Autism, Ignorance, and Love

摘要

Why is there so much attention to autism lately? In clinical literatures, autism spectrum disorders (ASD, or more often, simply a singular autism) are typically characterised as a suite of developmental disorders, usually (but not always) first diagnosed in childhood, with core problems across three domains: social communication, interaction, and range of interests (APA, 2000; WHO, 2007). Though precise aetiology remains unknown, and there is no known biomarker, autism is usually said to be strongly heritable, with some identifiable neurogenetic components (Bailey et al., 1995; Yates, 2012). It is diagnosed in about three-to-four times as many boys and men than girls and women (Baird et al., 2006) and it has a current prevalence rate of about 1% in the UK (Baron-Cohen et al., 2009). With a rising number of diagnoses (CDC, 2012), autism's increasing visibility has seen it recently emerge as a phenomenon of widespread interest and concern, in both scholarly and popular literatures (Eyal et al., 2010; Haddon, 20101.