Good, perceptive article by Polly Morrice on autism as metaphor, or as interpretive lens:

It's easy to see autism's appeal to storytellers. Even mildly autistic people have problems communicating and understanding social behavior; what's more, these difficulties remain tantalizingly unexplained in an era when medical advances have demystified so many other ailments. We now know too much about, say, cholesterol, for a writer to portray heart disease as metaphorically as Ford Maddox Ford did almost a century ago in ''The Good Soldier.'' But writers can still turn to autism when they're looking for an ailment that can drive a plot and convey what English teachers once called ''layers of meaning.''

Quite right. Interestingly, I watched a stupid fuckwad of a school psychologist in action a few weeks ago, as he was officiating at a CSE for an autistic child--after thirty years in the district, seeing no doubt scores of autistic children, he had clearly learned NOTHING and wanted to know what parent training was. He also commented, "Children with autism don't attach meaning to the world." I'm still trying to figure out what that means. Maybe I'm autistic and don't attach meaning to the world.* He's the type who fancies himself blunt-spoken, able to get at that final layer of meaning: he once said at a meeting, "Other children don't like this kid. I don't like him either."

*But it's just so dumbass. If it's in the sense that autistic people are less prone to understanding double meanings, they often nevertheless understand single meanings. Does it mean that they attach less symbolism, the symbolic system of language? Perhaps, and yet they often can learn visual systems better than we neurotypicals can.

I liked what Morrice, a POA, had to say re Mark Haddon's novel (I'm too lazy to type out the title):

For parents who, like me, have a child with some of Christopher's traits, the least believable aspect of the novel isn't his stupendous math talent but his utter remoteness from his family. Yet Christopher's inability to connect with the people who adore him (he likes dogs better than their masters) is what the novel is all about. If he were to hug his dad, it might be a more authentic rendering of his form of autism, but as fiction it would strike a false note.

Again, exactly. Though I read the remoteness as his inability to put emotions into words: his descriptions of screaming were usually externalized, the way I remember the book--he'd have the reaction but wouldn't describe what was happening within him to cause the reaction.

And I confess my impatience with the psychologist types who've said things like, "I wonder what's going on in his head" about my friend's child. I'm sure they have this whole alternate universe cyber-thing going on in their heads: she's asked her kid, and a lot of the time what's going on when he's stimming is whatever his current anxiety is. My child is very verbal, and I can usually tell what she's mulling over or obsessing about--I'm similar enough that I know the pleasures of diving into one's perseveration.