Let's be REALLY Aware of Autism

clipped from autisticconjectureoftheday.blogspot.com Child Abuse as Therapy For those of you "In the Know" discrete trials, or the Lovaas Method, is the only "approved and proven" method of achieving "progress" with autistic individuals. Approved by the state for funding, that is. And proven because, by the very mechanistic nature of the process, data is easily collected, plotted, and crunched. The following article, 40 years old, hails the arrival of this therapy in typical 60s style - science is God, and man can overcome anything that nature gives us. And how, you might ask, do we overcome? With electric shock, yelling, and physical violence. Of course. A quick click on the above title will take you to the site with not only this article, but the disturbing pictures that accompany it. The rage and venom portrayed in the faces of the "therapists" speaks for itself.

This article, written in 2005, includes graphic images that speak of the roots and underlying assumptions of Applied Behavior Analysis. And yes, at one "snakepit school," autistics are still being shocked for being... autistic.

Evidence of Malice

This is what happens to Autistics who try to communicate their own individual reality - or at least, when it might cause reasonable people to doubt the advisability of subjecting their children to dangerously unproven therapies. This blog would be more honestly titled "Hating Autistics;" I have rarely had the misfortune of encountering such an outright slimy person.

Amanda Baggs Snows CNN (Hating Autism)

My posactive anti-puzzle-piece autism awareness design that states "The Issue is Intolerance" and "Help Find a Clue!" Partial proceeds go to stress relief.

What I just watched on CNN with Amanda Baggs playing the role of a low functioning autistic was a disgrace. Low functioning autistics can't type anything. They can barely pay attention to anything, nevermind keep up a conversation by typing 120 words a minute. Cute little girls don't usually turn into fat ugly monsters either.

Did anyone else notice the little blond girl who turned into this beastly brunette? That little girl's eye contact with the camera looked normal to me. Perhaps her whole face changed when she was smitten with schizophrenia. Maybe she's not even the same girl.

How come Amanda can focus long enough to type without stopping to twiddle her fingers? One who deals with autism every day knows that expecting a low functioning person to pay attention to any task for long is expecting a lot. This overacting is a dead giveaway that Baggs functions much too well to be considered autistic. Why didn't she space out in the middle of answering a question and go finger twiddling for awhile? Bullshit, this imposter can focus long enough to make her point for CNN without having any autistic "moments".

Autism occurs a spectrum and every autistic manifests differently. This is complicated by a number of other "comorbid" conditions that tend to show up with autism, but are not in themselves autism, and which also occur in other contexts. It's a difficult diagnosis even if you are not a quack, because there are overlaps with many other possible conditions - and all of this is generally determined without the input of the person concerned using diagnostic criteria that can only be described as "maddeningly vague."

I should state for the record that there is, factually, NO credible scientific evidence of a link between mercury toxicity and autism. I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised and skeptical, seeing that mercury is by no means health food, and does have cumulative neurotoxic effects. But Autism is not the damage mercury manifests, and there have been enough studies to make what seemed like an attractive quick fix obvious quackery.

Likewise, Applied Behavior Analysis and other such Skinnerian behaviorist approaches cure nothing. What they do is create a set of conditioned reflexes, which may or may not generalize into understanding of why the behavior is desired. Autistic children are trained in the same way the "white stallions" are trained to caper and dance - they learn that disobedience results in a shock prod to the genitals.

This overcomes their reluctance to do nonsensical things they are uninterested in doing.

Surface compliance is not a cure, nor is obedience evidence of respect. But I think this person is so insecure in his own masculinity that he takes his' son's autism as being willful disrespect for his authority.

As far as I know, the only real cure for disrespect is to be respectable. Alas, I suspect that cure to be outside of John Best's grasp. He's far too attached to his own dysfunctions and personality disorders to either deserve respect or respect anyone with divergent, more useful viewpoints.

tag: cure autism now, neurodiversity, posactive, pro-autistic, aspie, aspergers, AS, autistic spectrum, autistic parenting, chelation therapy, Amanda Baggs, Autism Quackery, xenophobia, bigotry

Great Parenting makes a great difference

While the Refrigerator Mother hypothesis has been discredited as a cause of autism, it was seemingly never addressed as a symptom of a reaction to an autistic child. Bluntly, while "refrigerator parents" do not cause autism, they do cause tremendous disability and damage that persists for a lifetime.

In one critical respect, autistic children are no different than other children; we are keenly aware of our parents and how they feel about us.

For good or ill.

The video here is a record of advocacy from a 9 year old autistic young man who uses a keyboard to do most of his verbal communication. He is identified as "D" here.

