Thread by @erikaheidewald

It has been distressing me how many people think you can only believe in one framework for understanding an issue - if you believe in one, that means you think it is the only framework necessary. This is deeply incorrect & I want to help you break out of that way of thinking.

This might verge on patronizing, I don’t know, and if so I’m sorry, but critical thinking skills are *skills* that must be taught and practiced and it doesn’t make you stupid if you’re not good at it - it means your education system failed you. You can get this if you want to.

A theoretical framework or model is one way to look at data, categorize it, and derive meaning from it. It is a social construct. The data is not. In the context of autism - autism is a social construct, autistic people are not. Autism is a way to describe what we have in common.

There is some real thing that autism IS - the epigenetic mutations that create it or whatever it turns out to be - but nobody knows what that is so all we have is data and social constructs. The medical model of autism takes that data and categorizes it into traits.

Those traits are compared to other social constructs of data sets - developmental milestones of neurotypical kids, social skills, normative ranges of sensory acuity, etc - remember, those are all social constructs made of more constructs built around data - and differences found.

Those differences are labeled as symptoms, deficits, etc., and put all together in the social construct of “developmental disorder.” This disorder is a disability - a medical deficiency that limits someone’s abilities. That is the medical model.

Now let’s try a different model - the social model. We have the same data - autistic people and everything we do and experience. This time, we measure and categorize the data in a different way. Instead of an outside observer doing it, we ask the autistic people to do it.

Autistic people also observe data about how they socialize, but instead of categorizing it in the social constructs of symptoms and deficit, they come back with categorization of “communication style.” They also notice hindrances to their abilities - same data, new categories.

Instead of sensory processing disorder, they describe lights that are too bright, sounds that are too loud. The social model of disability says that the light is disabling them with its brightness, and if we change the kind of lamp, they will not be disabled by it.

The social model aims to find these disabling factors in society and change them, so they stop disabling people. It changes the definition of society as being created for one kind of person, to being created for all kinds of people. Society has the deficit, not the people.

So these are two ways to look at the same data, decide what they mean, and try to fix a problem. But are there only two ways to look at data? Are there only two possible models? Did all the data get included in each model? Does either model solve every problem? No.

The medical model did not solve the problems and left out a lot of data - everything autistic people saw as a problem. It only focused on the problems from the outside observer’s perspective. Did the social model’s changes mean autistic people have no more health problems? No.

Many of the autistic people’s problems were solved by the social model, but some remained. This requires a different model, or maybe several different models. Think of a physical object. Does it have two perspectives? No, it has 360 degrees of perspectives all the way around.

Looking at the object from a 90 degree angle does not invalidate the perspective from 270 degrees. In fact, both must exist. All data sets will have many, many ways to categorize & interpret them. That’s life. It’s complex. So now we create a revised medical model.

We take the data the autistic people categorized as problems that we couldn’t fix with the social model. We find that they fit data into very different categories than the old medical model. There isn’t a disorder of autism anymore, but there are experiences of GI issues.

Those are categorized in terms of symptoms - nausea, pain - and given names. Now medical research can focus on treating or curing these problems with medicine, surgery, lifestyle change, whatever it may be. Some autistic people may no longer be disabled at all.

Some autistic people may continue to be disabled by these medical issues, but they receive the care they want for the things they see as problems. If more problems remain, we use a new model. And so on. Now autistic people can live the full lives they want to.

Models like these are theoretical frameworks meant for understanding data and solving problems. You do not need to only believe in one model for any given data set, that’s honestly ludicrous. That’s like painting a picture of a vase and insisting it is the vase. It’s not the vase

Frameworks for looking at data should be used or not based on if they’re helpful, if they work, if they cause intentional or unintentional harm, if they provide people the opportunity to consent. The problem is, society presents social constructs as immutable fact.

Society pretends there is no other way to look at data. It uses its categorizations and labels to make it very hard for you to see what the data actually is - because you might categorize it differently than society wants you to. It can be hard for people to deconstruct models.

The way my autistic brain works is I start from the data end - not the model end. I don’t need to deconstruct models, I need to plug data into them. The data is real, the constructs are just lenses to look at it with. Try to see the world that direction. Start with the data.

Don’t let yourself use labels and categorizations. Just the raw data. What do you see? What categorizations solve your problems? What model might make sense to you? What model would you create?

This was just one example, but every model and social construct in the world looks like this. Don’t let anyone convince you there is a binary choice to be made. The social constructs aren’t real, they’re just helpful or not. Use them or not. The data is what’s real.

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