Talk:History of autism

introductory information

it seems like the lead information needs more context and citations. the writing seems to be a bit weak and lacking on details and like it could be improved with more information 192.225.180.2 (talk) 19:45, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

get wikiproject autism to help?

This seems like it would be a "mid importance" at least 198.110.115.186 (talk) 17:41, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Added to WP:AUTISM, and in my opinion this article qualifies for top importance there. Jhvx (talk) 19:13, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Article confuses autism spectrum and schizophrenia spectrum disorders

This article reads confuses autism spectrum disorders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, childhood schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder).

The cause of this confusion may be that Hans Asperger deliberately borrowed the term "autistic" from the schizophrenia literature, although he stated clearly that he was describing a separate disorder using a similar term.

To correct the information in the article, there are a few paths that seem reasonable:

1. Remove all passages about schizophrenia spectrum conditions (e.g. schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder, schizoid persoality disorder, dementia praecox, etc). We should make sure the same content is available in history of schizophrenia. Then we can add a statement to the effect that "The word autism refers generally to an inward withdrawal and was originally used in a sense unrelated to its modern usage for autism spectrum disorder. For this history see the history of schizophrenia."

2. Rename the article to "History of the term "autism" in Schizophrenia and Autism Spectrum Disorder", and keep the references. We would then need a separate article on the history of autism.

3. Keep the passages but add caveats to every mention of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder that the disorder is not on the autism spectrum and explain why the information is being included here anyway. In this case, I would also add a paragraph or two explaining why we're spending so much time talking about unrelated disorders. This isn't a great solution in my opinion.

4. Regardless which route we take, it's reasonable to have a section on historical descriptions of individuals who some researchers now believe to be autistic. This could include the Martin Luther example. It could also include a statement that some researchers believe that early descriptions of schizophrenia spectrum disorders may have accidentally included autistic individuals. This statement could then link again to the history of schizophrenia article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EvidentFrolic (talk • contribs) 09:32, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this confusion is fully accidental. Autism and schizophrenia really do have a long and intertwined relationship, and an article about the history of autism should surely describe this relationship. I certainly don't think we should remove this information outright.

However, in its current form, the article contains several extremely long quotes from primary sources. I think we should rely more on secondary sources, and summarize the information in these long quotes. If we do this, less weight will naturally be given to the relationship with schizophrenia. Also, some general restructuring would surely be beneficial.

I already did a little of this in this edit, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

In general the article seems overly verbose and in some places degenerates into just a long list of facts. For example, the article contains this paragraph:

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: An Introvert's Year of Living Dangerously was a popular book written by American psychologist and journalist Jessica Pan, and released in May 2019. It describes how the author spent a year fighting her introversion and succeeding.

Is this really a notable development in the history of autism?

I agree it was a relatively edge case. Asperger thought his concept of autism and Jung's concept of introversion were quite similar. (Which this entry made clearer before the quotes from both were curtailed so much). It was a popular book, and one of very few by an autistic/introverted person who speaks positively about their experience trying to change their personality. The reason there are so many books, movies and TV shows included is because they have been hugely influential on how people's perception of autism has been defined. They are not (necessarily) there because they came up with an amazing new idea. There have been relatively few of those since Sukhareva and Asperger.Transient-understanding (talk) 05:55, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

As for the entry becoming "a long list of facts" for later years, that was true enough. A chronology like that seemed to be the least subjective way of doing it (amongst other advantages).Transient-understanding (talk) 05:55, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Also, note that the relationship between autism and schizotypy remains unresolved today, especially with respect to schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder. Although I don't think such a discussion belongs in this article. But see e.g. McWilliam's Psychoanalytic Diagnosis or brand new evidence-based research like https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-023-04690-3 or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31170725/ Jhvx (talk) 16:09, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your attention to the article, it looks much better already. The focus on Schizophrenia has been much toned down and the structure is clearer.

The main recommendation I have at this point is to clarify what the article is about. The first sentence links to the article on the autism spectrum, suggesting that it's a history of the autism spectrum. However, the same sentence cites an article about the history of the word autism, suggesting that the article is about the history of the word autism. This is essentially the same point I made in (2) above.

If this is article about the history of autism spectrum disorder, then we should be clear about when references are referring to a much broader meaning of the word "autism". On the other hand, if it's a history of the meaning of the word autism, we should make that clear in the first sentence. I'm sure this sort of thing must come up commonly in Wikipedia, where the meaning of a term changes over time and the article has to pick a consistent strategy for what the word refers to when discussing its history. But no great example come to mind. If you have an example, it might be useful to see how other pages handle the issue.

My feeling is that in terms of usability, most readers would expect this to be a page about the history of autism spectrum disorder, since that's the main meaning of the word "autism today. For example, on Wikipedia, "autism" redirects to "autism spectrum", and the Encyclopedia Britannica article on autism is about ASD.

If the article is about the history of ASD some tweaking would be needed to keep the meaning consistent. But the tweaking is mainly around wording and emphasis rather than structure or content. For example, there's a section about "Eugen Bleuler: autism as a symptom of schizophrenia (1908)", but if "autism" in the article refers to ASD then it's incorrect. It could be salvaged by calling it something like "Uses of the term 'autism' predating the discovery of Autism Spectrum Disorder".EvidentFrolic (talk) EvidentFrolic (talk) 17:10, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! :) Yes, FWIW, I think I pretty much agree with your main point here. And I agree that this article should be about autism spectrum disorder and not the word "autism".

