For Tom Cutler, being diagnosed autistic was the happiest day of his life

It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a compelling autobiography was dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as highly unlikely. Though the term ‘autism’ was originally derived from the Greek word for self, autos, people with ‘self-ism’ — who were routinely described by non-autistic experts as being ‘trapped in their own world’ — were ironically thought to be incapable of the kind of introspection and self-reflection necessary to produce trustworthy documentation of their own experience.

When the industrial designer Temple Grandin published Emergence: Labeled Autistic in 1986, it was billed as ‘the first book written by a recovered autistic individual’ — the assumption being that a person self-aware enough to tell their own story must no longer be autistic. (Today, Emergence is still described by Google Books as ‘the first-hand account of a courageous autistic woman who beat the odds and cured herself’.)