Leo Kanner

How did you come up with the name?

[laughs] So, uh, we gotta give my husband credit for it, 'cause when we were brainstorming names, he suggested Refrigerator Moms because there is the Refrigerator Mother theory that dates back to Bettelheim, Leo Kanner.

These are old-school psychiatrists-

Right

What's changed, though, was in the '90s, a lot of them started becoming disabled, and that was not what was happening before.

The, the proportion that were disabled were one in 10,000 or one in 15,000 in the, in the days of Leo Kanner.

Leo Kanner used to drive, [chuckles] you know, it would take him months driving from state to state to find a single case, and, and I don't think that was just identification.

I, I mean, some of it probably was, you know, they were calling it other things, certainly.

But, but the cases that he picked out were spot on what we view as autism and apraxia today.

i suppose i mean if we think about some of the journey of autism so it was around 1943 canna did a study um of of a group of young people and he observed their behaviors observed being a keyword because it was an observational study not you know, not a discussion and understanding experiences from people, more an observation of their behaviours.

And it was Kanner that kind of coined a lot of the terms around autism, but he used words like unique syndrome and talked about autism as a childhood and say the word disorder.

So in that respect, if you were to think about things from a social constructionist perspective, you know, was autism there before Canna named it? It had been referred to as a kind of a behaviour within another diagnostic presentation before, but never a standalone diagnosis.

So did Canna discover autism or did Canna make autism by a naming of behaviours as autism? There's, you know, that's one way of looking at things really.

I think over time, the understanding of autism changed a lot, but Kanner's study was very much around boys.

There were girls within his study, but some of that kind of narrative around autism as a male presentation kind of stemmed from then.

I mean, there's millions of children like that that are getting buried by this argument of the super kids, uh, with, you know, Asperger's.

So it's, it, that's a, it's a very complicated issue, but one that should be addressed, but you cannot, all I'll say is this, the moment autism is discovered by Leo Kanner, um, he, You know, who people travel around the world.

Psychologists traveled all around the world to meet his 12 kids with this new thing he discovered.

Why were they traveling if they had them right where they were working? Right.