What Do You Think: Are Autistic People “Ill?”
What Do You Think: Are Autistic People “Ill?” Wednesday November 8, 2006 Google alerts sent me this headline from a newspaper in Wales: Finding jobs for autistic victims 7/11/2006 Newport 30-year-old Joe Powell thought he was a hopeless failure when he was sacked from his job with a police force for “a lack of communication. ” Then he discovered he had Asperger Syndrome (a form of autism) and realised he was ill, not incompetent. The article goes on to explain how relatively small changes in the workplace plus a dose of understanding made all the difference for Joe. There was nothing wrong with the article overall, but it struck me strangely, because I’ve never thought of autistic people as “victims” of an “illness,” but rather as people with mild to radical differences in how they think and perceive. In fact, autism is not classified as a mental illness, along the lines of schizophrenia or depression. Instead,
