Dinah Murray, who has died aged 75 of pancreatic cancer, was a key figure in autism studies, and an indefatigable advocate for autistic people for three decades. Her acute insight lay in the importance of attention and interests to an understanding of the condition.
On the autistic spectrum herself and fascinated with language and the mind, in 1991 Murray read Uta Frith’s book Autism: Explaining the Enigma. She had a eureka moment when it spoke of an autistic person’s attention “going to their leading interest”.
With Wendy (later Wenn) Lawson and Mike Lesser, who were also autistic, Murray developed the theory of “monotropism”, or “interest theory”. It posits that a non-autistic person is “polytropic”. Rather like light from a lantern, their attention is diffused over a wide area and several subjects of interest at once, while a monotropic or autistic person’s attention is more like the narrow beam from a torch, focused in an “attention tunnel” on their leading interest.
The theory helps explain several features of autism, for example avoiding language because of its power to interrupt attention. As Murray explains: “You’re a child looking at a beautiful button... If someone comes in and says ‘cat’ – you’re their victim – they’ve come into your brain and interrupted your train of thought. Right at the beginning [autistic] kids can go off language.”
The theory, published in 2005 , still has a central role in autistic studies today, and chimes with many autistic people’s experience. The autistic poet Kate Fox says: “The more you experience autistic people and their culture, the more you go ‘of course it’s about attention’. It feels like a theory that comes from an inside-understanding.”
However, monotropism received a mixed welcome in academic psychology circles. The authors were not professional psychologists and the theory was not based on experiments in the way that Simon Baron-Cohen’s 1985 research pointed to the need for individuals to develop a “theory of mind”, an awareness of other people’s mental states. Today the medical view of the autistic brain as “altered” and in need of fixing continues to dominate, with autistic research centering on genetics, causation and brain wiring. However, as the researcher Damian Milton says, “a more comprehensive theory of autism is still to be developed. The dominant ones today are dated.”
Murray devoted her life to improving conditions for autistic people. In the 1990s, as a community support worker in London, she was appalled at the amount of tranquillisers prescribed for autistic people, and in 1998 founded APANA (Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse).
In her time as a support worker, she saw how computers can help autistic people communicate, and with Lesser founded the organisation Autism and Computing to campaign for assistive technology for those with communication difficulties, which was achieved via the Mental Capacity Act (2005).
From 1996 to 2013 Murray was a tutor for Birmingham University’s distance learning course on autism. She was a prominent figure in the academic community, editing the autistic-led open access journal Autonomy; contributing to books and papers; chairing the national Autistic Advisory Panel, part of the National Autism Project; and taking a prominent role in the National Autistic Taskforce, and PARC (the Participatory Autism Research Collective), promoting autistic involvement in autistic research. She was also a major contributor to Ask Autism, the induction course at the National Autistic Society, and collaborated on the AutNav app for the charity Scottish Autism.
Emphasising what autistic people are capable of was one of Murray’s passions. She knew Ferenc Virag, an artist who used means other than language to communicate and, with Lesser, produced a video, Working with Ferenc, in 1995, showcasing his extraordinary computer animation talent. She also contributed to the wonderfully imaginative video Something About Us, part of the Rightfullives online exhibition, and liked to support “Autistic Pride” events.
Carol Povey from the National Autistic Society said that Murray’s personality helped her in these ventures, pointing to how she “was never caught up in any fashion or followed the crowd – she led always. She was a bridge between authentic voices of autism and large organisations.”
Born in Hampstead, north London, Dinah came from a distinguished socialist family. Her father was the Labour politician Tony Greenwood – a housing minister for Harold Wilson – and her mother, Gillian (nee Crawshay-Williams), a designer who wrote and illustrated the second world war pamphlet Make Do and Mend and was an early member of CND. Dinah’s godfather was Clement Attlee.
Dinah could read from the age of two and she and her elder sister Susanna went to Byron House school in Highgate and then the North London Collegiate school. Although very intelligent, she did not do well in her A-levels. She tried studying fine art in Newcastle, but it did not fire her interest, and she returned to London to work as a copy editor at Penguin Books.
Then she gained a degree in linguistics and anthropology at University College London in 1969, and the following year married the philosopher and music critic David Murray. They had three sons, Bruno, Leo and Fergus, and also became foster parents to Eddie O’Neill.
Dinah dovetailed bringing up a family with studying a subject she was passionate about – language and the mind’s interests – and in 1986 gained a PhD from UCL. In 2017, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Autistic Society.
David died in 2016. Disenchanted with political developments, Dinah and her dog Frankie left London, where she had lived all her life, in March last year for Dalgety Bay in Fife, Scotland. There she could be near Fergus and pursue her love of nature, photography and studying lichens and mushrooms.
She is survived by her sons and foster son, four grandchildren, and by Susanna.
• Dinah Karen Crawshay Murray, autism advocate and campaigner, born 27 May 1946; died 7 July 2021
