In their book published this month, In a Different Key: The Story Of Autism, journalists John Donvan and Caren Zucker delve into the history of the good and bad intentions, sometimes wrong-headed science, and shifting definitions that can cloud our understanding of what has come to be called the autism spectrum.

In their Tuesday conversation with NPR's Robert Siegel, host of All Things Considered, Donvan and Zucker tell of a particularly dark period in the 1940s when psychiatrists blamed autistic behavior on "refrigerator mothers" — emotionally distant women who, supposedly, didn't love their children enough. "This was a very, very poisonous idea," says Donvan. And it wasn't the last flawed notion about autism's roots.

Highlights of the interview follow, edited for space and clarity.
Siegel: How would you define autism?

Zucker: Well it depends who you are actually because autism is now seen as a spectrum and the spectrum is so broad right now that there are people on one end of it that are severely, severely disabled and you can't help but call it a disability because people are literally injuring themselves — they can't communicate, they can't do things by themselves. On the other extreme end of the spectrum are people who can speak for themselves, they can manage their lives; they do not see autism as a disability but just as a different fabric in humanity.

Donvan: Because this condition is not one that has a biological marker, you cannot identify autism by a cheek swab or a blood test, but you identify it by looking at people's behaviors. That has allowed, over decades, for so many various interpretations of those key traits that the definition itself has moved again and again. - Read More at the Autism

'In A Different Key' Traces History And Politics Of Autism

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