2019.06.20

DL_The battle of Autism

From 2002 that the Autism was declared “The Grand National Cause” by the French government, methods for treating autism spectrum acquire a political and social dimension. Eric Laurent, in “The Battle of Autism. From the Clinical to the Political”, analyses the details of the media debate which they broke from political decisions. Laurent displays the ups and downs of these policies, their bases and consequences. From the scientific assumptions based in figures, it is achieved disavow the clinical knowledge non-malleable to the figures.

The figure becomes fetish for a supposedly scientific knowledge. The clinical knowledge then was dismissed in favour of health bureaucracies based on the calculation. For the cases non-assimilables there are the ‘agreements between experts’, which eliminate clinical cases followed for years because there is ‘non-consensual interventions’.

 

In parallel, critical voices warn of handling mass categorical classifications as the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and put the ethics of cognitive methods such as ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) in question. Political authorities are trying to give an “inclusive” turn for treatment, but it remains to define what such integration is about.

Thus, health policies are a source of social debate in the media. And that is where one begins to question the ethics of the ABA re-education, “misconduct behaviourists” for endorsing their successes based on rewards and punishments that overlook the autistic subject.

Psychoanalysis, throughout this whole debate, defends an ethic for the subject, accompanying the autistic in their constructions in a world that presents hostile, defending treatment towards an individual know, not reducible to repeat behaviours normalized. In the next post we will discuss the clinical side of this debate.

Cristina Andrés

 

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