In a book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, the author Steve Silberman documents society’s emergence from this pre-history.
Steve Silberman describes stimming is a typical self-stimulation behavior. It involves repetition of physical movements like rocking back and forth, hand flapping or repetitive actions with objects. It’s a part of a routine that is harmless and helps them stay calm.
Silberman explain why functioning labels are not helpful. Silberman avoids using the terms high-functioning and low-functioning, because "both of those terms can be off base,". The terms are used universally. However, people who are classified as high-functioning are often struggling in ways that are not obvious. With so-call “high-functioning”, their challenges are often dismissed. Not all kids on the spectrum flap their arms, spin, or stim, many of them struggle with anxiety, socialization, and expressing themselves. Labelling a child low-functioning dismisses their abilities and place low
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discovered that autism was a lifelong condition lasting from birth to death that embraced a very wide variety of clinical presentation.
He discovered chatty people who became professors of astronomy and who would talk at length about their special passions for numbers or chemistry, etc. So what he discovered was not just this so-called high-functioning end of the spectrum — he discovered the entire spectrum.
The whole clinic was, in a sense, set up to be a kind of humane version of society in which the children in his care would learn to relate to each other and in which they would be treated with respect by the clinicians who were observing them constantly. And many of the teaching methods that were employed at the clinic were actually developed in collaboration with the children