Can You Become Un-Autistic?

You could read this as a straightforward narrative of medical recovery. Or you could read it as a fraught parable of modern identity:

Doctors diagnose a two-year-old boy, Alex, with autism. Like other toddlers receiving the diagnosis, Alex rarely makes eye contact, finds it difficult to communicate, and shows hypersensitivity to many stimuli. He undergoes behavioral therapy, attends special schools, and eventually shifts to a non-special needs classroom. By the time Alex is 10, he’s no longer displaying enough symptoms to fall on the autism spectrum. He has, in a sense, been cured.

Is this a triumphant story of therapeutic success? Science journalist Siri Carpenter isn’t sure, and she captures the full nuance of the situation in a terrific new piece of reporting about Alex and other kids who exit the autism spectrum. The article appears in Spectrum, the recently-rebranded web magazine of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.

As Carpenter chronicles, there’s a long and often brutal history of doctors trying and failing to cure kids with autism. In recent decades, there’s been a shift toward research into the genetics and environmental determinants of autism—research focusing on preventing autism, not fixing it. But, Carpenter writes, “a handful of studies in the past three years indicate that for reasons no one understands, a minority of children, like Alex, shed the core symptoms necessary for an autism diagnosis.”

The implication of these studies, Carpenter observes, “is both tantalizing and fraught.” Tantalizing, because of the burden that autism can impose on individuals and families. And fraught for a few reasons, which are worth exploring in a bit more depth.

For one thing, not everyone agrees that autism is a disease to be cured. From a perspective that recognizes the possibility of “neurodiversity,” autism is one just one distinctive neighborhood in the realm of human cognition. Who’s to say that this way of experiencing the world, if different from the mainstream, is somehow worse? Increasingly, an autism diagnosis comes with a built-in community, and access to a burgeoning identity movement.

A second issue is that, while some kids may exit the diagnostic criteria for autism, it doesn’t mean other behavioral challenges won’t remain. One autism researcher has identified 38 kids who no longer have an autism diagnosis. Of those 38, Carpenter writes, “35 continue to have emotional, behavioral or learning difficulties, and only 10 are in a mainstream classroom with no additional support.”

Finally, it’s important to remember that a diagnosis isn’t a natural absolute that scientists set out to discover. It’s a human-made category, which doctors then apply to patients’ symptoms. When a child loses an autism diagnosis, what has changed? The underlying cause? The symptoms? The child’s strategies of self-presentation? The diagnostic categories themselves? Carpenter spoke with Carol Greenburg, a special education advocate who’s skeptical that many children can leave their diagnosis behind:

Greenburg says that in most, if not all, cases of apparent recovery, people have not actually lost their autism, but rather have learned coping mechanisms that allow them to “simulate a non-autistic persona,” even in formal assessments. But “passing” in this way takes enormous energy, as both Greenburg and her 14-year-old son know from personal experience. “All autistics are forced into a position where we have to use that energy to create an appearance of normalcy rather than to actually function,” she says.

These issues aren’t unique to autism. We might call them challenges of the spectrum, recognizing that the “spectrum” is the ascendant identity model for our time. In sexuality, gender, and cognition, the old binaries—male/female, gay/straight, normal/disordered—have splintered into a range of more granular designations, or a rejection of the process of precise designation altogether. We can observe something similar about religious identity, where slotting individuals into denominations has become more difficult, even as spiritual life, in its myriad forms, seems to be vibrant as ever.

Spectra bring challenges as their edges can be difficult to define—what does it mean to leave the territory of, say, autism, and enter some other part of the cognitive map? And their fluidity forces us to recognize that people make choices and change, often in ways that can feel uncomfortable to those who expect identity to exist in a more settled form.

Also on The Cubit: Why Science Needs Neurodiversity, Autism Included


  •' nightgaunt says:

    Neuro diversity fits in to humans working as a group to get things done. Just as we have different body types we have different types of abilities and intelligence that are better accommodated to doing certain jobs than others. It makes sense. Some of us like myself, who I have self diagnoses as having Schizotypal Personality Disorder works best alone with minimal human contact. Generally not spoken of in these stories. In fact I have never seen it talked about. Usually it is either Autism and/or Asperger’s Syndrome. Maybe it shouldn’t be so ignored.

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  •' Gem #14 says:

    I think it’s kinda abusive to try to cure someone of autism, As humans we are always try to fix everything else rather than readjust ourselves. If we spent as much time trying to understand and acommodate autistic people as we do trying to fix them this wouldn’t be an issue

  •' cranefly says:

    It depends on how autistic they are. There are some people for whom independence is impossible, communication is virtually impossible, and daily life is a physical struggle due to autism. There are others for whom autism seems to be little more than a personality difference. It seems abusive to try to “correct” the latter, but the former may not have a high quality of life no matter how well accommodated or understood.

  •' cranefly says:

    If getting autistic children to act non-autistic is the cure we’re talking about, then we can consider it problematic, sure.


    Clearly whoever is asking this question is not interested in people who have serious, debilitating autism to the extent that by middle school they still can’t be left alone or put on their own clothes, let alone succeed in a profession. Evidence is mounting that autism is caused by a combination of genetic predisposition and pollution, hence its increasing prevalence. I am all for neurodiversity and will gladly support autistic people who take pride in their identity, but any such movement is bound to leave behind the people with the most at stake: those people who can not communicate their desires or their pride or their pain. If we’re going to let them fall victim to the exploitations of the industrial age without accountability or justice, we could at least not abandon the hope for a medical intervention.

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