a lot of people who were undiagnosed. They don't want to go through diagnosis, but they are quite obviously autistic. I've known them for a long time. They develop a lot of different ways of approaching the world and different interesting methods in coping with different things in life. It tends to be a very different person to person as well. This is a very great video. It is indeed. I do think that if Dr. Evil was allowed to raise neuro-typical infant, he could induce some behavior like autism. What? What are you talking about, Derek Giza? Oh, I guess I should hit the like too. Thank you. That's great to hear. There's Laveva Frey and for you often sent email notices of upcoming life. Is that how you know, Jackie? Or does it just send you like, it's usually like people just get notifications on our phone. Does it send you an email? All right, it's cool. But we talk too much. We notice other people don't get annoyed by loud noises. Often don't understand other people what they seem to understand each other quite well. And people have often yelled at us for not understanding something, doing something differently, or not realizing that what we were doing was annoying to other people. But at the same time, we don't want to be ostracized from our friends, family or society. And so we hide who we really are. We learn how to act non-autistic so people won't get angry at us, shout at us or get upset with us. And the older we get, the better we become at masking a true identity in front of other people. Yeah, and it's important to mention as well that, you know, masking, although, you know, you can sort of develop it, it doesn't take away the impact of it. Like it is still exhausting to do no matter how long you do it for. And it does have mental health impacts. It does have a lot of impacts on your like self-identity as well. It's not just kind of, you know, you just you just learn to mask better. I mean, I think you could imagine that perhaps it would be a bit easier to do in adulthood, but I still think there was a lot of negative impacts of it physically on the long term, which do get noticed. It's just it's not autism that gets noticed. So you might see people getting misdiagnosed of lots of different mental health related conditions, particularly like anxiety and depression and sometimes particularly for women, borderline, sometimes schizophrenia even due to due to like meltdowns and sort of different executive function related things, even BPD I've seen quite a bit. Autistic people are everywhere, but a lot of us are simply good at hiding our autism. In fact, you probably know several autistic people without realizing it. And this created a cycle. Because autism was thought to be rare, it received little funding for research, resulting in most autistic people going undiagnosed, which in turn meant that people thought autism was rare. But this cycle was broken in 1981 when a researcher named Lorna Wing had an autistic daughter and faced a lot of difficulties in raising her. When she wanted support from the British government, she found there was almost no help available for autistic children or their parents, because autism was thought to be so incredibly rare. Yeah. I mean, there's there's some good things about Lorna Wing, I think she introduced like the idea of the triad of impairments, which I would argue is more of a quadrant, because it doesn't really factor in sort of sensory differences within it. Um, however, did sort of propagate the theory of autistic people lacking empathy, which I'm not too much of a fan of. And so Wing came up with a plan. If she could prove that autism was more common, then it would get more funding, resulting in better assistance for autistic children. And so in the 1970s, she started her research with her colleague, Judith Gould. Firstly, they searched through old research papers to find out as much as they could about autism. And in the process, they managed to find Hans Asperger's paper on autism and had it translated into English. They combined the works of previous researchers to create a list of autistic traits. But they also noticed different researchers had different observations about autistic children's behaviors, whereas some autistic children were able to communicate better than most children, others had trouble forming sentences. Some could not speak at all, while others started speaking simply at a later age. So how was it possible that people with the same condition had such different traits? Well, Wing and Gould realized that autism wasn't a single thing like Connor had concluded. Rather, it was a spectrum of traits where every individual had a different combination of autistic characteristics. Yeah, I'm wanting to say because a lot of people have the misconception that autism is like a linear spectrum. They see a spectrum as being like a, you know, red to orange to yellow to green. And the more that you go across, that's kind of representative of like how autistic you are. So I'm wondering what kind of characterization they're going to make of this, whether they get it right. It's a very common mischaracterization. I think it's probably made worse due to like the sort of distilling of autism and all the different factors of it, like PDD, NOS and childhood disintegrative disorder and aspergers and autism kind of being combined into one ASD diagnosis. I mean, it definitely doesn't help with that misconception, but it's important to remember the autism spectrum is different to ASD one, two and three. The ASD one, two and three sort of continuum is more of a tool for psychologists, social workers and healthcare providers to understand and sort of the individual kind of strength of particular autistic traits and how much support they need. That's usually what they use that for. But the spectrum, it covers like basically just the variety, the differentiation of sort of various autistic traits. It's actually much multi-dimensional. Yeah, massive 4D spectrum. Hmm. I mean, people, but whenever I've talked about