Talking with Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai About Autism and Mental Health
We talked with researcher Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai about the overlap of mental health and autism, the evidence-backed tendency of autistic people to be LGBT+, and much more.
We talked with researcher Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai about the overlap of mental health and autism, the evidence-backed tendency of autistic people to be LGBT+, and much more.
If you separate ABA therapy from reward and punishment and token economies, you don’t have any ABA left because the entire structure of ABA is based on that.
RFK Jr. has gone full “useless eaters” about autistic people. Seeing autistic people as burdens is straight up eugenics, and yet Profound Autism parents are delighted. Let’s discuss why “profound autism” harms rather than helps autistic people and their families.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced that he would find the cause of autism in five months and “eliminate those exposures.” This kind of deeply disturbing statement can lead to real harm.
Vaccines don’t cause autism. But even if they did, is being like me really a fate worse than death?
We need to be careful about pro-vaccine arguments when autism is involved—because when we say “there is NO evidence linking vaccines to autism” without adding “and fear of autism hurts autistic people,” then we’re actually contributing to negative stereotypes about autistic people.
How can education and disability policy best serve disabled learners, and also support those learners and their families?
Why it is so disappointing to see ProPublica’s recent feature promoting hefty insurance mandates for Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), given the opposition by autism and autistic-led organizations to the practice.
Wikipedia’s editing is nominally consensus-based, so when a subject is objectively contentious—as is the case with autism—that editing gets tricky.
I’d like to share my story on what it’s like having a neurotypical sibling, and how difficult that was. Autism was never the problem, it was the lack of understanding that broke the relationship.