موضوعات
آموزش و پرورش
ادبیات و زبان
پزشکی، دندانپزشکی و داروسازی
تاریخ و جغرافیا
داستان و رمان
دیگر
دین و فلسفه
روانشناسی
ریاضیات و آمار
سلامتی، تناسب اندام و رژیم غذایی
شیمی و پلیمر
علوم اجتماعی و حقوق
علوم زیستی و بیوتکنولوژی
فیزیک و نجوم
کامپیوتر و اینترنت
کتابهای کودکان و داستان
کسب و کار و اقتصاد
کشاورزی و دامپزشکی و غذا
معماری
مهندسی و فناوری
هنر و تئاتر
محصولات
Killing Hope_ US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Part 1-Zed Books Ltd (2003) - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Introduction A Brief History of the Cold War and Anti-communism Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has. —Michael Parenti1 It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was "to be as rich and as wise as an American". What happened?"2 An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country-by-country, intervention-by-intervention. The opportunity to build the war- ravaged world anew, to lay the foundations for peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight of anti-communism. The weight had been accumulating for some time; indeed, since Day One of the Russian Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some 13,000 American troops could be found in the newly-born Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Two years and thousands of casualties later, the American troops left, having failed in their mission to "strangle at its birth" the Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill put it.3 The young Churchill was Great Britain's Minister for War and Air during this period. Increasingly, it was he who directed the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Allies (Great Britain, the US, France, Japan and several other nations) on the side of the counter-revolutionary "White Army". Years later, Churchill the historian was to record his views of this singular affair for posterity: Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war—shocking! Interference—shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial—Bang!4 What was there about this Bolshevik Revolution that so alarmed the most powerful nations in the world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had recently fought alongside them for over three years and suffered more casualties than any other country on either side of the World War? The Bolsheviks had had the audacity to make a separate peace with Germany in order to take leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any way their war, and to try and rebuild a terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater audacity of overthrowing a capitalist- feudal system and proclaiming the first socialist state in the history of the world. This was uppityness writ incredibly large. This was the crime the Allies had to punish, the virus which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their own people. 6 The invasion did not achieve its immediate purpose, but its consequences were nonetheless profound and persist to the present day. Professor D.F. Fleming, the Vanderbilt University historian of the Cold War, has noted: For the American people the cosmic tragedy of the interventions in Russia does not exist, or it was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But for the Soviet peoples and their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of looting and rapine, of plague and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions— an experience burned into the very soul of a nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also for many years the harsh Soviet regimentations could all be justified by fear that the capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that in his address in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the interventions, "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution", as he put it.5 In what could be taken as a portent of superpower insensitivity, a 1920 Pentagon report on the intervention reads: "This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings ... under very difficult circumstances to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty."6 History does not tell us what a Soviet Union, allowed to develop in a "normal" way of its own choosing, would look like today. We do know, however, the nature of a Soviet Union attacked in its cradle, raised alone in an extremely hostile world, and, when it managed to survive to adulthood, overrun by the Nazi war machine with the blessings of the Western powers. The resulting insecurities and fears have inevitably led to deformities of character not unlike that found in an individual raised in a similar life- threatening manner. We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and bogus) of the Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. The anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of "Red Peril", "the Bolshevik assault on civilization", and "menace to world by Reds is seen" had become commonplace in the pages of the New York Times. During February and March 1919, a US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held heatings before which many "Bolshevik horror stories" were presented. The character of some of the testimony can be gauged by the headline in the usually sedate Times of 12 February 1919: DESCRIBE HORRORS UNDER RED RULE. R.E. SIMONS AND W.W. WELSH TELL SENATORS OF BRUTALITIES OF BOLSHEV1KI— STRIP WOMEN IN STREETS—PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY MOBS
A devil's chaplain: reflections on hope, lies, science, and love - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1.1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1.2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards. At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then?' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters?' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1.3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
Naval Forces' Defense Capabilities Against Chemical and Biological Warfare Threats - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: U.S. naval forces must be prepared to respond to a broad array of threats. Of increasing importance are those from chemical and biological warfare (CW and BW). To help review its current state of preparedness, the Chief of Naval Operations asked the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the U.S. Navy’s defense capabilities against CW and BW threats. In particular to what extent are they being developed to enable naval forces to sense and analyze quickly the presence of chemical and biological agents, withstand or avoid exposure to such agents, deal with contamination under a broad spectrum of operational conditions, and over what period will these capabilities be realized. This report presents the results of that assessment. It provides an overview of the potential threats, and an evaluation of the Navy’s operations, non-medical programs, and medical countermeasures designed to confront those threats. The report also presents a series of general and specific findings and recommendations based on these assessments.