He was part of a panel hosted by an autism organization. The audience submitted written questions to all the panel members, some of whom were diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and some with autistic disorder (Kanner autism, core autism, whatever folks are calling it this week).

D's answers were intriguing, at times puckish and inciting as well as insightful. (Autism Diva is trying to follow in D's charming footsteps and use more erudite and scintillating parlance.) D's answers are recorded here on this video made by D.

We are certainly aware if we are felt to be a cross to bear instead of a treasure and a joy. We are also keenly aware when love is conditional upon behaving as if we were not ourselves, conditional on telling them what they wish to hear rather than what is true and real for us. We especially learn that our perceptions of how others treat us is unwelcome. Wait, perhaps that was just me. But when I came home, crying and bleeding with various injuries - the first thing I was always asked was what I had done to deserve it.

I have no idea what my diagnosis as a child was - my parents were very secretive about that - but I'm sure there were several. Probably one was "childhood schizophrenia," given the era. But I do know that I had my head candled many, many times and the results were always, obviously and clearly, my fault.

This is absurd, of course, and even then I was reasonably well aware that my parents were neither reasonable nor rational on the subject that was me. But the net result was that my parents completely overlooked everything about me that was potentially valuable while focusing intently on all my manifold "flaws," which were always related to being insufficiently like the other children they kept trying to force upon me - at any price.

Meanwhile, they went to great lengths to sabotage my interests and to interrupt my perseverations; communicating to me that if I was interested, it was therefore inherently valueless. Had a "normal" child shown the same abilities and interests as I, they would have been turning handsprings. Moreover, I showed no tendency whatsoever to engage in "normal" adolescent stupidities, such as drinking, compulsive risk-taking or engaging in pointless athletic mating display contests. (That was my perspective at the time. Now I rather regret missing a small portion of my share of the above; I do wish someone had bothered to explain the point to it all.)

While this gave them much less to worry about in a real sense, my mother at least found a great deal to fuss about in the realms of the unreal and untrue, while managing to overlook almost everything she could have usefully addressed, such as abuse - mental and physical - by schoolmates and teachers that has left me with permanent and surely apparent emotional scars.

I was frequently told that what happened to me was my fault for "not fitting in," the delusion compounded by the assumption that I would have been allowed to fit in under any circumstance. Alas, when a child (or adult) is identified as a legitimate target, nothing that person can do to change their status within that social matrix. They must either escape that matrix, or be destroyed by it.

It is not surprising that adolescents with AS spectrum issues suicide at a rate that has been cited as being as high as thirty percent. It has nothing to do with autism, per se; it has to do with abuse, rejection, humiliation and depression resulting from repeated failures to fit in with the antinomy of being told by everything around them that they would be loved, accepted and valued if they did fit in.

The tragedy is that the autistic mind is adapted to function best apart from and outside of a social dominance hierarchy. So much of the "best advice" is 180 degrees incorrect, starting with the presumpton that a lack of a broad social network is the result of, or the cause of, emotional deficits and damage.

In fact, autistics need a small number of intensely dependable and deep relationships; those outside of that circle will tend to be activity-based relationships rather than emotional ones.

It's a profound difference, one that seems very difficult for Neurotypicals to understand - but it is nonetheless true of AS spectrum people to a broad degree, to the point that it seems fall within the range of "autistic-normal."

I've often wondered what I'd be like had I been raised by sane parents, or, frankly, even wolves.

D's example; a nine-year old boy who is valued for what he is, rather than devalued for what he is not tells me that's all the "cure" that we autistics require.



tag: autism awareness, cure autism now, neurodiversity, posactive, pro-autistic, aspie, aspergers, AS, autistic spectrum, autistic parenting

Give a Clue this Christmas!

My Latest Autism Designs and what they mean.

People who are neurotypical tend to think in boxes. One problem with being on the Autistic Spectrum is that you tend to not think in boxes. As far as I can tell, our thought process is highly relational. We tend to not even SEE the boxes and we don't think in a binary way at all.

A great number of problems come from the inability to understand that different people can have starkly different ways of understanding the world around them.

We tend to assume that people who came up with a functional solution for a problem came to it in the same way; indeed, by way of the same initial perceptions. Autistics and Aspies are as guilty of this as anyone; indeed, it's been studied within the AS population. The reason it's not been studied within the NT population is simple; in the case of NT's, the assumption that another person has a thought process that works like yours does is statistically likely to be correct.

So, when an autistic person makes this unwarranted assumption, it's called "mind blindness" and the autistic is gently handed a clue in the form of "social stories." When an NT does it, it's in the form of an organization called "Cure Autism Now."

