Today’s Master Illness?
Autism might well be the “‘master illness’” of the information age that we live in, Ann Hulbert speculated in the March 28th Slate. Hulbert takes this notion from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: A “master illness” is a “disease that comes to serve as a repository of ‘punitive or sentimental fantasies’ about contemporary society. (Think TB and cancer.).” On the one hand, autism is the so-called “engineer’s disease” of the high-tech geek; on the other hand, autism is (as Hulbert writes) a child who is non-verbal, severely disabled, perhaps as the result of mercury poisoning from a vaccine. Autism seems to symbolize both what might be thought best and worst in our society.
Do you think autism is the early 21st century’s “master illness”?
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POSTED IN: Books, Environment, Q & A
9 opinions for Today’s Master Illness?
mothersvox
Mar 29, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Possibly. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about. I think there is another component here that Hulbert doesn’t mention . . . Our cultural anxiety about individualism . . . A hyperindividualist society — where market economics suggest that it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves — has as it’s worst fears isolation and dependence. Stereotypes about autism — though not autism itself — provide both.
mothersvox
Mar 29, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Scratch “it’s” and replace with “its”! :)
María Luján
Mar 29, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I do not agree with autism as a “master illness”.
I do think in autism as a complex disorder or syndrome that needs a multidisciplinary approach at so many levels that it presents the picture about how practice/clinical medicine is not evolving at the needed rate to find pathways of interactions with other science´s fields (biochemistry, chemistry,brain development, etc) to know more about how to effectively help for the medical ( true ones not only to control behaviors), pshycological, physiological, educational and sociological needs of autistic people of all ages.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Mar 29, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I need to review what Sontag herself says and reflect…… I find it almost too easy to suggest autism as a metaphor? a symptom of our times, also due to the disputes over what “autism is” (disability? disease? difference?) and what causes it (genetics? environment? multiple factors?).
mothersvox
Mar 30, 2007 at 9:14 am
Yes, I agree. It does seem almost too easy, which is why I’m only in the “possibly” camp at this point! But, on the other hand, there are ways in which diseases and syndromes (and anxieties they foster and represent) serve specific cultural purposes. Comparison to TB and cancer probably isn’t the most apt. A better comparison might be to the 19th c. phenomenon of “American nervousness” because of the shifting diagnostic parameters for each and the wacky “cures” that were advocated (confinement for women and hunting expedition/nature communion for men.)
natalia
Mar 30, 2007 at 10:43 am
what does it do to your reality, though, to have your reality used as a metaphor?!
i am not the only one to find that somewhat creepy.
natalia
Mar 30, 2007 at 10:57 am
PS: i am not even sure i prefer master illness to master race (those who think that autistics -usually aspies- are the new and improved kind of human)…
i think it’s all creepy. we’re just people. you’re just people(*).
i do like how that Slate article brings out how perseverative Portia Iversen is, which you mentioned in some other post here. i have noticed that in some online pro-cure parents of the more obsessive sort. maybe they are all autistic too; that would be funny, in the ironic way.
a lot of parents of autistics seem to find out how many autistic traits they themselves have, after finding out their kids are autistic.
(*)me, i’m still perseverating on Donna Williams’ lyrics. there is one line that says “could you find … someone like me to be your kind?”
i think it’s maybe in the same song i mentioned here the other day.
mothersvox
Mar 30, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Yes, it is creepy to have your experience appropriated as a metaphor, especially when that metaphor is for someone else’s agenda. e.g when some religious fundamentalists argued that HIV-AIDS was the wrath of god.
That’s one of the big points of Sontag’s book . . . that illness *isn’t* a metaphor, but that we have a cultural tendency to take various illnesses and attach all sorts of meaning to them . . . for example, with HIV-AIDS there were all sorts of horrible metaphorical constructs associated . . .
Observing that we are, as a culture, doing something (like making autism into a metaphor for other cultural anxieties) doesn’t mean that one is advocating that this should happen. An observation can be descriptive and analytical without being an endorsement, do you know what I mean?
With the popularity of that new self-help book and DVD called The Secret, there are people out there saying that if you get sick that you’ve just brought it on yourself . . . you know — you had bad energy, or you were “negative”. Malarkey, but certainly a cultural phenomenon to keep an eye on. Taking anyone’s experience and transforming for one’s own meaning making has a kind of cultural violence in it. But it happens all the time.
natalia
Mar 31, 2007 at 6:39 pm
mothersvox, sorry if i was unclear: i didn’t mean to call this discussion creepy. only the phenomenon that was being discussed.
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