For the past seventy years, autism has been labeled as a disease, a disorder, and most recently as one of many “normals” in a neurodiverse community. In this paper, I will argue that 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 accompany an autism diagnosis.
The terms Disease, Disorder, and Disability each have unique connotations in the psychology community. Some have labeled autism as a disease, choosing to search for a cure and looking for genetic causes. Others have considered it a disorder, and thus choose to treat it with a variety of therapies. Autism is 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 shifted its focus to interventions that promote independence and help make the lives of diagnosed individuals easier.
This paper will analyze different identifications of autism in the seventy years since its initial documentation 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, along with articles, papers and webpages from psychiatrists, scientific writers and from within the autism community. Knowing that there is a correlation between the label given to autism and the way the disorder is then treated can help us consciously choose to support treatments that best benefit individuals with autism.
