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Can weird be normal? This month’s Wired features a profile of Amanda Baggs, a twenty-seven-year old with autism. In her popular YouTube self-portrait, Baggs says that her seemingly bizarre and stereotyped movements constitute a language and a sophisticated form of interaction with the material world. To explain herself, Baggs types her words and has them vocalized by a synthesizer.
Baggs’s primary point, one supported by current research, is that people with autism are more intelligent than the medical literature had suggested. She and others make the additional claim that autism is not a disorder but a different way of being. A leading researcher, Laurent Mottron, sums up this perspective when he says that autistic children are simply “of another kind.” The author of the Wired piece, David Wolman, summarizes Baggs’s position as “We’re here. We’re weird. Get used to it.”
Psychiatry has been under fire in recent years for multiplying diagnoses and, with them, stigma. But diagnoses allow for research that corrects popular misimpressions. (These include the mental health professions' past mistakes—for example, the psychoanalytic view that autism is a defect in children that arises from unattuned mothering.) Diagnoses can also lead to services needed by, in this case, autistic patients with grave disabilities. And now, diagnoses allow for solidarity and the sort of activism—Wolman's interviewees trace this inspiration—that has benefited groups such as gays, through the civil rights efforts of identity politics. We may be entering an era when the two tendencies coexist—ever more specific labels and ever more generous understandings of what it is to be human.
