PLT Test Blog

Do you tell it as it really is? Or sugar-coat it, to make it more appealing? It looks like in the English-speaking world we are more and more being driven by emotional political correctness, rather than calling things out as they actually are. Now this does not really matter if you are talking about relatively trivial subjects, which is what we deal with most of the time, but is a problem when dealing with a serious subject. When it comes to autism, giving the cold truth is quite upsetting to many people. Bryna Siegel, a Californian Psychologist working with autism for a few decades has been promoting her new book, The Politics of Autism, in various articles.                             https://thepoliticsofautism.com/ She tells a lot of home truths that many parents and professionals do not want to hear and people often react very emotionally and quite aggressively. I have found myself on more than one occasion givin...

Farewell to Pingu I usually succeed in keeping to the science in this blog and refrain from sharing my other wider opinions.  Today I slipped up. Rather like James Simons, founder of the Simons Foundation, I do not have a high opinion of many supposed experts, particularly when it comes to autism. Autism is often a backwater, where “academics” can still write the occasional quasi-scientific paper on some touchy-feely aspect that they consider important and make a name for themselves.  On the back of this, they can advocate for their perception of autism and often encourage ever-wider diagnosis in people who are less and less severely affected. So far this is fine; we are all entitled to have our own opinions, so no comments on Autism Speaks, Autism One, or the various National Autism Societies. They all have the best intentions. I should highlight the Simons Foundation and the UC Davis MIND Institute as being excellent scientific sources of objective information. The only re...

    Monty aged 12 with ASD, “You have been transformed into an Australopithecus afarensis,  you walked upright more than 3 million years ago. Your picture is attached.  This morphing-station is a co-production between Naturhistorisches Museum   Vienna, Austria and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington” We can never know if they had autism 3 million years ago, but it certainly is not a recent phenomenon.  Today’s post, prompted by a visit to Vienna, is a collection of historical episodes that I thought I should include in this blog, before I forget them. Austria, as well as being home to an excellent natural history museum, where you can see what your children might have looked like had they been born 3 million years ago, is the home of autism.  Both Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner were Austrian.  Kanner was later educated in Berlin and then, being Jewish, had the foresight to emigrate in 1924 to the US. In 1930 he developed the first c...