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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Neurodivergent practitioners weigh the DSM checklist against the social model of autism
In short
Facilitator Dr Judy Tang put it to three neurodivergent practitioners in Sydney that autism was at a crossroads between the medical model and the real world’s understanding. The answers favoured the social model but kept the criteria.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Dr Judy Tang, who facilitated the first Sydney panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium on 9 June 2024, opened by putting it to the panel that the health and disability sectors, and society more widely, were at a crossroads between the medical model, with its very clinical view of autism, and how the real world was coming to understand autistic people. A speaker then narrowed the question by naming their own training. “I’ve been taught the medical model, right? All I know is the DSM.” Within that model, the speaker said, the diagnostic manual works as a checklist, under which a person who has these things has autism. What a clinician trained that way sees, the speaker said, is disorder that needs treatment, a medical issue to fix, and a process of othering.
The current edition of that manual, DSM-5-TR, was released by the American Psychiatric Association in March 2022. The association describes it as defining and classifying mental disorders in order to improve diagnosis, treatment and research.
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Sources the story draws on
- APA Releases Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) (opens in a new tab), American Psychiatric Association
- Fundamental Principles of Disability (opens in a new tab), Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and The Disability Alliance (copy held by the Disabled People's Archive)
- Introduction, Assessment and Diagnosis Guideline (National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism in Australia, 2023 update) (opens in a new tab), Autism CRC
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