‘Problems in living’ and the mental well-being people on the autistic spectrum' Part 1

Within the history of psychiatry and psychology, there are some who would argue that some kind of neurological defect will one day be found for all ‘disorders’ of thinking and behaviour, locating the ‘problem’ within a deficient and dysfunctional brain. There has also been however, a movement for many decades that has suggested that mental illness was a ‘myth’, at least when it came to illnesses of the ‘mind’ which had no physical manifestation in some kind of damage to the brain. The former position would suggest that people cannot have psychological ‘troubles’ due to differences of social position. In the accounts of many writers and theorists from the 1960s onwards (like Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, and Peter Breggin), biological causes were being wrongly attributed to ‘problems in living’.