168hours : you have more time than y ou think - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Keep track of your time, hour by hour, for a week or two so you can see how you’re actually spending your time. One woman called it “one mortifying experience” when she realized how much time she was actually spending checking Facebook while at work and how often it derailed her from getting actual things done. Figure out what your core competencies are and spend your time doing those. What are you best at? Writing? Cooking? Nurturing relationships with our significant others and children (hopefully no one is better at that than you are . . . ). Maximize your time doing those things and minimize how much time you spend doing other things. Stop doing pretend work. Lots of us spend a lot of time being busy but doing things that aren’t actually that valuable. Are you spending a lot of time doing meaningless housework, or setting up elaborate organizational systems or having long conference calls that could be finished in ten minutes if you got right on task? Whether this is in your home life or your work life, you could probably get the “have to” things done a lot faster and more efficiently than you do. I basically always spend the entire two hours of nap and quiet time at my desk, but I often end up wasting so much time trying to multi-task between screens, doing fairly unimportant busy work (spending the last $15 on a gift card or trying to clear my inbox) that I end up having to work in the evenings too and then I feel like I spend all my time “working.” Since I finished this book, I’ve made a list each day of what I needed to get done and then I just put my head down and work, not getting distracted by the other maybe-should be things that don’t matter nearly so much or could get done later at a less focused time. Decide what you can off-load. She’s an enormous fan of outsourcing as much as possible, whether it’s laundry, grocery shopping, house cleaning, lawn care, etc. She argues that Pick 2-4 hobbies or activities you want in your life. You may be saying you want to sew more or read more books or volunteer with an organization you care about or run a marathon, but then you end up squandering your free time doing really low-investment things like watching TV (which is draining and not nearly as fun as you think it is). Figure out what you want to do and then when you can fit them in and make the happen. You’ll be rejuvenated by doing the things you’ve always meant to do and the lure of the Internet and TV will be reduced. She also says one of your hobbies really should/must be exercise. When you consider doing 30 minutes, 5 days a week, that’s only 3 hours out of your entire 168 a week. You can probably (almost certainly) fit it in. I love that she doesn’t argue that it’s easy to make it happen. It takes a lot of planning and discipline to make your life look like you want it to, instead of just piddling your life away running errands, checking email, and watching TV. And she has such an engaging writing style – I think she’s somewhat similar to Gretchen Rubin, with a lot of anecdotes, discussions about what she does well herself and also where she falls short, and an ability to make all sorts of data and statistics really engaging. There are certainly things I don’t agree with her on. I’m not willing to let my housekeeping slip to barely passable to get back a small chunk of time; I’m not the world’s best housekeeper by any means and the time I spend cleaning is fairly minimal, but I don’t keep things tidy because I care what other people think – I keep the clutter to a minimum because it makes ME crazy when there are piles of things on every surface. And she doesn’t seem to enjoy cooking like I do – yes, I could probably reduce the time I spend cooking by making easier meals or doing grocery delivery, but I’m not looking to outsource those things and I like to cook. And having been in schools, I totally disagree with her hypothesis that school lunches are way improved from days of old and that it’s well-worth having your kids just buy a lunch for a few bucks (also, having just read Slim by Design, I know that people who pack their lunches tend to eat more healthily than those who buy because you pack your lunch when you’re usually not terribly hungry (after dinner or breakfast) and so you make fairly good choices, whereas if you buy lunch when you’re starving, guess what you buy? Not salad).