the autistic spectrum, like I've tried to give a more of a mosaic rather than a spectrum. Yeah, I understand. I think it's, I suppose when I talk about the autistic spectrum in this way, I'm trying to do it with an understanding that like making things too complex for outsiders to understand is like probably not a good thing. You know, so I usually try to sort of simplify to some degree the way that I explain things. I understand it's not as easy as even even that in terms of a sort of spectrum of traits. But it's, I mean, I'm very happy to, if you guys want to run it for a software, create a four dimensional sort of sphere of different autistic traits, I will post that. I think that would be actually really cool and great if someone wants a project to do and you have some computer skills, but I do not. So I'm having to simplify the way that I explain it to, you know, multi-dimensional. That's probably a good way of explaining it. I like that. Cheers to variety indeed. I have read about her. Yeah, Lord of Wings, interesting. So hitting the like button doesn't mean that you like that button. I don't know. When I say like, I mean, I've seen it in some of the videos. Oh dear, my light's gone off. When I say like, does it, or like the video, does it sort of highlight the like button in like a rainbow? So I've seen other streamers do it. And it seems to do that or like related to videos, it seems to do that. It's quite an interesting feature. I think they've just recently added from why now. I'm just going to update one of the filters in my video just so that we can see you don't have that sort of black outline because my light's gone off. There it goes. That's a bit better. Yeah, that's better. Right, let's go for it. And to different degrees. For example, I rarely have repetitive behavior. Germany will be united. Germany will be united. Who would see to it that Germany will be Germany will be because Germany had been united. Like I said, sometimes. What? I'm so confused. I imagine that's a compilation of like a recent video that they've made. I don't know. I mean, I saw something recently from a critical purple Ella saying that like autistic people don't have habits or asking if late diagnosed autistic people had habits. I'm pretty sure we do like to a certain degree. It's just maybe the way that we habitually do things is kind of like stacked, you know. So I've got a habit of brushing my teeth but that habit is only really sparked off from me having a shower and my face skincare routine is a habit, but it's only really sparked off from me brushing my teeth. So I kind of like stack things on on each other. If I don't do like this, the thing at the start that becomes an issue for like the whole process. But once I can get going with the first thing, I usually tend to be a lot better at sort of doing things habitually. It's an interesting thought though. I wonder if you guys have a similar experience. I am late. Well, welcome. Welcome to Isabella. Welcome to Isabella. What is a mosaic? A mosaic is it's kind of like a so if you can imagine sort of a wall of plaster. You had like little sort of differently colored, differently shaped sort of rocks that you would put onto that that plaster. That's kind of like what mosaic is. But you sort of make a picture out of those rocks. I think that's a good way of explaining mosaic, isn't it? Or is it mosaic? This theory was called autism spectrum syndrome, or ASD in short. Now that they had a working theory of autism, they decided to look at how many autistic people exhibited autistic traits. They did so by looking at children in psychiatric institutions in London who weren't yet diagnosed with any mental conditions and testing them for autistic traits. If they exhibited multiple autistic traits, they were deemed to likely be autistic. And the result of that data concluded that at least one in 1000 children were autistic. And so they were ready to present their findings to the scientific community in 1981. They changed autism from a singular condition to a wide spectrum of traits. These traits would eventually be categorized in four types of autism. The first is classic autism, where a person has difficulties in social interactions and communication and shows repetitive behavior. The second is childhood disintegrative. I don't think that's, I think maybe maybe classic autism is kind of like, seem to be more than more than that. Because people with who would be classified of having Asperger's syndrome is the same. I mean, that's the trait of impairments for Asperger's. A disorder or Heller's syndrome, where a person's autism shows later than usual. The third is Asperger's syndrome, characterized by significant difficulties in social interactions and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. And fourth is PDD-NOS, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder, not otherwise specified, where a person is definitely autistic, but doesn't fit any of the other three categories. This is what I was diagnosed with. I know someone who was diagnosed with us. I was part of sort of a running society at university. There's a guy who run, he ran like the elite group within the running society. I was a part of the elite group, although I was the slowest, and people had to wait for me. Because I just, I wanted to like push myself every time I run, but I was just not a runner. Some guys in there were like ultra marathon runners, like 200 miles plus, crazy. But he was diagnosed with that. It was a very interesting trap. But this research still had one big limitation. It only looked at children in psychiatric institutions and ignored all other children. And so in the 90s a larger study was conducted among children who attended mainstream schools in the UK. Just as in the previous research, they looked at how many of the children had autistic traits and would likely be on the autism spectrum. It concluded that around 0.36% of children had Aspeger syndrome and 0.35% had another form of autism. This showed that at least