Grunya Sukhareva is The True Aid of Autism

Pretext

The woman this community, and I, truly have to give thanks to is one Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (Груня Ефимовна Сухарева).

In light of recent discoveries within the Autism community, the notion of referring to individuals as ‘on the spectrum’ or ‘having Asperger’s syndrome’ have come under immediate fire.

By ‘discoveries’, I am referring to the skeletons inside Dr. Johann Friedrich Karl ‘Hans’ Asperger’s closet that have been not-so-covertly holding children hostage in its respective time of Germanic Fascism, as well as continuing abusive policy towards patients barely a century after its discovery.

With the uncovering of such deplorable behavior conducted under the shadow of the Nazi Swastika and coming to realize how ensnared those policies became in the diagnosis and treatment of autistic people, it has forced this community to reckon.

Is this research that evaluators and psychiatric firms are so often employing now inapplicable with this revelation coming to light?

Yes, that should certainly be so, as it has completely overshadowed the far more credible and humane work to have come out of the Soviet Union, and a decade earlier to boot.

A breif history of Sukhareva

While not the progenitor of the term itself, which is credited to Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler around 1911, she has most definitely forged better analysis and accommodations for autistic patients than a bastard like Asperger could.

She Began her career at medical school in Kyiv in 1915, initially to assist disease-stricken areas during the final years of the Russian Tsardom but switched to the city’s psychiatric hospital come the Bolshevik Revolution two years later.

After relocating to Moscow’s in the newly established USSR, with a tumultuous civil war winding down, she established her career in psychiatry at the lengthily-named Psycho-Neurological and Pedagogical Sanatorium School of the Institute of Physical Training and Medical Pedology.

That last study is not to be confused with the one more broadly known for soil science, but rather has been used primarily in Russia as a field of analyzing child behavior and development, that of which Sukhareva had enhanced her practical skills and nature to heal with.

Her research

Amid all the other medical deeds she had accomplished, her research on autism far exceeds that of Asperger and the more famous Leo Kanner, akin to what we see listed in the contemporary DSM-5 manual.

Meaning, that traits like sensitivities to smells and sounds, stereotypical or repetitive behaviors, or ‘stimming’ (a shortening of ‘stimulation’ individuals already diagnosed use), were already discovered almost a full century before their recent listing in 2013.

Of course, traits like social irritability and the seeming lack of facial expressions were already notable for Kanner and Asperger.

Sukhareva, however, clearly had the upper hand on a broader insight and analysis the whole time, ever since the disorder’s inception into the clinical consciousness.

While autism was initially conflating with mental schizophrenia since Bleuler’s coinage, and that the latter term has also been a political term, Sukhareva made a deliberate effort to untangle the two from each other by the 1950’s.

She even made the first connections linking autism to different brain spheres like the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and frontal lobes.

Divergence of study

Grunya Sukhareva’s insistence of autism’s roots within neural development was much far beyond, and empathetic, then the studies of Kanner and especially Asperger.

Those two were proposing that autism’s development was due to the misogynistic pretense of ‘refrigerator mothers’, that ‘cold and unemotional/uncaring’ mothers were to blame for their child’s underdevelopment.

This claim is strikingly rich with cold irony in hindsight, as Asperger himself was initiating thousands of children into the clinic Am Speigelgrund within Vienna, now annexed to the Third Reich, itself having roots in the imperial Steinhof am Main.

Both iterations of the Austrian psychiatric ward were creations to imprison and, eventually, murder children with disabilities. Asperger saw the tentacles of evil and took its hand, facing no unprosecution and living his psychiatric position in Austria until his death on 21 October 1980.

It is an easy to bridge the idea that the work of Grunya Sukhareva as ignored because she was both a Soviet citizen and of Jewish descent, both imagined enemies of the Nazis.

More important than ever

     Despite this cold inference, and that her work went untranslated in the West because of Cold War-era politics, Grunya Sukhareva has proven her strength of healing those who most needed it.

While it is absolutely a shame and contemptible that Western nations like the United States ignored her because she lived opposite the Iron Curtain, we must move past that judgement call and accept what the East has contributed.

The West, after all, has let the Judge Rotenberg Center of Canton, Massachusetts base its forms of legalized torture after Hans Asperger, even attributing his name as a disorder label and letting cranks make vaccine conspiracies.

Well, I, and many others say to hell with Asperger, as we deserve a true pioneer for research and admiration who saw her patients as human beings.

Sukhareva is the true face of who the public, and this community, should look to for understanding autism, as she has honestly proven herself to be.