Unstrange.com

The website for autism father and anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker’s forthcoming book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism is up, at http://www.unstrange.com. You can read an excerpt (the book’s introduction) as well as a brief summary on Unstrange.com, which also contains resources of a kind that are unique about autism.

In his book, Grinker describes his experiences meeting families of autistic children and autism advocates in many countries including South Africa, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Korea. On his website, Grinker has included pages with information about:

• Autism in India, including a link to Action of Autism, a rich and thoughtfully composed resource about autism in India and autism, period. You’ll find links to Open Door, a school founded by autism mother Merry Barua in New Delhi and an extensive list of autism organizations worldwide. Especially interesting to me is the Helpline page, an elaborate listing of questions from parents and answers from Action of Autism.
• Autism in Korea, including clips from Maraton (2005), which Grinker describes as the “best movie I have ever seen about autism” and the Milal School, a school for autistic children in Seoul.

You will also find photos and brief accounts of Leo Kanner, Hans Asperger, and Bruno Bettelheim (including a video of his appearance on the Dick Cavett show). And, as part of the biographical information about himself, Grinker includes portraits of his father (a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst); his grandfather (who founded the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago and was analyzed by Freud); and his great-grandfather (who practiced psychoanalysis in Chicago in the early 20th century and was also a neurologist).

When you are an autism parent, the personal is always political and certainly Grinker’s professional expertise and insight as an anthropologist inform his research about autism, his thoughtful analysis of statistics on the prevalence of autism and, too, his account of the intertwined histories of the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology and the creation of the DSM-IV with the history of autism during the twentieth century. Even more, Grinker’s own family story—his family history—is uncannily entwined in the rise of psychiatry and and psychology in the US, as in his account of his own childhood in Streeterville, Chicago, “in an environment dominated by Freudian theory” (in chapter 3, “Stigma, Shame, and Secrets” (p. 77) ).

All books about autism by autism parents are inevitably informed by a deeply felt and deeply experienced personal story. In the case of Grinker’s Unstrange Minds, the political, professional, and personal are shown to be interconnected because, when you live every day in Autismland, that is what life is like. It is a delicate enough task for a parent to write about their child honestly and to present this account to the public; any criticism or negative comments received come with a double-force punch. It is a bold gesture to write one’s family history into the history of autism. But that is what Grinker does in Unstrange Minds.

And that is why his book is unprecedented in charting out how, “as the general public learns to understand and appreciate people with autism, the autistic person is no longer strange or foreign”—how the autistic person is indeed made unstrange.