Fooled By Randomness - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: This is my book summary of Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book. According to Taleb, the book's most popular chapter was Chapter 11, the one in which he compressed all the literature on the topic of miscalculating probability. Important point: “it's more random than we think, not it is all random.” Chance favors preparedness, but it is not caused by preparedness (same for hard work, skills, etc.) “This business of journalism is just about entertainment, particularly when it comes to radio and television.” As much as we want to “keep it simple, stupid” … It is precisely the simplification of issues that are actually very complex, which can be dangerous. “Things that happen with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.” “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” One common theory for why people pursue leadership is because of “social emotions” which cause others to be influenced by a person due to small, almost imperceptible physical signals like charisma, gestures, and gait. This has also been shown via evolutionary psychology: when you perform well in life, you get all “puffed up” in the way you carry yourself, the bounce in your step, etc. From an evolution standpoint this is great because it becomes easier to spot the most successful / desirable mate. The concept of alternative histories is particularly interesting. If you were to relive a set of events 1000 times, what would the range of outcomes be? If there is very little variance in your alternative histories (i.e. You chose to become a dentist and you will probably make more or less the same amount of money and live a similar lifestyle all 1000 times), then you are in a relatively non- random situation. Meanwhile, if there is a very wide range of normal results when considering 1,000 variations (entrepreneurs, traders, etc.), then it is a very random situation. The quality of a choice cannot be judged just by the result. (I first learned this in baseball. Just because a pitch you call or play you call doesn't work out doesn't make it a poor choice. It could have been the right call, but bad luck. Or vice versa.) “Certainty is something that is likely to take place across the highest number of different alternative histories. Uncertainty concerns events that should take place in the lowest number of them.” You should think carefully about getting more insurance / shielding yourself from events that — although unlikely — could be catastrophic. You essentially want to insulate yourself from terrible random accidents. We have a tendency to see risks against specific things as more likely than general risks (dying in a terrorist attack while traveling vs. dying on your next trip, even though the second includes the first). We seem to overvalue the things that trigger an emotional response and undervalue the things that aren't as emotional. We are so mentally wired to overvalue the sensational stories that you can “realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.” Fascinating famous Swiss study of the amnesia patient who couldn't remember doctor's name but did remember him pricking her hand with a pin. “Every man believes that he is quite different.” It's better to value old, distilled thoughts than “new thinking” because for an idea to last so long it must be good. That is, old ideas have had to stand the test of time. New ideas have not. Some new ideas will end up lasting, but most will not. The ratio of undistilled information to distilled is rising. Let's call information that has never had to prove its truth more than once or twice, undistilled. And information that has been filtered through many years, counter arguments, and situations is distilled. You want more distilled information (concepts that stand the test of time and rigorous analysis) and less undistilled information (the news, reactionary opinions, and “cutting edge” research). There is nothing wrong with losing. The problem is losing more than you plan to lose. You need clear rules that limit your downside. (“If any investment loses one million dollars then our firm sells immediately.”) Much of what is randomness is timing. The best strategy for a given time period is often not the best strategy overall. In any given cycle, certain places will be dangerous, certain trading strategies will be fruitful, etc. If you find yourself doing something extraordinarily well in a random situation, then keep doing what's working but limit your downside. There is nothing wrong with benefitting from randomness so long as you protect yourself from negative random events. Randomness means there are some strategies that work well for any given cycle (an extreme fad diet), but these cycles are often short to medium term successes. More importantly, the strategies that work for a given cycle in the short term may not be the best for long run. They are sub optimal strategies winning over a randomly beneficial short term cycle. The same can said for setting huge goals, following a fad diet, chasing an extreme training protocol, and so on. Unsustainable and suboptimal for the long term. In this way, evolutionary traits that are undesirable can survive for a period of time in any given population. That is, suboptimal strategies and traits can seem desirable in the short run even though they will be resoundingly defeated in the long run. Important point: you can never affirm a statement, merely confirm its rejection. There is a big difference between “this has never happened” and “this will ever happen.” You can say the first, but never truly confirm the second. It just takes one counter example to prove all previous observations wrong. We never know things for sure, only with varying degrees of certainty. There are only two types of ideas. Those that have been proven wrong and those which have yet to