There's some subtlety in that ASD "evolved out of" (childhood) schizophrenia so to speak, even though it's now considered an entirely distinct disorder, and that the term "autism" was (and still is) also used to refer to a symptom of schizophrenia, and in particular a symptom of schizophrenia that resembles one aspect of what we now call autism – so these two "autisms" are very closely related, but as you point out they are not the same thing, or even the same kind of thing (symptom vs. disorder). In a sense there is not such a big difference between the history of the term "autism" and the history of what we now actually call autism, since the latter evolved out of the former. I think the information about schizophrenia in the article is quite relevant to the topic, but presenting it in an accessible way can be a challenge.

The way History of chemistry treats the topic of "alchemy" seems quite good, and it's (very?) vaguely analogous to the evolution from childhood schizophrenia to ASD. Perhaps a lesson could be that the lede of this article should explicitly mention something about how autism evolved out of schizophrenia, so that the reader will know about it even before diving in to the more detailed sections. On the whole, I completely agree that it would be nice if the article would make this somewhat complicated relationship between the "autism" of schizophrenia and the modern ASD more explicit to the reader, who should of course not be assumed to know about it in advance. Jhvx (talk) 23:03, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, I'm glad we're in agreement on the scope. That will help with a lot of little stuff that can make the article cleaner. History of chemistry is a great example, thanks. I realized after I posted this comment that history of psychopathy is another good example.

I would be cautious, though, about the claim that ASD evolved out of childhood schizophrenia. I'd suggest really drilling down on what can be established as fact rather than what some researchers have conjectured, since there's a lot of published conjecture on this topic.

For example, the first Asperger paper makes it clear that he thinks it's a description of a previously unknown disorder and gives reasons why it's probably not genetically related to schizophrenia. I haven't read the Kanner papers yet, but my understanding is that he also gave reasons it's distinguished from schizophrenia.

So historically, one of the first things we know about autism is that it's unrelated to schizophrenia.

You can make a reasonable case for a restricted version of the claim. For example, it's clear some autistic people were historically misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. It's also clear that after the discovery of ASD, some psychologists (like Lorna Wing) considered a very broad definition of schizophrenia that would encompass both disorders (contrary to what Asperger had argued) but without the symptoms of what we currently consider to be schizophrenia. But I'd try to be specific about claimed historical links between autism and schizophrenia. This is especially true as the links between autism and schizophrenia are controversial, as pointed out in the autism article. EvidentFrolic (talk) EvidentFrolic (talk) 15:32, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, History of psychopathy is a great example! And for sure, I would have to dive deeper into the literature on the history of autism and schizophrenia to really get a proper grasp of the nuance. Reading the primary literature too may be a good idea. I certainly agree that we shouldn't stray outside mainstream opinion in the claims we make, and have thorough citations on everything :) Jhvx (talk) 20:54, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I had thought reading the material that was there a few days ago would have sufficiently revealed how the various relevant terms came to be, and how their meanings changed over time. Some of the material explaining this appears to have been deemed extraneous however. In short - the term "schizophrenia" originally included what is today considered autism. The DSM only ceased using the term to cover autism in 1980. Grunya Sukhareva used the term "schizoid" in the 1930s to refer to what is considered autism today when she wrote the first comprehensive definition of childhood autism. Lorna Wing, who resurrected the term "Asperger's syndrome" in 1979 believed it had the same then contemporary meaning as "schizoid". Only references to the autism-related usages of what are now almost exclusively modern-schizophrenia-spectrum terms were intended to be included.Transient-understanding (talk) 05:55, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Hey, @Transient-understanding. After looking through the editing history, I see that you are a major contributor to this article, so I wanted to just say a few words about the recent changes I've been making, so we're hopefully on the same side:

Firstly, thanks for the great work! As it stands the article is impressively detailed and well-sourced. It's clear that a lot of thorough work has been put in to creating this article already. I've been making minor edits to Wikipedia on and off for a few years, but finding this article was the first time I've been inspired to really make some major changes, because I think it has so much potential to become really great with only some relatively minor changes.

My main criticism of the article as it stands is not so much in its content, but rather its structure: We should remember that Wikipedia is at the end of the day an encyclopedia – a kind of general-purpose reference work containing short articles on topics with references to secondary sources on the topic. And although this article already has high-quality, well-sourced content, I think it is not encyclopedic for essentially three reasons:

• It is not written in a summary style (WP:SS). The reader is forced to read from the top to the bottom and can't readily look up just the information they're interested in. I think my recent edits have improved on this point, but there is still more work to be done, especially on the second half of the article.
• It uses too many quotes, and the quotes are too long. This is both a stylistic and a copyright issue. Wikipedia policy (WP:OVERQUOTING, WP:LONGQUOTE) is uncharacteristically unambiguous on this point, so I don't think there's really any way around it: we have to replace the long quotes with summaries.
• Finally, it's too detailed – particularly in terms of popular media and books. An encyclopedic article should contain only information that a reader who is interested in the topic would actually want to learn about (cf. WP:NOTEVERYTHING). When deciding whether to include something or not, we should ask ourselves "Does a person who wants to learn about the history of autism need to know this?" I gave an example above of something that I think clearly doesn't fit, and I actually think most of the popular books and media could be removed. The ones that we do keep should be merged into the main text where they're relevant as prose rather than a list (whether using bullets or not, cf. WP:PROSE).

I'm not saying this just to tear down anyone's work. On the contrary, I think people have done an amazing job adding excellent content to this page, and I want to help turn it into the encyclopedic article it deserves to be! And please feel free to continue adding more content.

