After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again
Uta Frith seems remarkably cheerful and content for someone who’s spent six decades trying and failing to get to grips with her life’s obsession. “Very little has stood the test of time,” she tells me as we sit down in her living room in a leafy estate in Harrow-on-the-Hill, London.
Around us, high-ceilinged walls papered in a luxurious red print are barely visible between rammed bookshelves, several model brains and a collection of abstract art. Frith has been searching for the mechanisms that underpin the enigmatic condition of autism ever since she first met profoundly autistic children in the late 1960s. “We could identify them intuitively, but not really scientifically – and I have to say that this is, unfortunately, still the case.”
Still, Frith’s influence on our ever-shifting understanding of autism has been monumental. She developed two landmark theories about how autistic minds might develop differently to neurotypical minds – and was among the first to test ideas like these using newly available brain scanners in the 1990s.
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What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?
Since then, the number of autism diagnoses has sharply risen, especially among women and girls – largely because of a softening and broadening of how we define the condition. But Frith thinks that many people at the milder end of the spectrum have little in common with those who are profoundly autistic. “There’s absolutely no overlap,” she says. “That is the sign that the spectrum isn’t holding.”
Over tea and homemade macaroons, we discussed how the evolution of the condition reflects on our present situation. Could the emerging idea that there are a few distinct kinds of autism help us to find a way through the confusion?
