It’s fair to say that both autistic and non-autistic people face challenges in seeing the world from each other’s points of view. For children on the spectrum, the use of “social stories” – visual representations of interpersonal interactions – may accelerate the learning process; while neurotypicals can improve their ability to understand how autistic people think simply by hanging out with them in non-clinical environments where sensory overloading is kept to a minimum.

Empathy: it’s a two-way street.

Myth #3: The goal should be to make autistic children “indistinguishable from their peers”.

In the 1980s, UCLA psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas electrified the autism parent community by claiming that some children could be made “indistinguishable” from their typically-developing peers by putting them through years of intensive, one-on-one, behaviour modification. The method he developed into a treatment for autism, known as Applied Behaviour Analysis, is still the most widely employed early intervention for autism in the world.

There are several problems with Lovaas-style ABA, above and beyond the fact that the totally immersive program he designed – requiring the participation of “all significant persons in all significant environments” – is out of reach, financially and logistically, for most families. (ABA practitioners now generally recommend 40 hours of intervention a week, which is still tough for most families to manage without significant help). For one thing, Lovaas exaggerated the success of his interventions. His former colleague Christine Lord, a leading autism researcher, acknowledged that his claims of prompting recovery to “normal functioning,” which were reported breathlessly in the media, “did not reflect what really happened and certainly cannot be used as scientific evidence”.

Furthermore, some autistic adults reflecting upon their childhood experiences of being compelled to act like their typical peers conclude that they were traumatic and contributed to lifelong anxiety, as Julia Bascom does in her heartbreaking essay, “Quiet Hands”: “When I was a little girl, I was autistic,” she writes. “And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.”