My Last Autism Awareness Post.

Aspie Kid T-Shirt
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webcarve

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Yep. The whole thing fits on that t-shirt.

"Thank you for your input. Your interaction with my parent has added significantly to the body of my thesis."

My parents are dead - but speaking as an AS person and as step-parent to an AS person, I'm so down with that.

Putting it all in perspective

The key to all communication is knowing when to shut up. This blog entry illustrates that.

ISOLATION - Norma Desmond

My son needs the label of Asperger’s Syndrome so that people stop using inappropriate ones. There are many gifts that come with this condition. Difficulties arise from an inability of ‘normal’ society to understand or accommodate the way his brain works.
two sides to every story

Want to be a free thinker but still a nice person: Advice from a graveyard

I stopped at the grave of Victorian babies – I counted three dead and the mother taken in childbirth with the last one. Reflecting on that poor woman having to look into the chilly darkness of her children's graves put my modern problems into perspective. I didn't want to be careless with my own children's lives by doing something irrevocable simply because I was angry with my husband. The weight of what the mother had gone through gave me an anchor for the afternoon.

When I noted how many young people buried there had been brought down by cholera, malaria or some other condition we no longer worry about, I decided it's a privilege to live long enough to have problems exacerbated by a long life and marriage. I strolled past the grave of a girl 'who left us in her 13th year'. She was the same age as my daughter at the time. Her sad mother had written: 'The flowers appeareth on the Earth. The flowers fadeth.'

Walking home, I finally decided not to be a modern wimp, but to keep strong and fight for my family's future. I thought my friends in the graveyard approved, for as I walked away, the sun suddenly shone on a tombstone that I'd never seen before: "Whether we wake or sleep," the inscription affirmed, "we live together."

After finding the perfect photo to illustrate this story, I find myself with nothing to say that hasn't been said better in the caption for the photo.

This series is produced for a utata summer project - which aims to tell a story with six photos. My project tells the positives and negatives of having aspergers syndrome mainly to increase awareness of the realities and nit the myths surrounding the autistic spectrum

www.utata.org/show/speaks/dramaqueennorm a/1.php
the first six make up the story but the extras are ones with the same treatment that I still like very much.

I do too. The photo caption links to the set on flickr - please go comment. The quote links to the photo essay on utata - and that sure looks like something I need to pass around too.

As for the post excerpt, from which I was going to weave a post about anti-vaccine activists, perspective and cost-benefit ratios - all that now seems rather crass, and a disservice to both contributions. So, I will leave this as it is, and leave all the implications for each reader as they are, without further comment.

Neurodiverse "Unpuzzled" image for you to use.

Simply click the image to get the link code. If the largest version is NOT big enough for your needs (print applications, etc,) I'll be glad to email you a large PNG that will be sharp enough for any application you have in mind.

John Best's So-Craptic Dialogue

John Best conjures the shade of Phaedrus who promptly runs screaming from someone who makes Socrates seem tolerant and egalitarian.

Or in other words, he's commenting anonymously on his own blog. There can't be two people with the same writing style and the same exact fixations. Or at least, one sincerely hopes this to be the case - and if not, one hopes that they are of the same gender so that they cannot breed.

Foresam said...

Probe,
It's hard to believe that any sane person could consider Seidel a colleague. As I stated on Orac's blog, they might not fully understand Neuroinsanity.

I'll have more to say about this later.

Wed Apr 09, 09:12:00 AM EDT

Anonymous said...

what does "Nambla" stand for again?

"North American Man/Boy Love Association"?

As far as I am concerned what Seidel is associated with something every bit as nasty and loathsome.

They may or may not put their hands on people when they do what they do, but Neurodiversity with its autism 'lifestyle' obsessive fetishist behavior and goals at keeping autistics as severely disabled as is possible combined with their blatant unblinking victimization of persons disabled by autism is every bit disqusting and every bit as much a crime and a taking advantage of a group of people, whether they are sometimes children sometimes not, its their disability that makes them targets for this evil group and in every way what they do molests rapes and exploits persons with autism.

99% of them are twisted fetishists who indeed very much 'get off' on the idea of autism and I have long held a deep core gut feeling that they hungrily read every word ever written about autism, pass themselves off as 'autistic' as much as is possible and so help me they get online and 'admire' those with autism in images and videos in a very sick and sexual way.

