Jonathan Mitchell

Jonathan Mitchell (born September 7, 1955) is an American author and autistic blogger who writes about autism including the neuroscience of the disorder and neurodiversity movement. His novel The Mu Rhythm Bluff is about a 49-year-old autistic man who undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Biography Mitchell was born in 1955 and at the age of 12, he was diagnosed with autism. He attended psychoanalytic therapy as a child. After retiring at 51 years old, he attempted to get SSDI but was not successful.

Advocacy

Mitchell has been described by Newsweek as an extremely controversial voice in the autism blogosphere for wanting a cure and discussing the need to consider the longer-term effects of autism.

Responding to Mitchell's commentary on neurodiversity in the magazine The Spectator, Jonathan Rose, a history professor at Drew University, agreed with this commentary (that neurodiversity is over-represented in the media and at the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee), since profoundly autistic individuals have difficulty advocating for themselves. By contrast, author Jessie Hewitson described many of the difficulties associated with autism as challenges, but that his autism is "not an affliction".

Interests

Mitchell has written the novel The Mu Rhythm Bluff, which is about a 49-year-old man who undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat his autism. He has also written twenty-five short stories. Mitchell's writing has been compared by the novelist Lawrence Osborne to the work of David Miedzianik, a UK-based autistic poet and writer.

Mitchell served as a subject for an MRI study conducted by autism researcher Eric Courchesne. He has been exchanging emails with neurologist Marco Iacoboni with questions about mirror neurons since 2010. Mitchell has also followed Casanova's work, which focuses on abnormalities within the brain's minicolumns.