I should also note that in my recent changes, I've not "truly" deleted anything. Long quotes have been summarized, not merely deleted. In the section on introversion, I moved the content to its own article (Introversion#History) instead. For books and media, I made a new section to pull it out from the main text (although in this latter case, I admittedly would like to eventually delete them, if there's consensus on the matter).

I'm mostly quite happy with the changes I've made so far, and I'm planning on continuing in the same track. However, the changes certainly aren't perfect, so feel free to improve it. For example, I thought it might be a good idea to separate out a section called Social and legal recognition, but after working with the article a bit more, I think this should probably be merged back into the main text.

Anyway, I apologise for this ironically quite verbose comment about why I think the article is a little too verbose :) I just wanted to make sure we agree about where the article should go in the future. Jhvx (talk) 10:54, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Jhvx for the compliments on the content I provided. "Major contributor" is correct, as is "contributed nearly all the content on the page". The page was a blank redirect when I started by forking the what had been short history section in the main autism page (before I expanded it, then re-summarised it back to what is there now). Since then "History of autism" had seen two people who weren't myself re-writing the introduction, and one person adding a paragraph to the pre-history section.

I knew that someone would make more substantive changes to it at some point, and I'm appreciative that you didn't make mass deletions to anything but the quotes. The restructuring was disappointing however. Perhaps I should have called the page "Timeline of Autism", then it's highly chronological nature would have been valued more. I was hoping that people would see the value in the previous structure, and add and remove material within it.

The reader did need not read from top to bottom if they wanted to know what had happened during any particular time period. They do now. What they can do know is more quickly understand the history of certain topics you have personally chosen as being important, which they could do even better if they were separate pages. Or "history" sections of the pages that already cover those topics.

As to "Does a person who wants to learn about the history of autism need to know this?", I always had this in mind. You may believe that the works that formed much of the public's understanding of autism are unimportant. I don't. Do I accept some of those listed are more worthy of removal than others? Sure. But nothing on the page was added just because it had something to do with autism. All of it was believed to be substantially relevant to the mission of explaining what autism has been, and has been understood, over time. Each met certain criteria for notability (perhaps I should have included them all for each one as a comment.)

If someone wants a short history of autism, there is one on the "autism" page. This is a longer one for people who want to learn more. This was previously a perfectly encyclopedic piece. It was just more chronological than you would like, and not sufficiently focused on the subjects you believe are important. Transient-understanding (talk) 01:51, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, to some degree these considerations are subjective. I see that you have some points, especially about the chronology. As you can see, all of my edits (so far) have been in a short period between these two revisions:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_autism&oldid=1149743774
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_autism&oldid=1152204433

And here is a direct diff, although it's a bit too long to understand, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_autism&diff=cur&oldid=1149743774

The later revision is far from complete, but the changes are representative of where I would want the article to go.

When comparing these revisions, my personal opinion is that the second is more promising and that it doesn't actually go against the grain of the original in a substantial way (otherwise, I would not have made the edits, of course!). However, it does have a somewhat different structure, and indeed it is partially a subjective question which is preferable. Of course I hoped that you would agree with my opinion, which I argued for above, but if you nonetheless think the earlier revision is clearly better, please feel free to restore to that revision. If you agree that the later revision has some merit, I would be happy to compromise on the details – in fact, no compromise is necessary; just make the changes you want to see! :)

In the former case, however, I'll refrain from editing this article, as it would probably become too chaotic with two editors with such different visions. Jhvx (talk) 02:41, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Jhvx for your kind offer of reverting your work. That is a strong sign of good faith.

I don't think we see things all that much differently. I agree that the quotes were unusually long for Wikipedia, and, from a typical Wikipedia style perspective, deserved to be summarised more than they were. I would argue however they have been summarised too much. Each line was selected for a purpose, and some of those purposes haven't been summarised sufficiently or at all.

I think the mass-media representations should stay. I think they generally work the way they are represented now. A small number of them, like "Rain Main" and the character of Sheldon Cooper, should definitely be in the main body text however. I'm not suggesting that they greatly increased the depths of expert understanding of autism like the more scholarly works did, but they did do much to increase the breadth of people that had any understanding. Autism is not just a medical science, and it's history is not just a medical history. I can accept the argument that their previous form cluttered up the later years, with a large number of less-impactful items reducing the visibility of the more-impactful ones. As they are now, that is avoided.

Successfully separating the sections for "wider societal recognition" and "Social and legal recognition", as is currently attempted, will probably prove impossible. While I can only agree that societal recognition (and the advocacy that achieves that) is very important, it doesn't easily separate from the general story. By all means add to the history section of the "autism rights movement" entry by copying material from here, but I also strongly suggest re-adding the material here back to the sections previously containing it.

I previously had the DSM revisions forming the backbone of the post-1980 section structure because they were so instrumental in defining the understood conditions that described parts of the autism spectrum. (The DSM before that was not nearly as influential in that regard, and the ICD almost always followed the DSM). Cutting them out of the main story makes it harder to understand the evolution of the terms as someone reads it, and reduces the perceived role of the DSM. Given EvidentFrolic's earlier talk statement, it would seem that the term evolution was not sufficiently well explained before, and it is less so now. (Jung's concept of "introversion" is also an important part of this story - which the quotes from Jung were specifically selected to show. Most people are only aware of Myers and Briggs' narrowing of the concept later on.)

