Autism and Thriving: A Critical Review of the Academic Literature

Abstract

While traditional deficit-based biomedical accounts of autism have viewed autism itself as an obstacle to thriving, recent discussions based on social/relational models of disability argue that this pathologizing rhetoric perpetuates stigma and negative views of autism, which, in turn, create social and environmental challenges that hinder autistic people’s ability to thrive. In that sense, this critical review aimed to analyze how the current academic literature approaches the construct of autistic thriving, using techniques of critical discourse analysis. We found two broad categories that depict a contrast between studies that (1) viewed thriving as a process that looks the same to autistic and non-autistic people alike and perceived autism as a “problem” to be addressed and (2) articles that, alternatively, described autism as a natural difference and attempted to understand autistic thriving, to some extent, from an autistic perspective. We recommend future research that meaningfully and directly engages autistic people in expressing what thriving means to them and what factors facilitate it.