“He paid no attention to persons around him. When taken into a room, he completely disregarded the people and instantly went for objects, preferably those that could be spun.” With this memorable description of his first autistic patient in 1943, a five-year boy he called “Donald T.,” child psychiatrist Leo Kanner established a template for viewing people with autism as so disinterested in forging connections with others that they ignore their own parents.
Now a growing body of research is pushing against that stereotype, finding that many autistic people yearn for human connections and community at least as much as their neurotypical peers. The challenges they face are not attributable solely to their neurology, but also to the ways that nonautistic people respond to them. Not surprisingly, intimacy turns out to be a two-way street.
The tendency of neurotypicals to stigmatize autistic behavior as weird and off-putting also hampers the formation of relationships. This process unfolds subconsciously—even in the first few seconds of interaction, observes Noah Sasson, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas whose work is deeply informed by the insights of autistic colleagues like Monique Botha.
Studies of the roles played by neurotypicals in contributing to the challenges that autistic people face in creating supportive social networks are generally still small and preliminary, but the fact that they’re happening at all is one of the positive outcomes of more autistic people helping to set the agenda for autism research and combating ableist assumptions in study designs.
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