around 0.71% of people were autistic, far more than the 0.1% of the previous study. It now turned out that autism wasn't rare at all, but was indeed very common. This raised an interesting point. If so many people are autistic, it meant that a lot of autistic individuals went unnoticed before. Meaning that most autistic people became independent adults, had friends, got a partner, had a career, etc. It meant that autism couldn't be... I mean, there's definitely a lot of people, but I do think that from talking to individuals who sort of late diagnosed sort of in their 60s, 70s, 80s, they do report from what I've seen of having sort of a fairly sort of socially isolated life, perhaps struggling in terms of work, struggling in terms of relationships. But it's just they've learned to kind of live independently. I think that that's probably the main fact there. Not saying that the autistic people can't have both of those. I mean, it's to say otherwise would be silly, but you know what I mean. I think the stats are way too low, but it's over 2%. Yeah, I think it's at least 2%. I think it's like 1 in 64 in the US, maybe, from the last study. I think it's probably a little bit more than that. I don't think it's as high as 10%, like some people say. I don't think it's that much, but I mean, 2, 3, 4, 5%, maybe. Who knows? This horrible disability it was often portrayed as. Instead, most autistic people were just normal people like everybody else. And to dispel a common myth, this also didn't mean that more people were becoming autistic. Instead, it meant that we have better tools to discover who is autistic. Yes. Just like Pluto was discovered in 1930, but it still existed before we discovered it. But now a new problem emerged. Up until this moment, psychologists had assumed they would rarely meet any autistic person in their professional life and so never learned a lot about it. But this research showed that they were very likely to meet autistic people, but they didn't have the training to recognize, diagnose and help autistic people. And so Lorna Wing... I think another aspect to that, one of the interesting aspects to that is that the medical system generally is there to diagnose problems. So if you're not particularly seeing any problems within your life, like or noticing sort of the difficulties that may be coming from this other factor of your being, which is autism, then you won't perhaps go and get a diagnosis. Like there are some people out there who do pretty well in life and they just they don't really see any issues that come negative things that come from autism. Like they're not aware of it and they may not experience those, but they may be seeing some of like the advantages things. So they don't really go for an autism diagnosis. Because if you can imagine like the process of getting an autism diagnosis, if you didn't know about it before would be you would kind of get a psychiatric assessment, see like what is going on with you. If you notice something's happened, you have like a breakdown or a burnout or something of that nature. You kind of go into doctor's office, you get a psychological assessment and then they would sort of dive into different aspects of your being. Sometimes they would pick up certain traits and others, perhaps you might miss diagnosis, pick up that you're autistic. But it's usually something bad has happened that's sort of giving you some ignition to learn about it. I think it's kind of changed a little bit more in the modern day with the advent of social media and such more information about it, more lived experience advocates. But it's that whole thing about like, you know, doctors don't really diagnose you for your identity. It would probably be helpful because there might be some situations later down the road, which would be sort of better understood and better managed if you knew that you were autistic. So I think there's a worthwhile thing that even if it's just knowing that you're autistic, it's a part of your identity. But yeah, it's interesting. Does anyone believe that Marilyn Monroe was autistic? I don't really know much about Marilyn Monroe, other than their pictures. It would make sense if Mozart was autistic. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of speculation, isn't there about like historical figures. But there are speculations, you can never really confirm stuff. You can just vary down like how much input you have about their life. Amusing. So obviously it's gonna depend on how concrete you can be with that assessment. But you will never truly know. The colleagues went right back to work to create a framework for other psychologists on how to treat autistic people. And now more and more research was being performed into autism. One such research was about understanding the autistic mind. And so in 1985, a new idea was proposed called Theory of Mind. This theory states that the reason autistic people seem to be so focused on what they are doing is because they don't have empathy, don't care about anyone else, and can't imagine how other people feel. Is that what Theory of Mind has characterized us? I'm pretty sure that Theory of Mind just means that you can't put yourself in other people's shoes or see it from other people's perspective. From my understanding, I think the other stuff is separate. Like that's more related to what you describe as like empathy. But it might have been characterized in that sort of lump, maybe, when it sort of first came about. Do you guys know? Theory is completely false. When autistic people joined the psychology profession in the 1980s to better understand themselves and their fellow artists, they pointed out that they don't have a lack of empathy, but that we have so much of it that we feel overwhelmed. An example from one of my sources is a woman who went to a theme park. A famous children's band was supposed to play that day. Before they could perform, they had to set up their equipment on stage. Some children saw this, got super excited, but were told