User:Transient-understanding thanks for your work on the article! To clarify, my concern wasn't so much about whether the evolution of the term was clear. It was more about trying to focus the article on the history of autism spectrum disorder rather than on the etymology of the word autism. For example, the history of psychopathy article does a good job of clarifying in the first sentence that the word "psychopathy" used to mean any mental disorder, but now means something very specific. It then consistently uses the term "psychopathy" to refer to its current meaning rather than giving a history of all the ways people used the term in the past. Similarly, I think this article would benefit from stating up front that autism used to apply much more broadly but now refers almost exclusively to autism spectrum disorder. And then the disorders that it used to described can either be quickly summarized or we can link out to their relevant pages. Or perhaps the evolution of the term can be moved into its own section, as in the First uses of term section of the history of psychopathy article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EvidentFrolic (talk • contribs) 17:30, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your thanks EvidentFrolic! I take your point about not wanting to focus on the etymology of autism. I specifically tried to avoid the entry going too far down "autism" rabbit-holes that didn't relate to the currently understood condition of that name.

One thing that needs to be understood by the reader, is that a whole bunch of terms have been used to describe what is today considered "autism", many of which are now considered to refer only to things that very much aren't autism. The DSM considered autism to be "schizophrenia" until 1980, as did many others. "Schizoid" was a term used for autism from the 1920s, and the DSM continued to do so until 1994 when it added "Asperger syndrome". Lorna Wing, who brought that term into common use, believed that "There is no question that Asperger's syndrome can be regarded as a form of schizoid personality." When Bleuler invented the term "autism", he was referring to a symptom of a condition that (as we can see now) included both psychotics and people that saw the world clearly, but were strongly misunderstood by the neurotypically minded. While the term "autism" was used for psychotics, that wasn't being written about specifically here - only usage that included those deemed autistic today. Transient-understanding (talk) 01:18, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

One thing I have learnt over my twenty or so years of editing Wikipedia (not all using my current account) is that there is rarely a good reason for deleting things that aren't obviously self-serving vandalism. I see you understand the value of moving text to other articles - this is definitely preferable to removing things entirely from Wikipedia.

If your aim is simply to re-order and delete things, I might accept your offer of reverting your work; but if you plan to add new important material that was lacking before, I think it would be better to improve what is there now. I would rather have at least two people working on improving this piece than just one. Transient-understanding (talk) 06:06, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much for the kind comment! :)

First of all, after re-reading the conversation above, I worry that I may have come across as condescending or even outright rude. That isn't my intention; on the contrary, I try to be thorough in my argumentation yet open to discussion. But it's sometimes impossibly difficult to communicate sincerity over text, as it is too easily mistaken for conceitedness.

So far, I've spent just a few hours on this article, trying to improve the structure, and if my changes are welcome, I will probably spend maybe another, say, 5-10 hours. You have, I presume, spent far more than that adding content. So if at the end of the day, you're not excited about the proposed changes, but merely willing to tolerate them out of a sense of obligation to me, then I really mean it when I say you should just revert and go from what was there before. I'm 100% sincere about this!

I'm a big fan of WP:BRD, but in retrospect, I should have realized that my changes here were sweeping enough that I should have posted on the talk page before implementing them. Sorry about that. I've added the "under construction" template to the page to indicate that I may have been a bit too bold here, and that we should either reach consensus or do a reversion. You may consider the current page a bit of a "live draft" that can then be accepted or rejected.

On the other hand, my changes may have given a somewhat misleading picture of what I really want to do, making it seem like a bigger change than what I actually had in mind. In particular, I agree with you that separating out the section on the DSM and ICD as well as the section on autism and society, was simply a mistake. Furthermore, I agree that on the whole, the chronological structure that I'm trying to impose is probably a bit too "coarse". What I mean by "coarse" is that comparing the April 14th revision of the 1937-1949 section, we see a structure like this:

• 1937-1949
  • Until September 1938
    • Asperger, Kanner, Frankl, Lutz, Creak, Despert
  • October 1938
    • Aperger, Kanner
  • 1938-1942
    • Chorus, Sukhareva, Bender, Bradley, Kanner, Bender, Asperger
  • April 1938
    • Kanner, Frankl
  • July 1938 – Fragile X Syndrome
  • June 1944 – Asperger
  • September 1944 – Kanner
  • April 1948 – ICD
  • July 1949 – Kanner

I would consider this a rather "fine" structure, in the sense that it puts a lot of emphasis on the chronology and virtually none on thematic coherence. I had then wanted to replace it with something like this:

• 1937-1949
  • Kanner
  • Asperger
  • Others – Chorus, bender, Bradley, Lutz, Creak, Despert
  • Fragile X Syndrome

And this is admittedly a bit on the "coarse" side, as it places a lot of emphasis on thematic coherence at the expense of chronology. And I think I had some even more extreme edits at first that I then rolled back.

You will see that I have tried yet another structure in the current version. This uses essentially a "timeline"-style structure, with each decade (more or less) being its own top-level section. Then within each "decade", subsections are grouped purely by thematic coherence. Again, this should just be considered a draft, that, in retrospect, I really should have discussed first, but oh well...

Further changes are: Proper headings might be added for each section (although I'm not sure what they would be), and possibly a summary at the start. And the first part of the article is a much better example of what I want to do than the later part.

FWIW, I think we actually basically agree on the books issue, and it's mostly just a question of doing the work. Perhaps we have some minor differences of opinion about what is important and what is not, but I think simply separating these out into their own "sublists" is quite a reasonable way of doing things. I certainly agree with your general philosophy about preferring too much content to too litte – indeed, that's precisely why I think having a solid structure for a long article like this is so important.

