Just a few assumptions which I’d like to correct. I don’t think that people with an autism diagnoses who do not have learning disabilities are fakers. I don’t think that lived experience is unimportant and should be dismissed. I don’t think that the early psychiatrists who defined autism were right, and more recent definitions are wrong. I don’t have an agenda to cut benefits. I don’t think that the medical model is the best approach for helping distressed people or understanding behaviour. I do not reject the social model of disability. I’m not out to destroy people whose opinions I disagree with. I don’t think that autistic behaviour is caused by poor parenting nor should be blamed on the child. What do I think? Autism is a description, not an explanation. It was created, rather than discovered. It gives a name to a cluster of behaviours but no one has found an underlying genetic, neurological or cognitive difference shared by everyone with an autism diagnosis and no one without one. A descriptive category like autism can and does change over time - and so it’s up to us as a society to decide where the lines should be drawn, and to work out the costs and benefits of that.  In order to do that effectively, we have to be able to talk about the competing interests and conflicts involved. This is actually an uncontroversial opinion among scientists who study autism and the wider psychiatric classification system. It doesn’t just apply to autism, it applies to most psychiatric diagnoses.  There’s (a lot) more, but that’s why I wrote a book.

I’ve had misgivings about what is going on in the autism world for a while. Misgivings about the way that many clinicians are going along with narratives which are not based in science, and which seem to be largely based on the say-so of a few, very influential, activists. I’m concerned about the way that we have accepted that expanding autism to include more people is the right thing to do, and how little time we have given to asking what ‘neurodivergence’ really is - and whether it might not be such a good idea to refer to ‘neuro’ all the time when we know that people tend to understanding neurological explanations as ‘set in stone’. But the thing which makes me most concerned was how hard it is to talk about it. When pioneering researchers like @utafrith say that they think we need to rethink the autism spectrum, they are treated as if they are in the stocks. Rotten tomatoes, in the shape of internet insults, are hurled. It’s as if the crowd is shouting ‘shut up shut up shut up’. Except not as politely as that. Whenever I see something like that happening, it makes me more, rather than less, interested. I wonder what they are trying to hide. What is being covered up here? Why is it so important to stop some questions from being asked? For if we can’t disagree, then we can’t conduct science. There is no way to improve our knowledge if we can’t have balanced discussions about why something is happening. That’s why I wrote my latest book, which will be coming out in Feb 2027. It’s the inside story of how autism has expanded, and why that matters to us all. It's just too important to keep quiet about, even while the rotten tomatoes are hurled.