The following is an autobiographical account of Jonathan Mitchell, better know as Autism’s Gadfly. Jonathan is a controversial figure among autistics for espousing autism as a disability, his desire for medical treatment for those who need the same, and the need for more research into neurodevelopmental conditions. He has described Neurodiversity as a “tempting escape valve” and a movement that offers no solutions for lower functioning autistic individuals. This has propelled members of the Neurodiversity movement to hurl insults towards him and express their outright hostility by making disparaging comments about him, his parents, and his religion. In an article on the Huffington Post, “Neil Greenspan states that Mitchell’s critics, while seeking acceptance for their views, have not respected Mitchell’s. He says Mitchell would likely not demand that others seek treatment” (http://bit.ly/2cVImv9 ).
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I was born in Los Angeles in 1955 where I still live. In 1958, my parents noted that I was losing my speech and having behavioral issues such as tantrums and feces smearing. I was evaluated by a pediatric neurologist at UCLA who had no idea what was wrong with me (very few people knew what autism was in those days). Since they could not find anything wrong with me, it was presumed I had some sort of psychologic issue and I was referred to a child psychoanalyst. She was a practitioner of the Bettelheim era who blamed the parents for these problems. I have a sister three years younger and the onset of my problems occurred around the time she was born. My psychoanalyst blamed castration anxiety, the fact that I saw my sister naked and noticed she did not have a penis and was worried that my parents would cut off my penis as part of the etiology of the trauma that I experienced. I saw her for more than ten years (until about age 13). I was enrolled in a private kindergarten at age 5 and my mother had to make a deal and be an aide to another emotionally disturbed child for me to attend there. She did not get along with the person who ran the kindergarten and placed me in another one for my second semester. I was expelled from kindergarten due to behavioral issues and aggression towards other children. I also had a phobia of birds and a bad fine motor coordination problem which impaired my ability to handwrite, low score on the performance part of the Wechsler IQ test, though above average on the verbal IQ test. Very poor scores in the block design and object assembly part. I also had an abnormal Bender-Gestalt visual motor score, which was said to be an indicator for brain-damage.
I also engaged in a self-stimulatory behavior which I referred to as “twiddling” where I would take a pencil and shoelace in my left hand and a lone shoelace in my right hand and shake them at various frequencies and engage in fantasies and my desire for this behavior was/is like a drug addiction.
At age six, I was enrolled in Dubnoff school which was one of the premiere special education schools in Los Angeles, where i was occasionally abused, given spankings by one or two teachers and what were called “boo boo awards” where I was hit with a chalk filled eraser for being bad.
After three years in Dubnoff school, I was enrolled in a lab school affiliated with UCLA for learning disabled children. Shortly after this I went to Frostig school after school for tutoring for my fine motor and perceptual motor impairments.
At age 12 I was enrolled in a mainstream private school, but was expelled after half a semester for losing my temper, laughing out loud in class and getting into arguments with the other kids and had to return to the UCLA lab school for the next year and a half. After I stopped seeing the psychoanalyst, I was in therapy with a psychiatrist and he recommended I attend the mainstream junior high. I was put in 8th grade at age 14 and left Special Ed for good and stopped the tutoring at Frostig. I did not do really well but got semi-decent grades. After my last semester in the 9th grade, I started to do much more poorly. I attended a private school for a year in the tenth grade, but had arguments with the faculty there and left and went back to public school for the rest of high school where I barely graduated. At age 16 I saw a behavioral psychologist after my psychiatrist felt I was autistic and could not help me. This psychologist did not tell me I was autistic but said I was brain damaged.
I became interested in psychology and thought I might like to be a clinical psychologist, but was not sure. I was also interested in writing and attempted to write a novel about two mentally retarded boys who formed a friendship but never finished it. After taking a course in physiological psychology at the local community college, I thought I might like to be a brain researcher, but I was not able to do that, and I tried to learn what I could about the brain to try to find out what was wrong with myself. I wanted to take Ritalin to see if that would help and the psychiatrist I saw at UCLA who prescribed the Ritalin told me I was autistic and the Ritalin did not help. I transferred from community college to UCLA barely getting a bachelors in psychology
After school I had a variety of jobs, where I was mostly fired, including working at a warehouse and typing prescription labels in a pharmacy and data entry. After being fired from several jobs, I learned medical transcription and was able to work doing various medical typing jobs sporadically but still getting fired from the various jobs. I still read what I could about autism and was disillusioned that there did not seem to be any brain researchers working in the field. In the late 1980s I read about a researcher named Eric Courchesne who had done MRI scans of various autistic people and found that a certain part of the vermis of the cerebellum was smaller in autistics than in controls. I hoped that he could tell me what the etiology of my problems was. I became a research subject for their group and had a few MRI scans with them, but all they were able to tell me was that lobules VI and VII of my cerebellar vermis were “average” in size for an autistic. I wrote a nonfiction article about being his research subject and some of my ideas about it. I tried to get it published without success. After this, and my failed attempts to write novels I wrote several short stories and a few nonfiction articles about my autism but was not able to get anything published. I then wrote my first novel, which I was not able to get published, but was able to read on the national radio show studio 360. The novel dealt with an autistic boy’s experiences in a special education school and his mother’s attempt to get services for him. I wrote some more nonfiction book including an essay refuting the neurodiversity movement and another one disputing the posthumous diagnoses of Albert Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. Someone who had heard my radio show and found me interesting built a website for me with some of these writings.
I later learned about something called the neurodiversity movement, which I found very offensive and started a blog Autism’s gadfly in which I tried to dispute what they said to me. Because of this, I was often viciously attacked online and ironically told that by a few of these people that my disability came by having a domineering mother who taught me to hate myself. I say this is ironic, since I had already been through this during the Bettelheim era in the late 50’s and 60’s.
A reporter on NPR who was interviewing Eric Courchesne about the lack of postmortem brains after the freezer failure in which many of the postmortem brains were destroyed, happened upon my article about being his research subject many years ago and he interviewed me as well and i figured prominently in the piece on a national radio show.
Not long after this I wrote my second novel, “The Mu Rhythm Bluff” which dealt with an autistic individual who undergoes an experimental treatment involving stimulating mirror neuron areas in the pars opercularis with TMS and also training the subject in mu rhythm suppression hoping it will mitigate his autism. Instead, it gives him super mirror neuron capabilities and an extraordinary ability to read people, thus making him an expert poker player. I self-published this novel, but it did not go anywhere. After this, I wrote two more novels that were never published and aren’t relevant to autism- with no autistic characters. I’ve now been writing a nonfiction book trying to refute the neurodiversity movement, but, due to my disability, it is going very slowly.
I finally retired at age 51 and tried to get disability but was unsuccessful after a four and a half year battle. At age 61, I will probably never work again. I have had few friends in my life and basically never had a girlfriend.