Neurotribes - A Book by Steve Silberman

I've never spent much time learning and thinking about neurodiversity - until this year. I've been working my way through the book  Neurotribes by Steve Silberman (who I know from The Well). Neurodiversity is commonly known as:

- Autism
- Asperger's Syndrome

Both exist on a wide spectrum of symptoms, capabilities, and outcomes.

This long book takes the reader through the unfortunate history of autism - how western society and psychiatry have failed neurodiverse people since the 1800s. It's only recently (this century!) that autism and neurodiversity have been recognized as truly unique conditions that are outside of the schizophrenia diagnoses that children with autism would receive during and before the 20th century. This book is extremely well-researched and dense with detail about the history of the "treatment" of autism and Asperger's Syndrome. The book has multiple mini-biographies in it, used to illustrate the lives of the afflicted, their parents and siblings, and the psychologists who have both massively messed these folks up for a few centuries, and who have taken years and years to see those afflicted with these conditions as beings worthy of respect. It becomes obvious from reading this book that some of our most respected and effective scientists and engineers exist on the autism/Asperger's spectrum.

There's 'no need to read the book like you'd read a novel. I've managed to spread the reading out over the course of 2022. 

I think this book is a worthwhile read for those who are seriously practicing meditation and want to know more about how the human mind exists on a very, very wide spectrum of capabilities.  This book made me think very differently about some of the people I've known in my life and gave me a much more compassionate and informed view of neurodiversity. I see now that having these conditions is actually additive to human society, just another way to be, and a different view on the workings of the human mind.

Great question -

The book covers the increase in neurodiversity diagnoses and concludes after a lot of data is analyzed and discussed, that the increase is primarily due to re-examining what constitutes autism in the DSM . As the DSM committees expanded the autism definition more and more people were classified as autistic, so while it appeared from the outside like there was an emerging epidemic of autism, there wasn't.

The perception of increasing levels of autism in the population was also fueled by a Danish vaccination study that claimed autism's cause was often the MMR vaccine. The story is very complicated and handled as such in the book. There are also pretty clearly environmental factors that may very well contribute to autism, just like they can contribute to cancer and other diseases.

Silberman also makes it clear that autistic children were almost always diagnosed as schizophrenic for many, many decades. As the acceptance of autism and what it is grew due to things like the movie " Rain Man " and the rise of autistic savants like Tempel Grandin, a diagnosis of autism became less problematic and thus more common.