Same with the quotes issue: the quotes need to be shorter, but of course they should not just be ripped out of the article without regard for the meaning. I restored the section of introversion. Hopefully you can make a better attempt than me at summarizing the contents, since I evidently didn't quite get what you were going for :)

Also, I undid my changes w.r.t. the DSM/ICD, since as I said I agree with you there.

As I said, I don't think I'll end up contributing nearly as much to this page as you have, even if the changes are ultimately accepted, so I will leave the decision up to you. I'm genuinely sorry to have wasted your time if the changes end up not being useful! In the future, I'll try to be think a little bit more about boldness vs. consensus issues, and also about the difference between thorough argumentation and wasting other editors' time on overly detailed discussions.

But I'm glad that you can see I made them in good faith and because I want to help out with an interesting article. Maybe some of them will end up being useful anyway. In any case, I'll refrain from making any more edits until we have either reached consensus or else reverted the article. If you don't actively like the changes, please revert them; I haven't made more changes than I would be okay with having reverted. We could probably go on discussing the details for weeks, but if you still don't really agree with what I'm trying to do, it's probably better not to waste more time on it than this and just revert. Jhvx (talk) 22:17, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough Jhvx. I should mention that I haven't seen any success of the BRD concept, in that in my experience reverting anything except shallow-rooted vandalism very often leads to edit wars. "Yes and" seems to work better than BRD-style debate, as it does in almost all fora in real life. Go with what you think works, and I won't be afraid to change things. (I do generally support WP:BOLD). Transient-understanding (talk) 23:33, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you! :) In that case, I'll remove the "under construction" template again, but please feel free to make any changes you like, including reversions. I’ll also try to put in some more time at some point, probably focusing on also adding section headings to the later parts and maybe helping out with clarifying the relationship with schizophrenia, as discussed with EvidentFrolic above. Jhvx (talk) 15:45, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Very long

Hello @Mruanova! I see that you've added the {{Very long}} template to the article, and are working on solving this by splitting the article into subsections. I totally agree with you that the article as written is too long, and I also agree that it would benefit from being split into subarticles.

However, I'm not sure that these latest changes are really constructive – in fact, I think they actually make the article even more difficult to read and navigate. My main objection to the latest changes is that subarticles such as History of autism 1900-1920 etc. don't really work as standalone articles without the context of the parent article. Also, I can see that you've moved some text from Autism#History into here – but in fact that text had already been integrated into this article, so re-adding it is redundant.

A good guideline that's relevant to what we're trying to accomplish here is Wikipedia:Summary style. I also recommend looking at some other "History of" articles such as History of the United States to get a feel for how these articles are usually written. I think that it would be better to split the article into meaningful subarticles about topics that are by themselves notable; for example, perhaps an article such as History of autism and schizophrenia could contain much of the information in this article until the work by Kanner and others; and an article like History of autism in the DSM could contain most of the details about formal diagnosis of autism, which would then be summarized in this article. Of course, writing these articles requires more work, but I also think the result will be more useful for readers.

Also, replacing the long quotations with summaries would do a lot to alleviate the length issue. This was discussed above, but I'm not really sure where the consensus landed.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts and the thoughts of other editors about this. FWIW, I would support reverting but trying some other approaches to splitting up the article, but I'll wait for some more people to give their feedback. 16:45, 10 June 2023 (UTC) Jhvx (talk) 16:45, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

I was also surprised to see that the article has been split and by the way that it has been split. I believe that it makes sense to have one brief history section in autism and one longer but still unified article history of autism that is reasonably complete but so concise that it can actually be read. The way it is now, where each decade is separated into its own article without a summary does not seem like an improvement to me, as now one has to go through multiple separate articles instead of one text that was too long to read, but could be searched for keywords. Further, I feel that the split by decade is somewhat artificial and does not provide a meaningful structure. For example, the publication of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 in 1994 seems like a major milestone to me that ties together multiple timelines (eg Asperger's syndrome, a subsequent rise in prevalence due to the broadened/change diagnostic criteria), and the history of the rise of ABA is probably best told starting in 1987. In my personal opinion, a "history of ..." article does not have to be strictly chronological but can discuss developments with overlapping timelines in separate sub-sections. That's how most books on history are structured as well.

I'm not familiar with the editorial standards around such articles on Wikipedia but I would like to question whether we need more than one "history of autism" article. Instead of creating multiple history articles that cover a sub-topic such as the DSM, the ICD, or developments and movements (such as psychoanalysis, treatments, the autism rights movement, ...) I believe readers are served better by putting the effort into a concise overview of the history that links out to history sections in articles around the respective topics. The main history article does not have to trace the development of every single sub-topic in great detail (eg mentioning each book that was published) but should rather strive to provide a broad overview.--TempusTacet (talk) 18:21, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

TempusTacet, I agree the recent splitting of this article by Mruanova is a backwards step, and agree with your reasons why you think that's the case.

While non-chronological histories can work well, their subjectivity can be easy to challenge. This is a fatal flaw in Wikipedia articles, who have to find broad consensus. "Most books on history" have singular editors or authors - which is not possible on Wikipedia.

If you would like to author and maintain a "History of ABA" entry, by all means copy and paste from here and create one. But that doesn't negate the value of a history like this one explaining how ABA weaves into the broader autism story.