that the show wouldn't start yet and that they were only preparing for the show. The woman burst out in tears when she imagined how disappointed the children must be. And there are a lot of examples like this. Someone who gets so happy they start shaking. Someone who is so worried about other people they shut down. Or someone who bursts out crying when learning about poverty. Yeah, the last one is mine. Maybe not related to just poverty, but yeah. I've always been very sort of an empathic individual, I would say. I think a good thing to point out, I don't know if they're going to mention it, it's kind of the separation between cognitive and adaptive empathy. I hope they do. But if autistic children clearly have empathy, why did anyone believe this theory? Well, it's because of the way it was tested. They would show pictures of facial expressions to autistic children and told them to assign emotions to them. Autistic people are bad at reading faces, so they got most of them wrong. Not because they don't care, but because they don't understand. Another test. I think that that sort of graphic is a bit oversimplified. I think the actual eyes that they showed and faces that they showed were obviously a little bit more nuanced and subtle than just like that. I think that's more related to indirect communication, I would say. Maybe what you would describe as cognitive empathy is basically kind of the same thing in terms of emotion. Date use was to show two dolls who were playing with a toy. The green doll would then be placed under the table and told they went outside. The psychologist would then tell the child that the purple doll hides the toy and the adult places the toy in a nearby basket. Then the green doll would come back inside by taking the doll from under the table back to the purple doll. And the psychologist would then ask, where would the green doll look for the toy? When the child would point at the basket, the psychologist would see this as a sign that the child lacked empathy because the green doll would have no idea that the purple doll... No, I don't think it's related to empathy. I think the confusing fear of mind with empathy. But I've had this thing being done on me. I said the basket, not gonna lie. I probably did it like a couple of years ago. I think someone presented to me with it. But I also have done this with like autistic people. And yeah, they don't say the basket. But I think this is more related to like kids, maybe. See in this example of mindblast before it makes sense. K-bye. Why are you saying goodbye? New science proves no one can read faces. It doesn't exist. I think we can. You can read faces or else they wouldn't serve any social function. Doll placed the toy in the basket and if the child had empathy, they would realize this. But there is a problem with this approach. The autistic child has a lot of questions which confuse them. Yes. Why is the green doll going outside when it's actually going underneath a table? Why is the purple doll hiding something from the green doll? Why are the two dolls playing with each other? And while they are wondering about all these questions, they'd have to answer another question, where is the toy? And not sure of what to answer, the autistic child tends to answer the best they can while being very confused. And so while this test might be fine for neurotypical. I think this is a good sort of overview of it. 100% the flaws in kind of it. But again, I have done this myself. And I said the basket, even though I did understand the question. For children, children who don't have a disorder or mental disability of any kind, autistic people just get confused when someone would call the space underneath a table the outside. An important trait of autism is wanting to understand things as much as possible. But these children were not given the opportunity, give the wrong answer, and are labeled as having a lack of empathy. All because autistic people and neurotypical people communicate in different ways. Unfortunately, this theory has created a stereotype about autistic people, which is completely false, yet persists to this day. And many of such stereotypes became more common as the media started creating autistic characters. This started with the movie Rain Man, where an autistic character and his brother develop a meaningful relationship with each other. This had a tremendous impact for autism awareness, because for the first time, it not only showed autistic people accurately in popular media, but it also showed that simply because a person is autistic, that they still have value as a person and can still contribute to society. Okay, Rain Man, we love it. That's a joke. Right, I'll be right back guys, I've just got to do something, but I will be back very soon. Hello guys, apologies for that. Let's get back to it. I feel a deep compassion and sadness for people, it's just the same as empathy. I think so. Okay, let's get back to it guys. Unfortunately, the aforementioned stereotypes soon became common in popular media. Autistic people are often portrayed as lacking emotions and being a general nuisance to those around them, but being tolerated for their attention to detail or analytical skills. Yeah, I think just touching on what they were saying before about Rain Man, I think that was the first major film that came out about autism. It's definitely not the best representation because it's kind of this whole idea of like savantism that's being going around quite a bit. It's actually incredibly rare for autistic people to have such gifts and have such high support needs as well. Maybe what they're talking about now is related to this idea of like double empathy. I think that's a really good sort of description about maybe the reason to why people think that autistic people don't have empathy, but actually it's just mostly related to a lack of understanding or a lack of appreciation for the different experiences that we may have, different kind of perceptions and behaviors and ways of