An article here from The Autistic Advocate looking at dehumanising language used by people who are supposedly trying to help us, yet it looks like we’re being studied like advanced primates.
The main purpose of the article is to publish a letter by Dr. Sophie Vivian, who wrote a letter to Kings College London attempting to counter the dehumanising language she found in old research that is still studied in relation to Autism.
Dr Vivian has often been horrified by the way that her Lecturers and the course material dismissed, stygmatised and dehumanised the very people they were studying and at points, whilst offering definitions of what makes Humans, Humans, actively excluded groups of people (including Autistic people) because of what they considered deficits, often based on very outdated and antiquated notions, that have long since been moved on from and re-understood.
People such as her can hopefully make some difference to how things are expressed, but the reference to where all the money goes is revealing, as that shows who the research may be actually for.
Most of the government money is funnelled into biology research, which I suspect is “cool” and high profile, leads to expensive equipment acquisition and I’d be surprised if there weren’t some pharmaceutical companies in there searching for new drugs to sell as “treatment”.
Support services are relatively unexciting and won’t lead to awards or status within academia.
This likely isn’t an aspect of academic research unique to the study of Autism. Even if money comes from “public” funds it is quite likely that private interests are pulling the strings…