If "autistic thought" were not valuable, there would not be such a roster of famous thinkers, such as Einstein and Newton now thought to have been probably autistic to some degree. By the same token, it should be a profound clue that there are courses to teach neurotypicals to "think outside of the box," and almost all higher education is aimed at rooting out simplistic, either-or thinking and to over-ride fear and submission responses when you have to communicate about or defend your work.

The ability to think and function outside of the box is an asset of significant value; recognising that is especially important if you are planning to "do something for autistics." Their ability to function in 'in an appropriate way' is limited, but that does not imply their ability to function, given an appropriate context is as limited as it appears. The trick is to find that context; and in that context they will not have so much difficulty "being appropriate."

There's no area where this insight is more critical than in regards to the parents of autistics themselves.

Make no mistake; autism can be a crippling condition, and it's made worse by being a condition where you absolutely must depend upon others to accommodate your needs and accept limitations that those without the condition cannot easily see or understand. But even the most obviously disabled "autist" is as severely affected by presumptions of how their disability affects them and even more by refusal of others to accept our word for the accommodations we need.

This following paragraph is emblematic of the crippling parental fears that the 800-lb gorilla of the pro-cure movement exploits for funding and validation:

You are never prepared for a child with autism. You will gradually come to believe it, but never fully accept it, get used to it, or get over it. You put away the hopes and dreams you had for that child - the high school graduation, the June wedding. Small victories are cause for celebration - a word mastered, a dry bed, a hug given freely. - FAQs about Autism: Cure Autism Now

Those of us who object to such fear, panic and the pervasive bigotry that exists with in the pro-cure movement - as well as it's seemingly obvious ethical deficits are pretty soundly attacked, with all kinds of terrible motives assigned us. (Theory of Mind, eh?)

A great deal of the work on the support groups that accept AS persons as contributors - something of a rarity - is to get non-AS people to accept that our "inability to cultivate friendships" is not a crippling condition to us. Once we have our one or two friends - friends as geeky and weird as us, generally speaking, we are done. My personal limit is two, and what NT's call "friendships," I now interpret as "Acquaintances." Yes, of course that has profound effects in terms of my ability to sustain a social network, and that has cost me many opportunities; indeed even jobs. I try and work things so that one of my two has the social skills I lack and the willingness to use them on my behalf.


Unfortunately, there is a lot of very bad advice out there and some very bizarre ideas as to what will be helpful to people such as I, who are on the spectrum and who are nonetheless potentially articulate and intelligent beings. Mostly this revolves around the idea that a bad job of conforming to the expectations of others is superior to a good job of being me. Here's Lennie Schafer on the topic of "fake autistics" like me.

(What about "high functioning autism" and how does that fit in? Simply put, it doesn't fit in anywhere. High functioning autism is not clinically defined and is not in the DSM-IV, and for good reason. High functioning autism is an oxymoron. If one meets the criteria for a diagnosis of autism, by definition one cannot be high-functioning. It would be as silly as the term sharp-eyed blindness.) (1)

So why would a handful of people, amongst a few others, who apparently are for the most part Aspergers, if anything, want to identify themselves autistic? Perhaps because autism is a profound disability and Aspergers is a disorder that is mostly not. Autism thus carries more moral weight than Aspergers and therefore has more moral clout for self-esteem building political and social agendas. "We autistics don't want to be cured" carries much more punch than "We Aspergers don't want to be cured", especially given the reality that there is no movement anywhere that seeks to "cure" those with Aspergers into being anything else.(2)

Aspergers-labeled alone, they would be ignored by the press and would be denied the juicy sense of empowerment that would come with a high-profile "oppressed minority" movement article like the one in the liberal New York Times. (3) (4)

The New York Times reporter failed to do a journalist's most basic homework. She failed to check the credentials of those doing the complaining, despite my urging. Anyone can call themselves autistic and write cranky letters to the editor. So how does someone determine if a person is truly autistic,or is an autism imposter with Aspergers? Ask to see their diagnosis. If someone claims to have autism for purposes of making some political statement, ask them to prove it. In any of the correspondence I have had with the autism "imposters", not one has ever supplied such documentation. (5) Of course, it is highly unlikely to ever see it. The irony here is that if someone has enough language skills to effectively complain about the treatment of autistics, then they themselves cannot be autistic.(6) Apparently more than one big city newspaper has failed to see through this deception, so eager are they to get an unusual victim story into print. Can we afford to allow the interests of our autistic children and everyone else "on the spectrum" to be pushed out of the public eye and displaced by a handful of imposters crying a contrived victimhood? Who speaks for autism? Not this bunch.

