How I learned to embrace my autism

I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism. There are evil autistic people, as well as geniuses.

Was Hitler autistic? We’ll never know for sure, but he showed several symptoms. People who met him found that once he started talking, he would not stop. He was also nocturnal, had an addictive personality and developed lifelong obsessions (in his case, racial purity).

Around half of all the people referred to the anti-radicalisation programme Prevent are autistic males. Are we more likely to become political extremists? Rachel Moseley, an autism researcher at Bournemouth University, told me that there was no evidence that autistic people are more likely to become radicalised, but they are more likely to be referred to programmes like Prevent. The reason, she said, is a ‘lack of a nuanced understanding of autism, so that certain behaviours and interests are easily misconstrued’. In 2002, Gary McKinnon, who is autistic, was accused of the biggest ever hack of America’s military secrets. He claimed he was looking for evidence of UFOs. The US authorities wanted to lock him up. A more intelligent response would have been to hire him.

Was Einstein autistic? He did poorly at school except in the subjects that interested him: maths and physics. He and Ludwig Wittgenstein have been described as having Asperger’s syndrome, which is incorrect. Asperger’s is autism without speech delay, but Einstein and Wittgenstein didn’t start speaking until they were four and five respectively. The term Asperger’s has fallen out of favour now that we know Asperger collaborated with the Nazis’ eugenics programme.