Before the first person came along to restructure this history, it was written in eras. Post 1980 they were based on DSM editions, and before that on major conceptualisations and decades.Transient-understanding (talk) 00:21, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Transient-understanding, I understand that it can be a challenge but I (maybe naively) don't think that if the article were split by eras as you suggest that it would be so difficult to agree what the defining topics of an era are. Eg between the DSM-III and DSM-IV we have the development of Asperger's syndrome into a modern disorder, which I believe is best described in one sub-section rather than intertwined with eg early ToM research or the beginning popularization of ABA.

I'm not (personally) interested in a "history of ABA" article. Rather, I'm arguing against splitting everything into separate "history of ..." articles precisely because, as you say, there is tremendous value in "explaining how ABA [and any other sub-topic] weaves into the broader autism story". I just don't think that a strictly chronological re-telling of history is the best way to accomplish that.--TempusTacet (talk) 07:13, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

The main problem with moving nearly all of the history into separate articles for each decade, is the difficulty in choosing which few facts get to be in the base "History of Autism" entry. Relatively few people are going to read beyond that.

As it stands, "History of Autism" is about as long as the history section in "Autism". We don't need two histories with exactly the same purpose.

Regarding using the "History of the United States" as a model, you may note that it groups things together in eras - as I wrote this entry in the first place! I would have no great problem with this piece going back to that. However "decade-by-decade in the one place" has the advantage of removing controversy over what the eras should be, keeping chronologically related things relatively close to each other, and not separating closely related things into separate entries.

I don't know where the "every entry must be short" idea comes from. Some topics need more space to be usefully understood. TikTok is fine, but there is still a need for longer documentaries. Transient-understanding (talk) 00:02, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Article size#Size guideline Mruanova (talk) 04:23, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I believe that just because the article is too long by some guideline does not mean that simply splitting it (arguably somewhat arbitrarily) is a good solution.

@Transient-understanding I don't think that "short" means "just three pages" but "concise" and "can realistically be read in one sitting by a motivated, skilled reader". You seem to be really concerned that there might be controversy over the eras and defining topics. Has such a discussion ever taken place? If so, could you link it? If not, would you be willing to try drafting a rough sketch and see whether we could reach consensus on that?--TempusTacet (talk) 07:13, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

For context, you may want to read through the discussion above somewhat misleadingly titled "Article confuses autism spectrum and schizophrenia disorders", particularly the subthread beginning "I had thought reading the material that was there a few days ago...". I've already tried to make some changes to the structure of the article, bringing it from something like [1] to something more like [2]. My main issue with the old article was that I found it to be too strictly chronological with little thematic coherence in the individual sections – for example, take a look at the content in the section titled Asperger, Kanner and contemporaries (1937-1949) or DSM-III-R, autistic disorder, PDD-NOS and other conditions (1987–1994). The decade structure was intended as a kind of compromise that lets us take a broadly chronological approach at a high level while still allowing topics to be grouped together in a thematically coherent way.

I want to clarify that I completely agree with what you've written above, and I think the sketch of topics you made is a good place to start (DSM-IV as a major milestone, ABA beginning in 1987 etc.).

My position is certainly not that we shouldn't allow for History of the United States-style eras for the top-level headings. Actually I think that would be a great improvement! But if we do so, the content under each heading should actually match the heading, which was not the case with the old structure. And in fact, it would almost certainly entail either removing some content or ordering in a way that allows for an overlapping chronology (either of which I personally would support, but I don't want to push those changes through unilaterally if no one agrees with me). Jhvx (talk) 11:51, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I'll try to read through the various versions and discussions you mentioned over the next couple of days.

The history of the US article's section on "European colonization" has exactly the structure I imagine: It's roughly chronological but each country's settlements etc are treated separately without trying to construct a common timeline even though many of these activities happened more or less at the same time.

I would also like to emphasize that I don't have any in-depth knowledge about the history of autism, especially not the earlier decades. From my point of view, 1994 (ICD-10 & DSM-IV) and 2013 (DSM-V) mark beginnings of new eras, as these guideline changes had effects beyond healthcare and research (or coincided with developments such as the rise of the internet and the rise of social media, which led to new ways of self-advocacy, visibility, and public awareness). I'm not sure whether the DSM-III in 1980 and/or the introduction of autism into the ICD-8 in 1968 mark similarly significant points? Do you have suggestions for the "big eras"?--TempusTacet (talk) 13:39, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think the "European colonization"-section is an excellent example of what an encyclopedic history article can look like for the reasons you mention. I would definitely support that kind of structure! :)

Well, I'm actually most familiar with the earlier decades in the history of autism – actually I'm interested in this article mostly because I'm interested in schizophrenia. With that being said, as a very rough sketch of the kind of structure I have in mind, without actually having done any research into this stuff beyond what I already happen to know off the top of my head or having put a lot of thought into how this would actually read (titles TBD):

