Name Michael Fitzgerald Role Psychiatrist | ||
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Books Autism and Creativity: Is There a, Genius Genes: How Asp, The Genesis Of Artistic Cr, Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geni, The Mind of the Mathematician Profiles | ||
Raj persaud in conversation with michael fitzgerald
Michael Fitzgerald is the first professor of child and adolescent psychiatry in Ireland specialising in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). He has a large number of peer-reviewed publications and has written, co-written and co-edited 32 books, including Japanese and Polish translations.
Contents
- Raj persaud in conversation with michael fitzgerald
- Career
- Views on autism
- Selected publications
- References
Career
Fitzgerald has diagnosed over 3,000 persons with ASD. His other major research contribution is in the area of epidemiology of child and adolescent psychiatry in Ireland. He has been involved in research collaboration in 18 countries and in initiating master's degree programs at Irish universities. He has lectured extensively throughout the world including in London at the Royal Society, British Academy, and the British Library and also in New York, Buenos Aires, Tbilisi, Melbourne and many European countries as well as in China, Malaysia, Korea, and Hawaii.
Views on autism
In 2004's Autism and Creativity: Is There a Link Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability?, Fitzgerald says that Lewis Carroll, Éamon de Valera, Sir Keith Joseph, Ramanujan, Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.B. Yeats may have been autistic.
In 2005's The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts, he identifies the following historical figures as possibly having been autistic:
In 2006's Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger's Syndrome, he discusses Daisy Bates, Samuel Beckett, Robert Boyle, Éamon de Valera, Robert Emmet, William Rowan Hamilton, James Joyce, Padraig Pearse and W.B. Yeats.
Speculation about diagnoses in historical individuals is based on behaviour as reported by others and anecdotal evidence rather than any clinical observation of the individual.
Retrospective diagnoses are often controversial. Oliver Sacks wrote that many of these claims seem "very thin at best", and Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center has remarked that "there is unfortunately a sort of cottage industry of finding that everyone has Asperger's". Fitzgerald's psychobiographical and psychohistorical works that contain speculative, retrospective diagnoses of ASD in numerous historical figures have been criticized by Sabina Dosani as "fudged pseudoscience" and by Mark Osteen as "frankly absurd", in reference to Fitzgerald's speculative diagnoses of ASD in W. B. Yeats and Adolf Hitler.