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Thursday, 07 March 2019 at 18:30 – 19:30
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Peter Vermeulen – Autism and happiness: From neurodiversity to neuroharmony
The Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) is delighted to announce that the 2019 CRAE Annual Lecture will be given by Peter Vermeulen, who will speak on ‘autism and happiness: from neurodiversity to neuroharmony’.
With a MSc and PhD in Psychology and Educational Sciences, Peter has worked with autistic people and their families for more than 30 years. Founder of “Autism in Context” and Senior Lecturer at Autisme Centraal (a training and education centre for autism), Peter is an internationally respected lecturer/trainer and presents all over Europe and beyond. Peter has written more than 15 books and several articles on autism.
Peter explains that with more than 10 scientific articles per day, autism is just about the most studied condition in the world. We need all this research to increase our understanding of a condition involving, like no other, myths and misconceptions. Yet happiness has received little attention in the field of autism. Outcome and intervention studies, for instance, rarely take emotional well-being as a desired outcome. And when the focus is on well-being, it is often from a negative perspective, namely the lack of well-being and quality of life amongst autistic people. It is time to take a U-turn in our approach and change from an exclusive focus on what makes autism so different (and from a negative, clinical and medical approach of happiness in autism, i.e., a lack of distress) towards a shared and positive focus (we all want to be happy). In other words: let’s move from neurodiversity to neuroharmony.
We very much look forward to welcoming Peter Vermeulen to CRAE to speak on such an important topic and hope that you can join us for this special, free to attend event.
Anna Remington and the CRAE team.
The RADA bar will be open for a pre-event drink from 17.30 pm.
The venue is fully accessible.