Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently

"For years I had been saying to people that somebody needs to write a socio-cultural history of autism. The field has been controversial ever since Leo Kanner’s initial proposition of the diagnosis of infantile autism in 1943. There are strict divisions in beliefs about what causes autism and how best to treat autism. People really go at each other—I mean cut, slash, and burn when they talk about autism. Especially with the internet, every day we have dozens and dozens of new self-appointed autism experts who know everything. When I read Steve’s book I thought, not only is this a detailed history with so many untold stories, but it’s written with such compassion and it’s written with such depth of understanding of people with autism not being pathological but being people who are different. Steve uses the term neurodiversity, which basically means that the best way to understand people with autism and other differences is through neurological diversity—that we all have different brains and we process information differently—and that’s a more hopeful as well as productive way to understand people who behave and act and process information differently. Steve’s book reads like a novel. He’s a science writer but he tells wonderful stories. He writes about how Asperger’s work was never given the credit it should have been given, in terms of really identifying the autistic spectrum. He takes us through people who were famous scientists, physicists, engineers from hundreds of years ago who probably were on the autism spectrum and how a lot of their work was the foundation for great revelations in science, in some cases decades or even centuries later. Very often these people were thought of as reclusive or, in some cases, socially deviant. He takes us right up to the modern era. He talks about some of the controversies of treatment, such as the work of Lovaas and the traditional ABA behavioural perspective in autism, which still remains extremely controversial. Read this book if you want to get a sense, from the socio-cultural and also from the historical diagnostic perspective, of how this concept of autism developed, and how the concept of autism has changed over the years, and if there really is an autism epidemic. Steve believes that there is not. Steve believes that we are just recognising people with autism and the category has expanded so greatly that that can account for the numbers we’re seeing today that we’ve never seen before of diagnosed people. It’s a wonderful book. Neurotribes lays down the history and the philosophy of our need to respect people with autism, to understand them better, to understand the family experience and contribution of people with autism to our society, and the contribution of parents to our understanding of autism and advocacy for autism. The reason I was so blown away by his book was that it is so clear that our beliefs and values come from the same core. It’s considered to be a game-changing book in terms of our understanding of autism. And, if I might be so bold, my book has also been considered game-changing in terms of how best to support and treat people with autism and their families. One review from Nature magazine reviewed our books together and said “these books are serendipitous companions” and they must be read together. So, it’s one of those things that happens in life that out of nowhere this great coincidence happens. Steve and I know that our work complements each other’s and I’m very proud to talk about his book."

"This book came into my life once I had gone through the process of acceptance and had become an advocate of autism. I was trying to understand the world in its positive sense, right? In the sense of looking at it as an additive, not something that takes things away from people. So this book was recommended to me. I worked for an American company for about 11 years, and America has quite a different approach to autism than here in the UK. It’s much more autism-aware. This is a few years back, but although the UK is getting better, the provision in the US is much more established with lots of early intervention. There’s a much higher rate of early diagnosis. Twelve years ago, when I started going through the diagnosis process with my daughter, there wasn’t really any diagnosis at all at pre-school age. So my American colleague recommended me this book, and I love it. “It makes a lot of sense that people coming at the world from a slightly different angle might be able to bring new insight” It’s empowering, reassuring, and it really focuses on what the title says on looking at it not as a disorder but as something different . Sometimes when you start going down this track, people want to resist. They’re like: Are you saying you don’t want it to be a disability? It absolutely is a disability, in the practical sense. These individuals definitely need support. But it’s not necessarily something that has gone wrong, it’s just gone different. Steve Silberman interrogates that with evidence, and with examples of the opportunity that individuals who think this way have provided to the world, the knowledge that they have given to the world, the benefits… It was an affirming book that helped me manage myself and my thinking. Of course, it makes a lot of sense that people coming at the world from a slightly different angle might be able to bring new insight, and so that means they can offer a great deal of potential in all walks of life."