Its why they have their little so called 'culture' of autism, not a bit unlike those who excuse and justify other sexual deviant behaviors, develop entire communities and roleplaying around their deviation that goes with it and justifies it to themselves.

Seriously.

Tell me that Baggs and Tisconcik don't share a mutual twisted 'love of autism' -- its why they and their minions scour the 'net all their waking hours and prattle on endlessly about it, they're getting off on it.

Seidel and her crew couldn't do any worse if they were associated with "Nambla"

Ultimately I don't see a difference between it and "neurodiversity" at all.

Wed Apr 09, 02:35:00 PM EDT

Anonymous said...

To the anon above, very well said and so true. Autism is nothing more than the latest fetish to many people, and those obsessed with it are the high functioning aspergers types (if they even have Asperger's at all) Instead of looking for ways to improve their behaviours they revel in them, copy each other and can't wait to tell everyone they meet that they are autistic. Go on Youtube and look at the idiots at Autcom bragging about being autistic. It makes me sick.

Wed Apr 09, 03:57:00 PM EDT

And people wonder why I'd rather deal with the rather less toxic nonsense of social conservatives, flat-earth creationists and the Church of Reganology. Once a year I must remind myself what sort of insanity I fled.

By the way, John; speaking of obsessive, perverse concentration upon the supposed sexual behaviors of others - does the term "projection" ring a bell? Hateful people tend to accuse others of precisely the things they most loathe in themselves.

I believe I speak for many so-called "aspie perverts" when I say "eww" with the direct implication that your self loathing is not at all misplaced. "Perversion" is a way of saying that a person has a sexuality that is "abnormal," and I think that almost any rational person would giggle at the thought of you being in any mental or moral position to pass judgment on normalcy.

Not when you suggest that to criticize someone's financial motives for pushing dangerous treatments is the same as associating their name with the National Man Boy Love Association.

For the sake of your argument, a comparison to Dr. Mengele would be far more apt. He actually did inject children he considered subhuman with toxic substances in a quest to cure them of their Semitic attributes.

But Kathleen has not suggested anything of the sort nor do I. We find the facts in evidence compelling enough. I merely point out that it would have been a better-constructed straw man.

I suppose I should thank John for being as being the unapologetic essentialist he is, expressing without apparent embarrassment that which is hidden behind the smiles and paternalistic facades of those better able to conceal the overflowing cesspits of their subconscious fears and imaginations.

John Best is the Mike Savage of the Autism community - and in his way, as good an example of what sort of person you have to be to hate like he does. It's such examples of "normalcy" that cause me to celebrate my distinct differences.

Hans Asperger on the prognosis for autistics.

I stumbled across this on zazzle. It's the first time I've ever seen the quotation and I find it rather inspiring.

"For success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential." -Hans Asperger

I'm going to make my own version of that quotation. I'm thinking of putting it into my blog header, too.

But here's another Asperger quotation that is perhaps more to the point of the month:

We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers.^[3]

Yeah. What he said. I perhaps might add that one's success may well be inversely proportional to the degree with which worry and difficulty translates into "interventions" designed to minimize autistic distinctions that serve our distinct social purpose.

What is that, you may well ask?

Well, I'd have to say, if I were forced to explain my own role and generalize based on other aspies I know, it would be reality checking and social criticism. (Or systems analysis, looking at all sorts of different systems and rules sets.)

As children, our expectation that rules, strictures and diktats should make sense often gets us into a great deal of trouble, and as adults we tend to look back and try to make sense of it all.

He [Asperger] followed one child, Fritz V., into adulthood. Fritz V. became a professor of astronomy and solved an error in Newton’s work he originally noticed as a child.

I can just imagine how well that went over in a properly Germanic pedagogical context.

Well, I imagine it was received about as well as criticisms of the revealed doctrines of ABA and Chelation Therapy, or the observation that a treatment that improves a co-morbid condition, such as gluten intolerance, is not therefore a "cure" for autism, or indeed, suitable for all persons with AS issues.

I suspect that the sons and daughters of those obsessively searching for ways to impose normalcy upon them will grow up to be an immensely productive disappointment to their parents. I know that my father's form of bigotry made a deep impression on me, and my personal disconnect between internal reaction and facial expression probably saved me many a beating, such as the day he informed me that he was a much more valuable person than Martin Luther King, because he, my father, was a blue eyed white man.

Yeah. To this day, racism strikes me as being indescribably stupid, the refuge of those with no better distinction than being a completely undistinguished member of a visible majority - and generally an example most other members of that majority would do well to exclude.