• Autism before "autism" (until 1925)
  • Autistic "pre-history" (before 1908): autism before psychiatry/psychology as a whole; people who were in retrospect autistic.
  • Autism and schizophrenia (1908-1925): the term autism, Eugen Bleuler's description of schizophrenia.
• Early pioneers (1925-late 1940s): Work by Sukhareva, Asperger, Kanner. Kanner first speculates that autism is distinct from schizophrenia, but this is not widely accepted.
• The path to defining autism as a psychiatric disorder (late 1940s-1980): Autistic people continue to be diagnosed under various terms related to schizophrenia, and many live their lives in psychiatric institutions (?), but research into autism accelerates.
  • Work towards separating autism from schizophrenia (1950s-1971): Formally, autism continues to be thought of as closely related to schizophrenia, but there is a boom of research into autism as a separate condition.
  • Autism as a formal diagnosis (1971-1980): Kolvin's paper, and the first formal diagnosis of autism in the DSM-III. Autism finally distinguished beyond any doubt from schizophrenia as a separate condition.
  • Autism begins to enter the wider culture (1960s-1980s?): The term becomes more widely known beyond psychiatry. Autism in popular culture. First organizations dedicated to autistic children and their parents. Treatment programmes.
• Continued scientific research (1980-today): DSM and ICD updates, Asperger's Syndrome "controversy", modern research into autism (ToM stuff, etc.).
  • ABA and parent advocacy (1980s-2000s?): Parent advocacy, treatment programmes, deinstitutionalization.
  • Neurodiversity (?-today): Autism rights, controversy/reaction to ABA-style treatment. Support over treatment. Autism in popular culture.

As I said, a very rough sketch. I may have a bias towards overemphasizing the schizophrenia aspect as the core of the structure. But feel free to comment on it.

The idea is then that within each of these sections, relevant topics would be grouped by thematic coherence. For example, in the "Early pioneers" section, it would make sense to have subsections for Sukhareva, Asperger and Kanner, each consisting of maybe 1-3 paragraphs but possibly linking out to a different article with more information, as is done in the History of the United States example. This would require reducing the scope of some of the sections in this article, but I don't think the content needs to be removed from Wikipedia entirely – it could be moved to other articles, in this case Grunya Sukhareva, Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner. 16:49, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I believe that's a really good draft! I would definitely start a new era in 1994 and 2013 as I suggested above, as we'll likely see that there is more going on in these later time periods (more research, higher prevalence, more involved people/groups etc).--TempusTacet (talk) 17:43, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! :) And yes, adding 1994 and 2013 as division points sounds very sensible to me. Jhvx (talk) 18:00, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Curious to hear what @Transient-understanding has to say.--TempusTacet (talk) 20:12, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks TempusTacet :-)

I think the compromise of covering major topics within a decade works well. It allows thematically related material to be closely connected to each other, while not allowing contemporaneous events to be separated too far.

Overall, I quite liked the structure there was immediately before all the decades were separated out into separate articles.

This said, Jhvx's proposed structure has merit. I suggest a few changes:

• Before "Autism" (before 1908)
• Autism as a symptom of schizophrenia (1908-1925): Bleuer defines "schizophrenia", and shortly after coins and describes "autism". (And Hoch contemporaneously defines the "shut-in" - a term also used in early editions of the DSM).
• Autism without psychosis? (1925-1950): Sukhareva defines a condition without psychosis. Asperger adds some more detail and applies a dedicated name for the condition. Kanner promotes things. Lots of other people contribute insight.
• Parents adopt "autism", others start to follow (1950-1980): Parent groups come to the fore, deinstitutionalisation in various countries, EHA passed in US, ABA established as main pedological approach, rubella-as-a-cause identified, research continues.
• "Autism" first recognised by APA (1980-1994): and subsequently recognised by many other people, especially via "Rain Man". Mirror neurons discovered.
• Asperger syndrome also recognised (1994-2013): the era of aspies and the autistic. Support for aspies improves greatly. A doctor tells some lies.
• Autism spectrum disorder and neurodiversity (2014-today): two competing ideas, a disorder and an order.

As for subdivisions of these, I think "Science" and "Support" work well. I also like ten-year blocks. Transient-understanding (talk) 01:45, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response. As far as I can see as the non-expert in this discussion, there seems to be a consensus how to split the eras.

@Transient-understanding, would you be opposed to moving towards an eras-structure? And are your concerns with such an approach mostly related to the editing process (eg people not agreeing on eras, disagreement over splitting eras into sub-topics) or do you see problems beyond that?--TempusTacet (talk) 08:12, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand the advantage of purposely hiding that certain things happened at the same time. If, for example, if we set all of ABA in the 1980s, it hides that ABA has developed and remained a common practice in all the decades since - withstanding all the other developments over that time. (Not to mention potentially hiding the strong role of ABA in the 50s-70s). Similarly, if we set all of Sukhevera's story in the 1920s, the fact that her notable 1930s work was happening as the same time as lots of other things gets lost.

Breaking these big things up into roughly decade-long chronologically progressing pieces is a good compromise between subjects and the connections-between-subjects. "History of the United States" doesn't try to put the history of cars only in the era of Henry Ford. This is not to say there might not be small paragraphs from one era recounted in the article for another, but having a policy that a long-running subject can made made to fit into one era seems problematic and open to abuse. Transient-understanding (talk) 21:42, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

I believe I fully share your concerns and that we have a misunderstanding. The idea is not to put each topic just into one era. For example, there would probably be a section on Asperger's syndrome in the 1925-1950 era (talking about Asperger's work and discovery), in the 1980-1994 era (talking about Lorna Wing's "re-discovery"), in the 1994-2013 era (talking about the consequences that it was now a recognized diagnosis and the continued debate around whether AS is autism, failure to differentiate the two diagnoses reliably - and this section would sit rather early in the era, so that there can later be a section on the drafting of the DSM-5 that ties together several developments, eg Asperger's, functioning labels, and various fundamental insights from research). But we would not try to describe Wing's work in the 1980s and subsequent establishment of Asperger's syndrome as a term and proposed diagnosis in the same sub-sections that talk about the DSM-III or the invention of ABA, just as the history of the US article deals with parallel developments.--TempusTacet (talk) 07:19, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough. Sound good. Transient-understanding (talk) 23:34, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I think this is a nice structure, and I think reverting to the pre-split version and then moving to this structure instead is unambiguously an improvement to the current article. So, strongly support! :)

