![]() ![]() Naoki Higashida is a Japanese man who wrote this book when he was thirteen years old. The conclusion is that both emotional poverty and an aversion to company are not symptoms of autism but consequences of autism, its harsh lockdown on self-expression and society's near-pristine ignorance about what's happening inside autistic heads.” This book shines a light on the dehumanizing current behind the scientific discourse on autism by laying bare the sheer humanity of a single person's struggle to communicate with the world around him. ![]() In his introduction to the book, the novelist David Mitchell asserts: “Like all storytelling mammals, Naoki is anticipating his audience's emotions and manipulating them. ![]() In particular, autism has recently been characterized as being defined by an inherent lack of empathy and as a state of “mind-blindness,” or the failure to develop the “capacity to mindread in the normal way.”Naoki Higashida’s book, The Reason I Jump, leads us to question the legitimacy of these assumptions as well as their impact on actual individuals in the world. The field of bioethics has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of how the medical and social assumptions that accompany diagnostic categories impact the people who have been diagnosed. ![]()
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