In 'We're Not Broken,' Author Eric Garcia Takes On Myths About Autism
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
In the beginning of your book. You mentioned that the writing began in part out of frustration and frustration specifically fueled by how media covers autism. What frustrated you about that. And what were you hoping to do about it in this book so i feel like the frustration i had about the way we talk about autism was that any conversation about autism began and ended with discussion about vaccines. I should say the completely false idea that vaccines caused autism. There is no evidence whatsoever about it and then there was the other part. Which is that if we want to get. We wind up getting past discussing vaccines. There's just a lot of discussion. about curing. autistic people are curing autism or combating autism or fixing autistic people and almost never. Was there any discussion about well. What is it that autistic people need right now. Even if you believe that there should be a cure which i really articulate that. I don't think that there should be cure that there can be a cure for autism. That's something that's a long way down the road and that doesn't really serve autistic people now and i also was frustrated that i felt like almost every discussion about autism focused mostly on white male adolescent boys and i felt like that was a very incomplete. Discussion about autism was a very incomplete excluded. Plenty of autistic people who. Don't that that categorization right right so it. Just it sounds like there's just a lot of myths that get perpetuated through the media which is all too common right and that this in part this was to dispel some of those that have been so pervasive precisely. I think that one of the things that i wanted to do was again to ball from the title of my book. Change the autism conversation to include as many people as possible. Because i felt that there were. There are a lot of pernicious ideas. About what the idea about whether autistic people can live independently or even even if they can't live independently live and they deserve to live in the community rather than institutions or the idea that autistic people can either not work or only work in a very specific sector of science technology engineering mathematics. And i also thought that there were a lot of misconceptions about whether people can have families or have legitimate relationships or legitimate