be proved wrong. (Feynman said something similar.) Strive to become a man of leisure who can afford to sit with ideas, think properly about them, and gradually provide something of value. Science is speculation. This is important to remember. Scientists are simply creating well-formed and well-educated conjectures about the world. But they are still conjectures that can be proved incorrect by one random event. It's a difficult standard to demand that you can actually implement ideas and not merely share them (there have been many brilliant philosophers and scientists who have had great ideas they didn't personally use), but is an idea really that great if you can stick to it? Obviously, everyone has different skills and circumstances, so maybe someone can use your idea even if you can't. But generally speaking, I think you should be able to live out the ideas you share. Pascal: “the optimal strategy for humans is to believe in the existence of God. For, if God exists, then the believer will be rewarded. If God does not exist, the believer will have nothing to lose.” My first thought: “yes, but what if you believe in the ‘wrong' God?” Should you play a numbers game and believe in the God most people believe in? Or, can we safely assume that of the infinite number of possible Gods humans could have designed it is unlikely that any of the ones we worship are actually the God? So, just believe that a higher power exists? Whew. Tough call here. Social treadmill effect: you get rich, move to a better neighborhood, surround yourself with more successful people, and feel poor again. “Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.” Skewness and expectations: you can't just look at the odds of something happening, but also the payoff you receive if it works (and the cost of it failing). A bet on something very unlikely can be smart if the payoff is large and you have rules to limit the many small losses that are likely. Minor stalemates in life can often be solved by choosing randomly. In many cases it doesn't really matter so long as you choose something and move forward. We follow rules not because they are the best options, but because they make things fast and easy. Humans are inherently flawed. The cognitive biases that we have are simply a result of how our brains work. Sometimes these biases help us rather than hurt us. But they are always a result of how we are built. That makes them particularly difficult to avoid. We seem to focus too much on “local” changes, not global ones. That is, we care too much about the latest change rather than the overall trend. “Wealth does not make people happy, but positive increases in wealth may.” We do not think, but use heuristics to make decisions. Emotions are “lubricants of reason.” We actually need to feel things to make decisions. Emotions give us energy and they are actually critical to life in the day-to-day world. In other words, the goal here is not to become a robot who can analyze everything with perfect logic. Even if you know about randomness and cognitive biases, you are still just as likely to fall victim to them. How to overcome these biases? We need tricks. We are just animals and we need to re-structure our environment to control our emotions in a smart way. “Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge.” “I try to remind my group each week that we are all idiots and know nothing, but we have the good fortune of knowing it.” Do not blame others for your failures. Even if they are at fault. The only aspect of your life that fortune does not have control over is your behavior. Repetitiveness is key for determining if you are seeing skill or randomness at play. Can't repeat it? Not skillful. “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible. We scorn the abstract. Everything good — aesthetics, ethics — and wrong — fooled by randomness — with us seems to flow from it.”
Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: ABSTRACT Be more effective in group therapy with addicted clients Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory, Third Edition is the newly revised edition of the classic text, that provides you with proven strategies for defeating alcohol and drug addiction through group psychotherapy. Philip J. Flores, a highly regarded expert in the treatment of alcoholism and in group psychotherapy brings together practical applications of 12-step programs and psychodynamic groups. This updated book explores the latest in constructive benefits of group therapy to chemically dependent individuals, providing opportunities to share and identify with others who are going through similar problems, to understand their own attitudes about addiction by confronting similar attitudes in others, and to learn to communicate their needs and feelings more directly. Topics in Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory, Third Edition include: alcoholism, addiction, and psychodynamic theories of addiction alcoholics anonymous and group psychotherapy use of confrontational techniques in the group inpatient group psychotherapy characteristics of the leader transference in the group resistance in groups preparing the chemically dependent person for group the curative process in group therapy integrating a modern analytic approach a discussion of object relations theory group psychotherapy, AA, and twelve-step programs diagnosis and addiction treatment treatment issues at early, middle, and late stages of treatment a discussion of guidelines and priorities for group leaders countertransference special considerations of resistance to addiction termination of treatment Professionals working in group therapy and addictions will find Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory, Third Edition an invaluable resource emphasizing the positive and constructive opportunities group psychotherapy brings to the chemically dependent individual.
Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Bringing Anthropology Back In - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: IntroductIon Although the topics of kinship and economy are central to anthropologi- cal analysis, few scholars have brought the two fields together by introduc- ing broader concepts or large-scale comparisons. To date, the topic is gaining importance (Hann, 2018), and there is some solid research available; however, the results remain disparate and have few links to each other. Therefore, family business researchers with a strong background in management studies currently dominate the analysis of family firms and business families. A better understanding of family business, however, remains both necessary and hard to achieve under these research trajecto- ries. Therefore, the main aim of this volume is to provide a vision of how family business research and anthropology can be brought together, in order to benefit future research in both disciplines and develop a more sophisticated understanding of family businesses themselves. The study of family business has insisted that family ownership and operation distinguishes this business form from others such as non-family corporations, because of the close interaction between kinship and busi- ness interests. Such an insistence naturally demands further specification of how the family matters, and family business research has attempted to clarify the influence of the family itself on business activities by developing concepts such as familiness (Frank et al., 2010; Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Zellweger et al., 2010), entrepreneurial legacy (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015) or socio-emotional wealth (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007). As a result, the kinship group behind the family firm has received increasing attention in family business research in the last decade or so (Caspary, 2018; Combs et al., 2020; Jaskiewicz et al., 2017, 2020; Kleve et al., 2020; Kleve & Koellner, 2019; Koellner et al., 2022; Stamm, 2013). Nevertheless, it still is the case that some obstacles to a better under- standing of the kinship group behind the family firm remain. A first con- sideration about the direction of future research concerns the fact that family business research largely focuses its analysis on single persons and not on broader networks of kin or whole families (Jaskiewicz et al., 2017: 313). Therefore, the composition, structure and organization of the kin- ship group still remain largely neglected, as do the form and quality of these relationships (Kushins & Behounek, 2020). Here anthropology definitely can offer some insights with its detailed ethnographies on kin relations based on long-term research
Understanding Autistic Relationships Across the Lifespan: Family, Friends, Lovers and Others - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Autism, and autistic people, have been around as long as humans have. It is likely there were ancient humans with behaviours, cognitive patterns, and sensory sen- sitivities that would meet clinical diagnostic criteria (though that would be taking the game of historical diagnoses too far!). Autism, and other neurodevelopmen- tal conditions, are part of the natural range of human biodiversity. This belief is known as the neurodiversity paradigm, and it is the framework within which we are writing this book. We take the approach that autistic people (see the language note that follows) are valid in their way of being in, experiencing, and relating to the world, and hope to help them and others understand some of these differences, rather than arguing that they are somehow ‘wrong’ or need changing to be more like non-autistic people. This book is not about the definitions or evolution of neurodiversity, but if you would like some further reading on the topic, we would recommend looking at the book list we provide at the back! Throughout the book, we will be using the terms ‘autistic people’ and ‘non- autistic people’. This is known as identity-first language, and has been shown to be the preference of the majority of autistic people who take part in research on the topic (Kenny et al., 2016). This is different to the way a lot of clinicians, pro- fessionals, and researchers have historically talked about autistic people, as they have tended to use ‘people with autism’ or say someone ‘has autism’ – known as person-first language. Originally this was used because it was thought to empha- sise the person rather than the condition (Kenny et al., 2016), and in some cases it is the preferred language of people affected themselves (e.g. in eating disorder research, people are described as ‘having anorexia’). However, recent research in the autism field has shown that person-first language can increase the stigma against autistic people and has a dehumanising rather than humanising effect on how oth- ers think about them (Cage et al., 2022). Combined with the stated preference of many autistic people, therefore, we use identity-first language in our writing, INTRODUCTION DOI: 10.4324/9781003044536-1 2 Introduction whilst recognising that a proportion of autistic people prefer person-first language. We have no wish to intimidate a minority within a minority and are following majority preference for simplicity. Autism has both a very complex and a very simple history, depending on how you look at it. The simple version is that two psychologists in the 1940s, Kanner in the United States and Asperger in Austria, independently noticed that they were seeing children who had a shared set of characteristics – difficulties with social interaction (to varying degrees), a preference for routine and sameness, and chal- lenges with everyday