communicating. Appropriate poor emoji, do you plan that? Did you say nature's cause? I didn't go to the toilet. Oh my god. Came around as a useful tool. Often the autistic guy is a child or an adult who acts like a child. They portray autism as a tragedy instead of what it actually is. Just being a bit different. At least I hope I'm not a tragedy to my audience and what autism is generally portrayed as something exclusive to men. This is not at all the case. And this image of autism being a horrible, debilitating disease has caused actual harm because some people have become obsessed with curing autism and one such cure. That is harboring back to the old ideals of eugenics that we saw during the world war. Not good. Not good. I think as well something that they didn't mention was the sort of cultural and sort of racial aspects to diagnosis. I think there is still a lot of misconceptions about it just being about white people as well as it just being about autistic men. I think it's definitely something that needs to be further looked into. Dropping the bomb. The bomb has been dropped. Oh my god. I didn't think that they would be talking about this. I thought they were going to talk about something like shock therapy or like, I don't know, some crazy stuff that they used to do a while ago. Okay. Let's say them out. Interesting. Therapy. This is a type of therapy where autistic children are being trained to act like non-autistic children through positive and negative reinforcements. For example, you would identify autistic traits in a person such as finding it difficult to maintain eye contact and then punish the child when they look away and reward them when they keep looking them in the eyes. Yes. If it feels uncomfortable to keep looking into the eyes on the screen right now, this is how a lot of autistic people feel about looking anyone in the eyes. The punishments include taking away something important to them, shouting at the child, to the child receiving electric shocks. This is the same technique. I mean, I think this is something like particularly the electric shocks and the shouting. I think it used to be a lot, that used to be how it was. I think nowadays it's kind of related to positive reward. Perhaps being like stern and saying like, no, quite. Maybe not shouting, but like quite loud from what I've seen. And also, yes, taking away stuff that they want. That's another way that they do it. Used in gay conversion therapy and many autistic adults have described their time in ABA as torture. And it can go on for dozens of hours every week for years. To quote one parent, he would cry sitting at the table during those sessions, hysterically cry. I would have to walk out of the room and turn on the faucet to tune it out because I couldn't hear him cry. People who went through ABA were 86% more likely to meet the PTSD criteria than autistic people who didn't. And this ABA. I didn't know that statistic about the PTSD. That is very concerning. Eugenics is making sure that a person can't reproduce even though they might want to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it can take a lot of different forms, not just that. No, you can imagine people isolate the genes. I mean, it's usually like the most likely way that a cure would come is not going to be something that an adult could take like a pill or a surgery. It would be preventative in nature, most likely, which is concerning, obviously. It's not something that I want. It's still happening to this very day around the world. Imagine if this happened to you. Some people decided that your behavior is undesirable. They might say your hair is a normal and give you a reward to change your hair. They will say the way you speak is wrong and give you a reward when you speak differently. They will determine that what you like is wrong and reward you when you get a different hobby. Yeah. Eventually, what makes you, you will be gone. You will have been trained to deny who you are, what you want to do, and what makes you happy in order to appease other people. Yeah. It's like completely erasing self-advocacy from the equation. It's not good. Not good. A really good way of explaining it, I think, especially about the way that you speak in your hobbies and stuff like that. It's a very, very interesting way of explaining what it could feel like. Definitely, I imagine, contributes a lot to masking and other such mental health stuff. Give me something to change my hair. Nope. Many of you have probably experienced this. Yeah. Parents who tell you to behave differently, teachers who tell you what you can and cannot wear, or society who treats you differently because they think you are too different from them. Now imagine that this happens for hours on end, almost every day of the week, for your entire childhood, and people call it therapy. Yeah. Well, people are like trying to change your brain, like the who you are, the way that you work. It's not even like these asphatic things that the dog you know. It's so much more deep than that. Especially like who you are, what your brain is. And you can't change it. It's just you find different ways of expressing the way that people want you to be. You're not really changing who you are, really. You're just hiding it. You're just finding ways of getting around it. Like the whole thing about this whole practice is like who decides what is, especially when it comes to cures, when it comes to the brain, who decides whether we have a cure to it and how that cure is rolled out. It's not us. It's not autistic people. We don't decide. It's the government. It's the scientific community. It's terrifying. You know. Hi, Joseph. Good to see you, man. But if so many people have come out to say that this is harmful, why are we still doing it? Well, it's because that when researchers looked if the autistic child would exhibit fewer autistic traits, their data shows that torture is indeed an effective way to get a child to maintain eye contact, to teach them to use certain phrases and