I don't know about anyone else, but I very rarely read a book for just one reason. (It feels like I rarely do
anything for just one reason.) Nothing is unmixed.
So
I've been interested in Temple Grandin, the most famous and
accomplished person with autism, for a while, because of what she
accomplished and because of what she overcame. And, as the father of a
son on the autism spectrum -- I think the current DSM collapsed all of
the previous niche categories to "autism spectrum disorder" with
explanations in individual cases -- I'm worried and interested and
thrilled and confused by what that disorder means. (And I know that
every person is a bit different, particularly in this area: the current
medical category of "autism" covers a vast territory from "not great at
personal interaction" to "completely non-verbal.")
Thinking in Pictures was
Grandin's third book and her second to wrestle with the "who I am and
how I got to where I am" question, after her first book
Emergence: Labeled Autistic.
And I believe this is generally seen as the Grandin book to read or
start with -- unless you're engaging with her on a professional level,
obviously, in which case you'd look at her technical publications -- so
it was the one I picked up.
It's something like an
autobiography and something like a book about how her mind works
differently than those of neurotypical people and something like a book
about how to understand and deal with people with autism. Grandin
organized the book into eleven thematic chapters, each more-or-less
about how autism affects one aspect of her life -- and the lives of
others, informed by research. Grandin is a scholar, so she has
citations of the kind suitable for a mass-audience book -- you could
follow them, if you really wanted to. Since the book is twenty years
old, and the study of autism still a young field, I expect the landscape
has changed quite a bit since then, though.
Grandin
follows connections between topics within those chapters, and those
connections may not be the ones neurotypical people will expect. I'd
call that a feature rather than a bug: the point of
Thinking in Pictures
is to give us a view of how Grandin thinks through things, and it also
gives us a glimpse of what it might be like for an autistic person to
live in a world with people who think neurotypically.
I do think things have changed, in treatment options and definitely in categorization, since Grandin wrote
Thinking in Pictures.
So those sections and references may be less useful these days, particularly to families dealing with an initial diagnosis of autism for a child. (Autism is defined as a developmental disorder: it has to be diagnosed in childhood, and usually, these days, is identified before school age.) But her
life is still what it was, and her insights and ability to describe how
she thinks are as useful and illuminating as ever.
I
tend to think we all think more differently from each other than we
generally admit -- that "the spectrum" (as in autism) is part of a much
wider spectrum, extending out multi-dimensionally. So the fact that any
one of us is not diagnosed with autism doesn't mean we're "normal" -- it
just means we think in ways that haven't caused this particular kind of
problem yet, or that our differences are less diagnose-able, or just
that we're functional enough that it's not worth the resources to
investigate us. But understanding, in any ways we can, how other people
think can only be helpful. And
Thinking in Pictures is a marvelous look into one particular way of thinking, by one very accomplished and introspective woman.
