Autism pioneer Uta Frith wants to dismantle the spectrum. After a career spent grappling with the condition’s neural underpinnings, she is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of it and start again. Frith’s influence on our ever-shifting understanding of autism has been monumental: she developed two landmark theories about how autistic minds might develop differently to neurotypical ones, and was among the first to test ideas like these using newly available brain scanners in the 1990s. Since then, the number of autism diagnoses has sharply risen, especially among women and girls – largely because of a softening and broadening of how we define the condition. But Frith thinks that many people at the milder end of the spectrum have little in common with those who are profoundly autistic. “There’s absolutely no overlap,” she says. “That is the sign that the spectrum isn’t holding.” In this video, she sits down with 51 editor Thomas Lewton to discuss autism.
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