living skills. Kanner called this ‘autism’ (a preference for one- self or being alone), and Asperger called it ‘Aspergers’ (a preference for showing off his ego). The two did not know about each other’s work, and autism became the dominant diagnosis as Kanner published in English, whereas Asperger published in German (which was not the way to make your work popular in 1940s Europe, for obvious reasons. It may also have had something to do with the fact that Asperger worked with the Nazis in highly problematic ways.). These diagnoses were unchanged over the next 40 years or so, until Lorna Wing and Judy Gould, in 1980s South London, did a large-scale population level study and realised that the children with these two diagnoses were actually part of the same spectrum, as were lots of children who had not been given a formal diagnosis of either. This is where the term ‘the autism spectrum’ comes from, and it was designed to create a broader and more inclusive sense of what being autis- tic meant and could look like. This pair of researchers also invented ‘the triad of impairments’, which, while not the terminology we use today, revolutionised how autistic people were recognised and opened up diagnosis and support for more of those who needed it. This triad was made up of difficulties with: • Imagination and executive function (things like guessing what other people were thinking, or being able to make a plan based on imagining what will happen next) • Social communication (things like being non-verbal, not following standard ‘rules’ of communication like turn taking in conversation, or struggling with eye contact) • Repetitive behaviours and restricted interests (things like repeated physical move- ments such as hand flapping, or having intense special interests) The rise in autism diagnoses following this expansion of the diagnostic criteria from the strict ones set out earlier, especially removing the need for co-occurring learning difficulties Kanner used, was significant. This coincided with the rolling out of the MMR vaccine; and a highly questionable researcher called Andrew Wakefield used this correlation to publish his idea that the vaccine was causing autism in children. What he did not publish was that he was paid by the rival vaccine company, had faked his results, and the blood samples he ‘used’ had been collected without parental consent from children at a birthday party. If you want a Introduction 3 fuller idea of just how wrong his work was, there are literally thousands of academic papers proving it – but these tend not to make such good Facebook memes, and hence we have the anti-vaxxer movement. Regardless of that particular issue, autism diagnoses have generally continued to rise. This is because we are getting better at spotting when someone is autistic, our diagnostic tools have improved, and we are starting to recognise that autism can present in an even wider variety of ways than we thought in the 1980s. It is also because there is now a recognition that we can – and should – diagnose adults who were missed in childhood, for a variety of reasons. For a long time, if someone was not diagnosed before the age of about 14, they were highly unlikely to get a diagnosis at all, because autism was thought to be a ‘childhood condition’. The fact that autistic children grow into autistic adults was somehow lost on a lot of the early researchers. In 2013, on the basis of evidence from autistic people and clinicians, sensory sensitivities (being under/hypo- or over/hyper-sensitive on one of the five senses) were added to the diagnostic criteria. Similarly, there is growing research into and awareness of how autism can look different in those who internalise a lot of their experiences and those who externalise them – which is more what is considered ‘classically autistic’. A lot of these more nuanced ideas about what autism is have come from the autism community itself, with autistic advocates and academics driving change and increasing societal awareness. There is still plenty of work to do, but the direction of movement seems positive. There is also, as we said, a much more complex story which can be told about autism and how autism research has developed over time. That isn’t the focus of this book (though it is the focus of Neurotribes, by Steve Silberman), and so we won’t try to tell it all here. What is relevant for the current book is the focus on social dif- ficulties, which have characterised autism research and stereotypes from the earliest days, back in the 1940s, and the assumptions this led people to make about autistic relationships until very recently. Most autism research, researchers, and parents of autistic people, for most of the last 80 years, have functioned based on the assumption that because autistic people had difficulties with making and maintaining friendships and relationships, had dif- ferent social interaction patterns, and did not show distress about these things in the ways they expected . . . that autistic people did not want friends or romantic relationships . . . that these were just things autistic people were hardwired not to value, or be interested in at all. Avoiding eye contact was seen as a sign of not wanting to engage with the person who was speaking; not inferring someone’s true intentions was seen as a failure to understand that other people have minds (yes, really); and not making friends at school was assumed to be because the child did not want friends and was happier on their own. A whole academic discipline of autism studies, with corresponding theories, was built upon the basis of these observations of social difficulty (along with the other two parts of the triad). A few examples of these theories follow
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