Neurodiversity and autism: where do we draw the line?
In April 2012, the Emory Neuroethics Program conducted an interview with Steven Hyman , the director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at MIT’s Broad Institute, where he expressed his belief that mental illnesses and developmental disorders should not be thought of as clear and distinct categories. He said that “classifications are, in the end, cognitive schemata that we impose on data in order to organize it and manipulate it…it's really not helpful to act like there's a ‘bright line’ in nature that separates the well from non-well.” Rather, he said, there are spectrums of behaviors, and disorders exist along them with differing degrees of severity. This idea of spectrum disorders is common in modern psychiatry, with a commonly known example being the autism spectrum. This approach groups similar disorders of varying levels of severity along a spectrum which also includes behaviors and emotions classified as normal. While the spectrum approach is often touted a...