In 2007 I presented a conceptual (unbuilt) design for the Virginia Tech Autism Clinic. During that presentation I argued for a calming environment, in part because of high divorce rates among families with individuals with autism. There is one catch; I couldn’t have known what the divorce rates were. No study prior to 2010 had seriously looked at divorce rates among families with autism, more on that later. My irresponsible and inexcusable blunder reflects the depressingly common urge we have to jump to conclusions about the why and how of a situation before we analyze the reality of it. For centuries, countless scholars built elaborate models to explain why and how the sun went around the earth without ever asking “does it?” This kind of cognitive blindness makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint; it is better to assume a hungry lion is making the grass rustle than to ponder if it is nothing at all. Not surprisingly we tend to make more Type I errors (false positives) than Type II errors (false negatives). Although advantageous on the African savannah, this type of thinking can be disastrous when making design decisions.
My stomach still turns when I think of how I carelessly helped perpetuate the myth that families with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis have higher rates of divorce. The myth of high divorce rates (80%+) has been strong in the press and the autism community, including a statement made by Susan Wright, the cofounder of Autism Speaks, the U.S.’s largest autism science and advocacy organization. I first came across this myth while reading an article about HGA’s 38.8 million dollar design for the UCDavis M.I.N.D. Institute. In that article Architect Bill Blanski stated, “imagine an autistic child in a young family. It’s a very stressful experience, and the divorce rate among these families is huge… So a warm, inviting, calm atmosphere was very important.”
Statements about divorce rates are not innocuous statements, whether or not they are true. First, if it is true, then it needs to be delivered with greater care than I did. Many individuals with an ASD diagnosis can understand the meaning of such a statement. Without a sensitive and thoughtful delivery, some individuals might blame themselves for their parents’ divorce. Nonchalantly saying that an autism diagnosis increases divorce rates is callous at best. Now, imagine making this statement without bothering to investigate if it is true. That is what I did. And here is the painful irony; a large epidemiological study published in 2011 by Johns Hopkins’s Kennedy Krieger Institute found that an ASD diagnosis, when controlling for accompanying diagnoses, actually decreased the rate of divorce.
