Showing posts with label disability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disability. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity, by Devon Price

Penguin Random House Audio, ISBN 9780593507353, April 2022

This is an insightful book about about being autistic, masking (bluntly, pretending to be neurotypical as well as one can), the important reasons to stop masking, and the risks and benefits of starting to unmask.

Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist, a professor at Loyola University, and his work is published in peer-reviewed journals in the field. He's also autistic and transgender, and can fairly be said to have a deep personal understanding of the issues of difference, alienation, isolation, and denial of self that he discusses here, along with a professional, scholarly understanding of them that's surprisingly rare in psychological and psychiatric professionals. Autism has mostly been defined as a medical problem to be solved, by getting autistics to behave like neurotypicals, rather than helping autistics to understand and use our differences, and prompting the neurotypical world to make room for our differences and our strengths.