Is Autism Biological or Psychological?

We all naturally have the desire to control, and basically "take charge" of our lives. We simply cannot let the concept that there are things beyond our control, enter our minds. That's why biological explanations of a disorder are so frightening to us, they serve as evidence that we are not as omnipotent and powerful as we would like to be. To combat it we often create alternative explanations of a biological phenomena.

Autism is generally considered an organic disorder. Scientists were able to identify it as such, because of it's rather large correlation among monozygotic (identical) twins, and a practically absent correlation among dizygotic (non-identical) twins. Yet, there still have been many psychological explanations of autism, some of which I will describe and analyze in this article.

In 1976 the psychologist Bettelheim proposed that autism was caused by the subconscious wish of the parent to make the child disappear, which influenced the child's development. This belief had wide repercussions on how autism was viewed, and additionally put the burden of guilt onto the child's parents. Although this psychology's, just like all his companions in the psychogenic (psychological) explanations of autism, have emphasized that they do not intend to imply that it is the parents "fault" that their child has autism, the popularly received message was completely different and created considerable distress in numerous parents of a child suffering from an autistic spectrum disorder.

Of course there has been some evidence that social and environmental factors do play a role, and have an influence on autism. For example a very large percentage of blind children suffer from an autism spectrum disorder. Probably because of the impairment in social interaction associated with being blind. This impoverishment, and lack of certain interpersonal experiences, might in turn contribute to the development of autism in children who are already predisposed to autism by their genes. For it is important to note that even though the prevalence of autism in identical twins was indeed high it wasn't absolute. Actually the correlation in one study conducted by Firth was only 34%. Of the eleven autistic children with monozygotic twins only four (34%) had a twin with an autistic spectrum disorder, which means that seven (66%) didn't, so there's definitely more to autism than genes, but this does not negate the fact that most of the contributors towards autism are biological and not psychological.

All parents were relieved of a substantial amount of unneeded guilt, when science has progressed enough to rule out the hypothesis that autism was caused by psychological factors, which serves as evidence of how developmental psychology can improve the lives of not only children, but also by parents, by for example protecting them from holding distressing beliefs which further complicate their already difficult lives.