Michael Fitzgerald (psychiatrist)

For other people named Michael Fitzgerald, see Michael Fitzgerald (disambiguation).

thumb 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.

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:

• Writers – Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Bruce Chatwin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift and William Butler Yeats.
• Philosophers – A.J. Ayer, Baruch de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Simone Weil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Musicians – Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Glenn Gould, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Erik Satie.
• Artists – Vincent van Gogh, L.S. Lowry, Jack B. Yeats and Andy Warhol.
• Mathematicians - Srinivasa Ramanujan.

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.

Selected publications

• Fitzgerald, Michael (2004), Autism and Creativity: Is there a link between autism in men and exceptional ability?, New York: Brunner Routledge, ISBN 978-1583912133
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2009), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Creativity, Novelty Seeking and Risk, New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc., ISBN 978-1604568554
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2010), Young, Violent & Dangerous to Know, New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc., ISBN 978-1608769520
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2014), The Link between Asperger Syndrome and Scientific, Artistic, and Political Creativity: Eleven Case Studies, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, ISBN 978-0-7734-0907-1
• Walker, Antoinette; Fitzgerald, Michael (2014), Unstoppable Brilliance, Dublin: Liberties Press, ISBN 978-1905483280
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2015), The Mind of the Artist: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism, Asperger Syndrome & Depression, New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc., ISBN 978-1-63463-573-8

External links

• Official website