Today’s episode critiques the historical bias within autism research toward deficit and pathology rather than genuine understanding of strengths. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, examines a systematic review by Chow and Cooper (2024), which sought to catalogue the lived experiences of strengths as defined by autistic individuals, yet found a profound scarcity of strength-focused data within the existing literature. This lack of data is presented not as an absence of autistic strengths, but as a symptom of a research structure built on neurotypical assumptions and deficit models, where autistic self-definitions are often marginalised or reframed as symptoms. Ultimately, she argues that the true “deficit” lies in the research archive and its methodologies, calling for a fundamental reorientation of the field to prioritise autistic voices and participatory justice.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/listening-for-the-absent-record-autistic
Let me know what you think.
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