I salute and congratulate the editors for their decision to embrace qualitative and mixed methods studies in the pages of the
Journal of Autism and Development Disorders (JADD) (Van Schalkwyk and Dewinter
2020). In publishing such work, they provide a concrete, welcome and long overdue way to ‘give voice to the lived experience of autistic individuals and stakeholders’, and to make good on the participatory research dictum to engage in ‘nothing about me without me’ (Bergold and Thomas
2012; Quinlan
2020). At a time when academic medical journals may capitulate to the temptation of attracting only those manuscripts likely to garner bibliometric citations, qualitative works can too easily be overlooked, when not actively dismissed. In the case of psychiatry,
JADD is providing a healthy example and helping buck the trend of a relatively weak tradition for this kind of scholarship. Without assertive editorial action of this kind, there is a risk for further diminishment in the prospects for such critically important work to find its way into psychiatric print or pixel. …