conversations, and to behave in a certain way. Just minor stuff. Just like stuff that doesn't really matter. There's stuff that other people, there's like social things that people decide as things that are like, like good to display that just make people feel at ease. Like they put all this effort in to doing something that just doesn't benefit the child at all. It's infuriating. But that child usually has very little understanding of why they have to do certain things. Parents often observe their child going up to random strangers to say things like, hello, nice to meet you, because they were tortured into saying those phrases to strangers. But don't understand when to use these phrases and when not to use it. So it's not only torture, it's also ineffective in most cases. But it's easy to show data in which a child maintains eye contact longer and conclude that it's working. And so to this very day, thousands of children are abused every day simply for being different from everybody else, because not a single country in the world has made this illegal. It's not illegal in the UK, but it's not part of the standard educational practice. People have to go through courts in order to do that. And it's like maybe one school in the UK, from what we saw in that documentary, there's maybe more nowadays. But the fields are coming over me. I can feel it. Oh, dear. That was not a deep breath. That was a fake deep breath. Let's continue. To give a silly comparison, imagine if we did this with other groups of people. Most people like that sweet, sweet, delicious chocolate. However, some do not. Therefore, we train chocolate-hating children to like chocolate by punishing them every time they don't actively enjoy chocolate. We tell them that not liking chocolate is bad, that that dislike for chocolate needs to be cured for hours and hours and hours every single week of their childhood. This would be considered torture. After all, it is okay not to like chocolate. And the autistic community argues the same point. Simply because someone is different doesn't mean they need to be abused into being the same as other people. Autistic people therefore advocate for accepting people who are not neurotypical as naturally different, rather than abnormal and in need to be fixed. Some people in response to this discrimination against autistic people, a counter movement was created called the Neurodiversity Movement. This term was first coined in 1999. And in its simplest form, it advocates for the autism spectrum to be seen as a natural variation in the human... It's not only just related to autism, although I think it did start with autism, particularly autism and ADHD. It's kind of... It's been extended to pretty much anything, which is like a difference in the human brain. Like, and they have like different categories. They have inherent sort of neurodiversity, which is something that you're born with. And also stuff that you develop as well, at some point in life. Human brain, rather than a disease to be cured, that autism is an identity, not a disease. It is important to note that the Neurodiversity Movement also includes other groups such as... Yeah, definitely not a disease. Although, I think originally I sort of understood neurodiversity as being like a counter movement sort of the whole social model of disability sort of approach to autism. I don't think it's necessarily that anymore. I think it's just a lot to do with like accepting differences of like any kind, you know, that's kind of like generally how it's seen nowadays. It's not really like a... Like it runs in tandem with the whole sort of disability community, community sort of movements that are going on. It's not necessarily like a counter movement, the medical sort of disability model, as I once thought it was. As ADHD, dyslexia or dyscalculia. For the purposes of this video, however, we will focus on the autism part of the neurodiversity movement. This movement sees the issues faced by autistic people not as an inherent flaw, but sees the issues as autistic people trying to live in a society made for neurotypicals and that most of the struggles could easily... Again, that's how it was once characterized, but I think this video made two years ago. Some people still view it as that way. I think it's changed a lot. It has changed a lot in these sort of modern era. It be overcome in a more inclusive society. For example, lots of autistic people are oversensitive to light, but in a lot of cultures, it's considered rude to wear sunglasses indoors, even though they significantly reduce the pain to our eyes. But it's okay to wear glasses. I think people in general don't like it. People can be mistrustful of people who wear sunglasses, make certain characterizations of who they are. I mean, there's a lot of deplorable, annoying figures who do wear those sunglasses, particularly that kind of masculinity kind of cults online. Sunglasses are pretty common there, but people do make assumptions if you wear sunglasses. A lot of people would say that it's rude. Or even if you were to wear ear defenders or earbuds, people kind of point out, are you listening to music? I know. It's just a bit too noisy. Or allowing autistic people to make repetitive motions without it being a bad thing. Because making those repetitive motions is often very comforting to autistic people. Just as, for example, hugs are comfortable to most neurotypical people. In the same way we often have tactile paving and signs for blind people in Bray, so too does the neurodiversity movement want some accommodations made for them so that autistic people won't feel ostracized for being different. Another point that they often address is that while men are two to four times more likely to get diagnosed with autism, that this is in large part because most medical research was targeted specifically towards males. As a result, the theories about autism were almost exclusively geared towards men creating a... You're seeing the whole extreme male brain theories