Dame Uta first expressed her views in an interview with the Times Educational Supplement in March. The NAS reacted to it in strong terms.<\/p>\n
It wrote a blog post about “false narratives and outdated ideas”, “misinformation” and “false claims”.<\/p>\n
Dame Uta says it’s “just wrong” to dismiss her like this.<\/p>\n
The NAS says anyone with an autism diagnosis will have been assessed against strict criteria and “have lifelong differences in communication, behaviours and focused interests compared to non-autistic people”.<\/p>\n
Dr Sue Smith, the NAS’s head of clinical services, says: “We’ve got a group of people with a genuine need. We’re having this weird debate about what they should be called.”<\/p>\n
She says this isn’t just an academic row but has real implications for autistic people: “Historically a lot of people who weren’t properly identified as autistic were given other really unhelpful labels”, such as borderline personality disorder or bipolar.<\/p>\n
She worries that re-labelling some autistic people could lead to them losing support.<\/p>\n
Dr Monique Botha, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University, criticised Dame Uta’s opinion using swear words.<\/p>\n
Botha is autistic and stands by her reaction: “A lot of people were understandably upset and angry\u2026 I still am.<\/p>\n
“Researchers have a duty to be a bit more blunt and upfront about how damaging these kinds of things can be.”<\/p>\n
Botha feels that Dame Uta’s ideas add to a narrative that “there’s some magical easy autism where you’re just quirky, where everything in your life will eventually work out, and you’re just using this as a crutch so that you can feel special, and it trivialises the reality of a whole bunch of people”.<\/p>\n
Botha says autistic people are united by key features: sensory sensitivity, a need for predictability, intense interests and struggles with communication.<\/p>\n
“That doesn’t mean that we will have the same lives or the same outcomes.”<\/p>\n
James Fitzpatrick was diagnosed in the 1990s, and doesn’t speak. His father, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is a retired GP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dame Uta first expressed her views in an interview with the Times Educational Supplement in March. The NAS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-744902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}