Neurodiversity and Social Inclusion

Abstract

In the 1940s, the child welfare and mental hygiene movements merged, leading to the emergence of the category of autism, as childhood became a focus of psychiatric surveillance. This resulted in stigma placed on parents through psychoanalytic explanations attributing autism to an inappropriate upbringing. A social movement by parents emerged as a response to challenge this medical perspective, coinciding with the deinstitutionalization and community transition trend of the mid-1970s, expanding the authority of therapists rather than physicians. The redefinition of autism was made possible through collaborative efforts between parents and therapists. Against the backdrop of mid-20th-century norms in middle-class child rearing, the concept of Asperger`s syndrome spread with heightened sensitivity to minor deviations or delays. Parent groups seeking support for autistic individuals without intellectual or language impairments, and their families engaged with autism researchers, who were also parents, to influence academia, leading to conceptual expansion and geneticization. These actions provided legitimacy to parents advocating for children with language impairments within the same genetic community. The broadening of the diagnostic criteria inevitably gave rise to a group of autistic self-advocates who could assert themselves without linguistic impairments. In the early 1990s, a neurodiversity movement emerged, aiming to depathologize autism and promote inclusive societal realization, in contrast to the medical model-focused parent groups. This movement expanded in various directions and, like previous parent groups, sought to influence academia' s authority over defining “what is autism.” While many activists agree with the medical definition describing the core features of autism, some challenge the current autism concept because it is considering social communication difficulties as individual traits. Empirically grounded studies supporting these trends are also emerging. Sociology, which has studied the normativity of social communication, can potentially align with the neurodiversity movement by describing micro-level communication styles and macro-level social orders that have been customized for neurotypicals and exclude autistics.