that have been going on. Blue light glasses are slightly more socially acceptable or offering protection from too bright lights. I think there's some better ones than blue light glasses out there. I can't remember exactly what they're called, but I think some people, when we talked about sensory adjustments last time, highlighted a particular pair of glasses that's supposed to be pretty good. I can't remember what they're called though. They've got some code and number. Male model of autism, which often doesn't apply to females, because autism expresses itself differently between the sexes. This has a lot to do with the different ways in which boys and girls are treated. Girls are more often taught to be quiet, to smile more, and to conform, while boys are more likely to be taught to express themselves openly. As a result of this sexism, girls learn to hide their autism better than boys do, and autism in girls tends to be different in other ways as well. One example is that girls also tend to show less repetitive behaviors than boys do, while the autistic models classify repetitive behavior as a key component of autism. I mean, definitely like the diagnosis, so criteria are very male-centered. I mean, just because of the research, but I think there's more stuff coming out, which are helping to make it feel a bit more accurate, you know, whether you're a man or a woman, or you don't classify yourself as either. And with the male-focused model, anyone who doesn't fit into that model goes undiagnosed. This model started to change in the 21st century, however, as more and more adult, women and non-binary people are being diagnosed with autism, and girls are being diagnosed at a younger and younger age. And while we don't know for sure whether more boys are autistic than girls, it's thought that the rate of autistic people among men and women are about equal. However, more research is required into autistic women and non-binary people. But even worse are the people who have tried to cure autism. They argue that autism is a horrible thing to live with, and that therefore these people need to be cured eventually. Have you seen that video that I did on, on ABA? The way I reacted to that documentary? You know that guy? If you've watched it, you'll know who I mean, that guy. When I see stuff like this, I just think of him right now. It's embedded in my memory. Jesus. Eradicating autism entirely. But there is one big problem with this line of reasoning though. Autism isn't a disease, it's a personality type. It is part of you. It's not a personality type, I wouldn't say. It's the difference in your brain, but it's not a personality type, that's for sure. Just as your likes and dislikes are a part of you, or how being introverted or extroverted is a part of you, or how the way you speak is a part of you. Autistic people often don't see their own personality as inherently flawed or in need of curing. Just as at one point we thought being left-handed was a disease in need of curing, we today see left-handedness as something natural that isn't wrong at all. In case I'm still not getting my point across, imagine if we decided to cure all men. You see, men are more likely to commit violent crimes than women. On average, they die at an earlier age, and they can get prostate cancer, so we can show them. He decides, you know, it's not the actual people. I know I have higher testosterone levels when compared to average women. I think there's some studies about testosterone, particularly in the womb, but I think the way that people have interpreted a lot of the scientific data around that is it being like this idea of neurogendering. I think it's a lot to do with people's interpretations from the lay sort of abstracts, but I think it is a bit more nuanced than that, but I'm not really interested in the genetic sort of stuff. I think a lot of my work just tends to focus on what is it people just being here, you know? I'm not really bothered about like why. That being a man has serious health risks. Therefore, we are going to cure all men. That would be a very sexist and insulting thing to say. However, this is how people talk about autists. I don't need to be cured. In fact, the largest autism charity organization actually supports finding a cure for autism. I don't think they say that they actively support it anymore, although that was the inception of it. That was the role. Whether you believe them or not is another line of questioning. It's not something that they say outwardly or express within a lot of their documents. I don't know if they're going to mention the organization. I imagine they will do because they're anonymous, but I'll let them do it. This is an organization called Autism Speaks and while most charity organizations try to help the people they are fighting for, Autism Speaks does the opposite. They do some good things. I think it's just like overall like the mission and who they are and the fact that they don't do a lot of sort of back and forth work with like the autistic community as the advocacy kind of neurodiversity spaces. I think that's a problem and obviously the history like some of the media that they've put out, but they do some good things for autistic people that you know to say otherwise would be you know just in factual you know. But some of the things that they propose, some of the things that they talk about are definitely not like favourable to a lot of autistic people. Hi Thomas, how are you? Hello Figui, how are you doing? Wow. Hello y'all, hello Zantastic. It was founded in 2005 after the founder's grandchild was diagnosed with autism and rather than listening to autistic people, they decided to support various research and programs which are very harmful to autistic people. They did. Such as curing autism, supporting harmful treatments such as electrocuting children with ABA and funding research to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though that research is completely false, has never shown any evidence of being slightly