Just to be clear on the subdivisions within the top-level eras, what I had in mind (and I'm almost certain this is what @TempusTacet had in mind too, right?) was to keep the current subdivisions (and in particular, not going back to the model of having a strict chronology within each era). This follows the approach used on History of the United States. Of course, we'll want to eventually improve them further by merging or splitting sections, adding new ones, maybe summarizing content in the main article, introducing third-level headings, etc., etc., but as a starting off point, just keeping the current subdivisions from the [3] revision but with the era structure proposed above would in my view be a clear improvement. Jhvx (talk) 11:29, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I had in mind and I support the proposal to revert to this state and to then slowly start to implement the proposed "superstructure".--TempusTacet (talk) 12:20, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

"A doctor tells some lies" can you please clarify this one for me? Mruanova (talk) 13:32, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

The doctor in question is Andrew Wakefield, a key figure in the Lancet MMR autism fraud.--TempusTacet (talk) 13:34, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

That was who I had in mind, yes. Transient-understanding (talk) 21:16, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, since there seems to be strong consensus for reverting the split, I've gone ahead and done this. I made sure to reapply any good changes that I could find, including on the subpages. These pages will have to be deleted. I'm not quite sure what the process for doing this is, so I hope someone else will take care of it.

There also seems to be consensus that an era-based top-level structure is better than the current decade-based approach, so I also went ahead and implemented a version of the new era-based structure. I followed Transient-understanding's suggestions above, changing the headings to try to make them feel more Wikipedia-y. This is intended as a starting point, not as the final version.

The subsections are still grouped by topic. Since the era-based structure has chronologically wider top-level sections, some subsections had to be merged to avoid covering the same topic multiple times (in the same top-level section). I tried doing this where I could spot them, but I may have missed a few. Other than that, I did not make any (major) changes, and I tried to stick to the top-level structure quite rigidly, only modifying the structure of the subsections. I did also remove the years inside parentheses from subsections, to avoid giving the impression that the subsections are intended to be chronological, but I kept them in the top-level sections, since these actually are chronological. Jhvx (talk) 21:15, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much for all the work! What are we going to do about the articles that were split off such as History of autism 1960-1980? Can we just request their deletion or do we have to go through some process?

I'll see that I'll pick a couple of sections (probably the later ones or the ones related to the history of the diagnoses, as that's where I currently have the best insight into the literature) to revise over the upcoming weeks. The DSM-5/ICD-11 seems to be rather poorly covered from a historical perspective, there are interesting stories to tell (eg the lobbying efforts of ASAN, the public outcry over the fear that a lot of people would lose their diagnoses, researcher's concerns that the broad ASD diagnosis is unsuitable for selecting research participants...) and this goes hand in hand with updates in other Wikipedia articles.--TempusTacet (talk) 08:23, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

The process for uncontroversial deletion is WP:PROD, takes 7 days after adding the tag. However, redirect might be sufficient here, as it's effectively a merge? —siroχo 04:32, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't see a reason to keep redirects. These articles have just been around for a couple of days, nothing links to them (and if so, these links should be adjusted anyway, as we won't be able to point the redirects to appropriate subsections), and they're not helping readers find what they're searching for but rather clutter the search results (if you type "history of autism" into the search bar the results are pretty much meaningless). I've read through WP:R#CRD and it seems that deleting them would be in line with the policy.--TempusTacet (talk) 08:54, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I've added the proposed deletion to all of the deprecated child articles. —siroχo 19:41, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

There was more detail about the various editions of the DSM and ICD in earlier revisions, though not covering the specific issues you mention. By all means add something to explain those issues. Transient-understanding (talk) 01:33, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Disability, Communication and Visual Culture

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2023 and 12 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Gkrolewski (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Allyson103 (talk) 01:48, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Auto eroticism?

The source does not mention auto eroticism at all. I think it's a lie. I can't prove this though. I don't know if there is a better source? Should I change it? Krɪt̮ɪkl feɪjəɹ (talk) 17:10, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Krɪt̮ɪkl feɪjəɹ, the deleted matter was not a lie. See https://archive.org/details/PsychiatrischNeurologischeWochenschrift12.191011/page/n197/ - the last footnote on page 185. This paper was referenced. As the deleted paragraph stated, Bleuler thought Freud was right about much of his concept of autoerotismus, but not that it had a strong tie to sexuality. As Blueler created it, "autism" is Freud's "autoeroticism" without the eroticism.

Also, the rest of the paragraph deleted was about other thoughts of Bleuler. Transient-understanding (talk) 13:08, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Does the current article not violate the rule “Wikipedia:No original research”?

The following paragraphs “Early descriptions of autistic symptoms”, “Dementia praecox and related disorders”, and “Autism as a symptom of schizophrenia (1908-1924)” do not violate “Wikipedia:No original research”?

To be cited as “History of autism”, it should only be cited when it is mentioned in another scholar's work on autism.

But doesn't it violate “Wikipedia:No original research” to cite as a source the work of scholars before the diagnosis “autism” was established?

I recognize that Eugen Bleuler's work on “schizophrenia” is an important work on “autism”. But what do Gannushkin, Kraepelin, and Carl Jung have to do with “autism”? Autisticattitudes (talk) 06:23, 23 December 2024 (UTC)