The Question of Violence and False-Negative Autism Diagnosis: Open Letter on Humboldt University's Co-Responsibility for Violence Against Neurodivergent People
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The present open letter to Prof. Dr. Isabel Dziobek, Director of the Specialist Outpatient Clinic for Social Interaction at Humboldt University of Berlin, is published as a historical document and as part of an ongoing investigation into institutional violence against neurodivergent people. It is situated within the context of three preceding research papers (Speed, 2026), which examine the exclusion of autistic people from diagnostic and social welfare recognition procedures, the epistemic limitations of autism diagnostics, and the health-related and existential consequences of institutional misjudgments through a longitudinally documented individual case. Methodologically, the letter is situated within Provoked Empiricism. Its publication serves not merely to document a conflict retrospectively but constitutes part of the investigative process itself. By explicitly confronting a responsible institution with documented contradictions, scientific objections, and the consequences of its actions, institutional responses, justifications, refusals, and forms of silence become accessible as empirically observable phenomena. The intervention thereby changes the situation under investigation while simultaneously generating new possibilities for its analysis. In this sense, the open letter is not merely a statement about the object of research but a documented intervention into it. At its centre lies the question of what responsibility diagnostic institutions bear for false-negative autism diagnoses and their potential consequences, particularly when the procedures employed are insufficiently capable of identifying certain manifestations of autism. The investigation addresses the tension between professionally asserted diagnostic certainty, scientifically recognised methodological fallibility, and the epistemic authority of neurodivergent self-report. Particular attention is given to how diagnostically excluded individuals may disappear from institutional bodies of knowledge and why the actual number of false-negative decisions may consequently remain unknown. The letter combines personal testimony, scientific critique, and political accusation. Its deliberately confrontational language forms part of its methodological approach: it renders visible the affective, bodily, and existential dimensions of institutional violence that are frequently excluded from administrative and clinical accounts. The evaluations and accusations contained within the letter are to be understood as positions articulated by the affected researcher and distinguished from independently verified factual findings. The publication thus pursues two interconnected objectives: to preserve the confrontation as a contemporary historical source document and, at the same time, to open a field of inquiry into institutional accountability, mechanisms of diagnostic exclusion, and the societal consequences of the non-recognition of neurodivergence. The documented individual case does not serve as statistical proof of representativeness but as a detailed empirical entry point into mechanisms whose potential structural prevalence requires further investigation.
Author: Speed, Timothy
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225631574
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