The psychiatrist Lorna Wing, who has died aged 85, revolutionised the way autism was regarded and her influence was felt across the globe. She developed the concept of an autism spectrum and introduced Asperger's syndrome to the English-speaking world. As a mother of a daughter with autism, she championed the rights of families and proposed that every child should be treated as an individual and that parents and professionals should work closely together. In 1962, she joined a group of like-minded parents to found the National Autistic Society.
Lorna was ahead of her time in her thinking, always questioning orthodoxy, including the belief that Kanner's autism was a single and distinct condition. In 1943, the psychiatrist Leo Kanner, based at Johns Hopkins University hospital in the US, had been the first to identify a disorder he called "infantile autism". Failure to use language to communicate with others was one of the key features of Kanner's autism. Lorna was the first to challenge this narrow perspective.
Continue reading...