Autism in Saudi Arabia: Media and the Medical Model of Disability

Saudi Arabia as a traditional society is mostly based on the medical model of disability to interpret autism that increases the stigma and the negative social attitude towards the condition. Additionally, the media plays a big role in portraying the condition as a “disorder” that contributes to the cultural judgment within the country. In this paper, the authors reviewed 57 articles between 2011 and 2021 using the databases of Google, Swisscows, and StartPage. Document analysis was used to analyse the data from both journals and newspapers. Results have shown that the studies exploring autism in media are quite limited with almost nonexistent papers on the roles of media and the medical model of disability in the stigmatisation of autism in Saudi Arabia.