accurate and to this day is causing people to skip vaccinating. What's his name like? I was going to say Andrew Huberfield, that's a podcaster. What's the name of the dude? I can't remember. Andrew Wakefield maybe? Disbanded from the scientific community because the data was incredibly biased and flawed, but still is a prevailing sort of narrative within the mainstream. Resulting in thousands of people dying from easily preventable diseases. To quote the original paper on which this belief is based, we did not prove an association between measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described, by which they meant autism. The organization also created ads portraying autism as a horrible disease, and the people who are autistic as a burden to those around them. As a result of these actions, most autistic people have a very negative opinion of this organization. Autism Speaks is one of the only organizations in the world who are hated by the very group they claim to help, while also blatantly ignoring what those autistic people say to them. It would be like if a charity which claimed to help cancer patients was hated by the majority of people who have or had cancer. And returning back to the history aspect. In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed, where scientists were able to identify autogenetic code in humans. Scientists then began looking for genes which were the cause of autism. And while they were able to identify hundreds of genes which were related to autism, they were unable to find a specific genetic cause for autism. But they also discovered that the types of autism that were known at the time, such as Asperger's Syndrome, PDD NOS, etc. did not have specific genes determining their autism. They instead found that any person with autism could have any of these genes. Meaning that the types of autism were likely all related and not different at all. At the same time, physicians were being pressured by parents to give their autistic child a specific autism diagnosis. Thinking that one type of autism was inherently better or worse than another. To address both these concerns, it was decided that autism would be redefined to the definition we have today. Marked deficits in verbal and non-verbal social communication skills, social impairments apparent even with support in place, limited initiation of social interactions, and reduced or abnormal responses to social overtures from others. But this new definition still has a lot of issues. It excludes people with milder autistic traits, it excludes many older individuals, and it excludes a lot of women. Milder. An issue still facing autistic people is to be recognized as autistic in order to get the proper help. We need. Having our society listen to us, try to understand us, and try to include us is still a major struggle we face. As I speak, there are still places where autistic children are being electrocuted in order to torture the autism out of them. Psychologists who publish... Where did they do that? Does anyone know? You look sad, this is sad and frustrating. Wayfield wasn't anti-vaccine originally, he wanted rubbish to combine MMR vaccines so he could flog his single vaccines. Spicy traits, I'll take my autism with some curry, thanks. I'm just a spicy autism. Very, very hot spicy autism. Have people in positions of authority abuse their power on us? And it hurts, it always hurts so much when this happens. There's so many things, so many very disproportionate treatment negatively towards autistic people. You just have to look at the stats, don't you? You don't even have to listen to autistic people, you just look at the stats, you can see it, it's clear as day. It's only just further highlighted from autistic testimonials. In the last 10 to 15 years, I even noticed that autism and autism are being used as a curse word or an insult. And when we have to go through life with this type of discrimination, constantly targeted towards us, many autistic people decide to hide who they really are and pretend to be non-autistic just to avoid the pain and suffering from having to deal with abusive people as a result. And people say that it's like a glamourized term, it's like a fashionable label nowadays to discredit people within the neurodiversity community. It's not seen like that anywhere outside. It's not even seen like that, like sometimes a lot of the time within the autistic community. To most people in society, it's not seen as a good thing, you know? People don't know that they know autistic people in their lives. Most of my colleagues never knew that I am autistic. Most of my classmates never knew, and I never told anyone I was dating I am autistic until I've known them for several months. And when I do tell people, there are two responses I dread. The first is being told, but you don't look autistic as though we're supposed to look like we're all incredibly helpless people, which we don't look like. And the second one is where people start treating me like I am incredibly stupid. Yes, I'm finalizing. Simply because autistic people and neurotypical people communicate differently doesn't mean that we are somehow stupid. Instead, when there is a misunderstanding, just explain what is happening as though you would explain something to other people. A fellow human being who lacks a piece of information which you can give them. We don't ask for a lot, we just ask to be treated equally. I wish this video had a happy ending. But the abuse hasn't ended yet. This was Avery from History Scope. Thank you to all the non-autistic people in the audience for taking the time to understand your fellow human beings. It means a lot to us autistics when people actually pay attention to us. So thank you. Well, guys, that was quite surprisingly quite good. I am very, I feel very positive about that. That's really, you know, pretty good of you. I think there's some things that they got wrong, but overall, really great. Obviously coming from a lived experience angle as well. Very cool.