New book trivializes ASD, chastises parents, and proposes no solutions to challenges of severe autism, writes Jonathan Mitchell.
Book Review
”We’re Not Broken”
By Eric Garcia
By Jonathan Mitchell
[Jonathan Mitchell is an autistic self-advocate. You can find some of his writing here and follow him on Twitter at @autismgadfly.]
There’s an old saying don’t judge a book by its cover. This rings true in a recently published autism book, We’re Not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation, by a journalist with Asperger’s named Eric Garcia.
We’re Not Broken promotes an ideology referred to as neurodiversity that states autism and other neurologic disabilities aren’t disorders or pathologies, but rather an alternative form of brain wiring and that the disabling aspects of autism are due to societal constraints rather than an intrinsic medical condition. The book’s subtitle is particularly ironic in that this is not a new or changed conversation by any means. In the past fifteen years, this movement has shifted from something considered to be on the fringe to being embraced by the media and a large part of the autism community, culminating in the bestselling book NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman which advocates the tenets of this movement.
The neurodiversity movement has numerous talking points they’ve been advocating for years. Mr. Garcia expounds on these in his book. One of these is the false statement that Kanner, one of the first people to write about autism, had a narrow definition of autism and that Asperger, who wrote about autism at the same time, provided a broader definition. He seems to have cut and pasted from his friend Silberman’s book. The book also pits parents, who are trying to help their children, against autistic people, making them out to be adversaries of neurodiversity proponents who want to build a more accommodating world for autistics rather than engage in a futile search for a cure.
Garcia also makes the specious comparison of autism to homosexuality, one of the neurodiversity movement’s oldest and most commonly used parlor tricks.
There is also the question of where the demarcation line between severe and mild autism is. Garcia and his friends eschew these labels and instead refer to those who have higher support needs versus lower support needs. The author received an Asperger’s diagnosis as a child and has some disabilities. Despite this, he graduated from college and became a successful journalist, employed at several prominent media outlets. He claims he has common ground with highly impaired individuals who can’t speak and need round the clock care, but neglects to state how he’s similar to these people. He also states with the proper resources, others on the spectrum can function at his level, but does not say how this can be accomplished.
On the question of what can be done about the fact autistic persons engage in self-injury and might infringe on other’s space in a variety of ways, Garcia acknowledges these are problems that should be dealt with, but neglects to state how this can be done.
He mentions the neurodiversity movement’s trope about autism being underestimated in girls and believes more women should receive the cachet of a diagnosis. He states there is no biologic basis for an uneven sex ratio — which has been seen to be about 4:1 male:female in hundreds of studies — and is apparently ignorant of the widely replicated findings of a female protective effect in the scientific literature. This is where a girl has to have a stronger hit of genetic mutations to become autistic than a boy.
Attention to details that enables autistic persons to be an asset in the corporate world, despite an upwards eighty-five percent unemployment rate, is another common trope of the neurodiversity movement. Garcia mentions his friend John Marble, another neurodiversity proponent, who has a company that tries to help autistic persons find jobs based on this notion.
The concept of a theoretical cure for autism is also mentioned in the book and has been a rallying cry of the neurodiversity movement for years. This is despite the fact Autism Speaks has abandoned the word ‘cure’ in their mission statement and it’s not apparent, at least to me, who is doing research with the specific intent of finding an autism cure.
The problems autistic people have with dating are also touched upon in the book. The author gives an example of an autistic couple who are married and claims acceptance will solve lack of romance problems of autistics. However, the husband received his diagnosis in adulthood and his wife is self-diagnosed.
Another thing the neurodiversity movement does is use autistic people as a conduit to pursue an identity politics agenda. Sometimes when perusing neurodiversity websites, one gets the impression they are more interested in the problems of people of color than they are in autism-related matters. In his book, Garcia talks about George Floyd and other black people who have been murdered by police officers and he finds a way to relate the disparate conditions of being autistic and being black, another old trick of the neurodiversity movement.
Last, but certainly not least, the author uses derogatory slurs frequently used by neurodiversity proponents. They refer to parents as “infantilizing” their children and thus denying them the best possible outcomes. Autistics, such as myself, who don’t agree with Mr. Garcia’s perspectives on neurodiversity and other autism-related matters are referred to as having “internalized ableism,” meaning they are bigoted against persons with disabilities, including themselves.
Though the book provides some interesting and novel information that’s beyond the scope of this article, instead of proposing to change the autism conversation, it mostly presents the same old neurodiversity talking points of an already changed conversation.
So far, there have been several pro-neurodiversity books published including the New York Times bestseller NeuroTribes. Though it may not do as well as NeuroTribes, in the two days since its release as of this writing, it appears on track to be a commercial success. With the trivial exceptions of one or two memoirs by parents, who touch on the subject of neurodiversity, to the best of my knowledge, there are no published books scrutinizing and criticizing this movement that would really provide something novel in the autism conversation. I hope one comes out someday, but I won’t hold my breath.
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