For the past 80 years, autism has been defined in many ways. It has been labeled as a disease, a disorder, and most recently as one of many “normals” in a neurodiverse community. How people think about autism is a major factor in how they act towards diagnosed individuals and how they choose to address the educational, developmental and social struggles that come along with an autism diagnosis.
Some have treated autism as a disease, choosing to search for a cure and looking for genetic causes for autism. Others have considered it as a disorder, and thus chose to treat it with different forms of therapy. Autism is finally beginning to be seen as a disability, and the response to this identification has been to adapt social, educational and community programs to best benefit individuals with autism spectrum disorders. The identification of autism as a disability has helped humanize autism by identifying that it is not a problem that needs to be “fixed.” Instead, the autism community has changed its focus to interventions that promote independence and help make the lives of diagnosed individuals easier.
This paper will analyze different identifications of autism through time and the development of forms of treatment that relate to those identifications, looking at the different editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, articles and papers from psychiatrists and scientific writers, and articles and webpages from within the autism community.
