Photo: Charlene Croft | Creative Commons / Flickr [image: hand of a person with light skin arranging long red, green, and yellow construction blocks in a line.] Shannon Des Roches Rosa @shannonrosa Autism research is mostly failing my teenage son and his autistic community. Saying something so forthright may seem harsh, but this is the Greta Thunberg era—and we’re now telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. I’ve been going to autism science conferences and scrutinizing autism research for nearly a decade, and during this time most autism studies have remained mired in areas like causation—a pursuit that does absolutely nothing to improve the lives of autistic people who are here already. Even more frustratingly, when research does address the needs of existing autistic people it does so with the goal of “intervention,” rather than focusing on quality of life, and largely neglects those…