On the 19th of November 2019 a workshop on subtyping autism was held at LSBU. The hosting organisation was PARC (Participatory Autism Research Collective). With help from individuals from PARC and LSBU, myself (Sam Fellowes), Chloe Farahar and Annette Foster organised this workshop. The workshop lasted two and a half hours. There were five talks, each lasting twenty minutes followed by ten minutes of questions. Some papers argued against subtyping, some argued for subtyping and some looked at specific subtypes (or, in my own case, looked at multiple specific subtypes when I outlined the history of subtyping). I was pleased to see that the workshop was well attended, counting 37 people present at one point on a quick head count.
One aim of the workshop was to obtain the views of autistic people on the question of subtyping. I feel this was a success since some of the speakers identified as autistic whilst there were also autistic individuals in the audience. Some autistic people thought that questions about how to best formulate the diagnosis of autism should be largely determined by autistic people whereas other autistic people felt the views of autistic people should be one of many relevant factors. Either way, I hope this workshop went some way to facilitated autistic people, as well as the non-autistic, in providing views upon this issue.
Quite a number of speakers seemed to share a common vision of what a good psychiatric diagnosis should do, even though they disagreed about whether subtypes would help achieve those goals. In my presentation and in other presentations it was argued that there is more to autistic people than just a broadly defined autism. Rather, it is important to understand the specific ways in which a specific autistic person manifests autism (alongside understanding aspects of them unrelated to their diagnosis). Also, I and others argued that understanding how autistic people can change over time is important. It is also important to understand that different environments can influence how autistic people think, feel and behave. So in this reguard there was a level of shared commonality when it came to questions over what a good diagnostic system should do. Some people (including myself) felt that subtypes would help with understanding these factors whereas other felt this information could be best understood without subtyping autism.
I outlined a history of subtyping. I divided my history into three different areas, the 1930s to the 1970s, the 1980s until recently (around 2010) and finally I discussed the present day. I focused upon Lauretta Bender and Leo Kanner in the first period, then I focused upon DSM-III and Lorna Wing in the second period and finally I focused upon DSM-5 in the final period. I outlined how the subtypes which were employed heavily reflected the values held by psychiatrists in each era. I suggested that DSM-5 is still largely working within the values present in the 1980s even though our values are currently in a process of shifting away from those 1980s values. I then suggested that adopting subtypes would help better reflect the values we are currently moving towards.
The full list of talks was as follows:
Autistic observable and unobservable experiences, and erroneous subtyping: Introducing the Internal and External Autistic Space (Chloe Farahar & Annette Foster )
Exploring an autistic derived classification of autism (Mary Doherty)
Online discourse on autism does not need autism subtyping (Dafne Zuleima Morgado Ramirez)
An historical overview of subtyping (Sam Fellowes)
Demand Avoidance Phenomena: The circularity, integrity and validity of PDA: a commentary on the PDA Conference held by the National Autistic Society (2018) (Richard Woods)