When I worked in residential care, “autism” referred to the severely affected individuals who were entirely dependent on various levels of care. These were individuals with profound disabilities in communication, cognition and any form of human interaction.
Some of these unfortunates required secure settings and full-time trained staff. The delivered care that I saw was always excellent, but sadly, stories of abuse abound.
One thing the public is rarely aware of is that secure units are virtually empty of all throwable objects, and “care” is largely reduced to “control” because there is very little else that can be done.
Then things got rebranded. We were told that these people were “learning disabled” and that we had to refer to them as “people with learning disabilities,” and that community integration was key to their survival. This program utterly failed for two main reasons. The public wanted no integration with them, and they either wanted no integration with the public or were utterly incapable of it. The resources (financial as well as neurological) to make this happen were simply never available.
Instead, it was the notion of autism that got integrated, where the people did not.
And now, like so many other real conditions that affect real people, it’s become the latest fad, a social toy, a new portion of identity politics, and one big social justice movement bandwagon for so many people who have nothing wrong with them to jump on and shout about.