Note that he, and those like him don't like being quoted, even under "fair use" constraints.

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Of course, if I committed so many foolish rhetorical errors in public, I'd prefer not to be used as a hideous example either.

1. Argument from Authority. Of course, the process of determining what goes into the DSM-IV is pure and objective science .
2. Aspergers is, in fact an autistic spectrum disorder and has quite a range of effects. As a step-parent of a diagnosed Aspie, I'm very aware of the fact that there are very significant issues involved. They are not so inconvenient to US, as parents. They are going to affect HIM quite significantly unless we find some adaptive strategies that work for him.
3. As opposed to the entirely legitimate empowerment that comes from suffering the hideous, horrendous burden that is Autism.
4. Of course, it's a liberal thing to be concerned about the civil rights of children being abused and neglected for the sake of the convenience and social comfort of their conservative parents. This is the root host for "Autism, A Debilitating Disease, not a Culture," a page that links to both Free Republic and Free Dominion, while telling Canadians they a vaccilating, unpatriotic fools for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing." Snark aside, the fact that this site, is associated with Authoritarian Right Wingers explains a lot about the entire, very authoritarian "curebie" movement.
5. For myself, I want to see Lennie's MENSA results, his HIV status and full financials proving he's not unduly profiting from his activism before I deign to speak with him. I suspect he's unworthy of my attention, but if he proves otherwise, I will of course listen.
   
6. Factually untrue.

Unpuzzled is my most militant anti-curebie design, with the slogan, "help find a clue."

I know, it's rude and confrontational, but I've found that sometimes you need to swat people with a clue-by-four in order to startle them enough so they actually listen.

Those "seeking a cure" tend to ignore everything from those of us who ARE on the spectrum because it doesn't fit into to their mindsets, just as they reject "inappropriate" responses to communications from their autie and aspie children.

This is especially true of issues about communication style, reasonable accommodation and most importantly, the concept that a difference need not be AS disabling as it seems from an "NT" perspective. And, speaking as someone who's gone round and round on this at various times and under various circumstances, those who most boldly wave the "puzzle ribbon" seem at times to be making a point of their puzzlement, and their inability to understand to be the issue of auties and aspies.

See point above about how many friends and relationships an autie or aspie needs in an emotional sense. We do not absolutely require a relationship with the biological parental units. It's a nice thing to have, but we cannot and some quantity of will not be as easily coerced by family emotional ties as neurotypicals can be. This is not just because we have a "faulty" connection between emotions and reasoning. Our reasoning is not emotional, and our emotional responses seem to be quite different - across the board. Put two aspies in the same room and they will communicate quite well indeed - but their body language, topic choices and intuitive negotiations of "status" will be starkly different - and one of the greatest differences is the relative lack of huge tooth-bearing grins with full eye-contact.

To an aspie, to most sensible primates and all cats I've ever met, bare teeth and a full-on gaze is, at the very least, a statement of territorial or situational dominance, inviting a ritual contest of wills to determine who will be in charge and who will submit. Your typical aspie doesn't wish to play that game, having no need or real desire to join your pack, so if you do see them bare their teeth - it's probably in the context of a genuine, non-ritualized warning that Bad Things Will Suddenly Occur If You Do Not Go Away NOW.

What part of "Agggh! [flap flap flap] [throw object] LEAVE ME ALONE" is unclear to you people?

The "Unsmily" design honors the "aspie smile," a neutral expression that essentially means "hailing frequencies open." That look of slightly blank attention is a sign that an aspie or autistic is willing to let you talk at them for a while. Indeed, oft-times we are listening so hard that we are not thinking about what we will say next.

No pointless social noises please! Talk about something that is both objectively important and something within the realm of my interest and ability to have an opinion on. Make a full statement, then shut up and let me talk at YOU for a while. Then it's your turn.

Appalling, isn't it?

Well, that is the way aspies and auties communicate best - asynchronously. The full give and take of an NT conversation is difficult for us, and those of us that can manage it are doing it because we realize that style of communication is important to our NT friends all out of proportion to anything actually communicated. Mostly we grunt and make what experience has taught us to be socially appropriate noises at the expected times.

We are quite unlikely to put up with attempts to get us to conform to your expectations of what people like you should be. We are not 'like you,' and while we do very clearly appreciate that you have social advantages we do not, and we all understand that any parent would wish their child to have every possible advantage - we also know that many of those "advantages" come with a price. Some of those prices are ones we cannot pay - and for many of us, compromising who we are or being less than honest about what we know to be true is a price we will not pay - no matter how politically incorrect it may be to point out that the emperor has no clue.