The tragedy, of course, is that in attempting to suppress what I was and am, my parents spent little or no time considering how to inform and empower my abilities, being focused exclusively on what they saw as my deficits.

Neither seemed able to understand why I was so ungrateful for the benefits of their tender concern, or my lack of interest in continuing in that same vein once I was legally permitted to ignore them.

Even so, I consider myself immensely lucky to have not "benefited" to the extent many persons on the AS spectrum have - and the rates of both suicide and homicide of autistic spectrum persons tends to grimly underline the dark side of "awareness."

For some, "awareness" promotes xenophobia, rather than compassion. When you see that reaction - dissociate yourself. Fear is contagious - and it does more to debase and destroy families and civilization than any degree of autism could. And I factor the cost of care into that equation.

Credit: Asperger Quote by jillgo4th

Being aware of autism has a price. Being aware of what a "standard cure" looks like.

The aptly-named "Judge Rottenburg Center" is the logical extension of all "compliance based" approaches toward "behavior issues;" the "get a bigger hammer." It is the "summa logica" of authoritarians who have shaped our dominant culture - if I may use the term loosely.

The presumption - amusingly enough - is that it's quite literally insane to resist, or even question authority. Objectively, the more rational it would seem to question, the more doctrinally rigid the response is - and both covert and overt violence is to be expected as one of the first responses.

It's no accident that such programs spend as much time on modifying the behavior of parents (h/t Ballastexistenz ) as of the students. When you have to create a video that "explains" to parents Why Students Complain To Families, with such patronizing gems as these, anyone who was not utterly desperate (and kept in that state by the industry literature) would run screaming - their child under one arm and a random example under the other.

The following transcript and commentary comes from the inimitable Ballastexistenz (Article Link above) who does a pretty thorough deconstruction of language used and probable intents, from an experienced perspective.

From Chapter 5:

Some other concerns that we come across quite frequently involve general complaints about the program. Students will complain that they are physically held or restrained for no reason, and they will claim that they didn’t do anything to justify or provoke this. They will claim quite often that their behavior contracts were broken, also for no reason, or for no good reason. (Dr. Paisey)

And usually the problem is that the students don’t connect their own behavior with the consequences or structure of the program that has been put in place for them. (Dr. Paisey)

And that’s where you hear the complaint of “Staff are too strict” or “I was restrained for no reason,” because they’re not initially making that connection. (Dr. Rivera)

Of course, being restrained and otherwise punished for no reason, and then having it written up otherwise, is an incredibly common experience in institutions. It is convenient for them to have such a facile explanation for the whole thing.

From Chapter 8

Now young people complain about food all the time, in fact young people complain all the time in my experience, about everything. (Dr. Paisey)

This is true. (Dr. Rivera)

So if they weren’t at JRC, they’d probably be complaining about different things in different places… (Dr. Paisey)

Actually, the JRC imposes a strict diet on the “students”, regardless of their prior dietary preferences, and while it allows “other food” sometimes (sometimes contingent on good behavior), this is still an unreasonable restriction.

Chapter 9:

Nonetheless we will have students who do report to families that they are going crazy, or that they are going to hurt themselves, or they’re gonna run away, or they will make claims that staff abuse them, or they will say that they have marks on their bodies as a result of a restraint procedure. And they will sometimes claim that they were hurt by other people on purpose. (Dr. Paisey)

Because things like this happen in every institution I’ve seen.

And here is the big one, the one that explains everything:

If you have a telephone call or a face to face meeting during a visit with your son or daughter and they make some complaint, the first thing to do, I would suggest is to ask yourself, “Is this one of the complaints mentioned on that video I saw?” And then perhaps that will guide you towards the next step, which might be to listen briefly to the complaint. If you can, try to minimize your reaction to it. You can ask for specific details, specific contents, briefly. And then move on. Move on to something more appropriate and positive. If you think you need more information, contact the case manager. (Dr. Paisey)

See, the first thing to do is see if the complaint is mentioned on this video. If it is, then obviously it’s not a valid complaint, or something.

But as compelling as this analysis is, it's also quite ordinary and conventional - a putting into words, as it were, of what Amanda first picked up from the body language of the video presenters themselves. She presented this first, but as I'm speaking about her analysis, more than the idiocy she's examining, I reverse the order.

There were two people near each other, a woman on the left and a man on the right. When one was talking, the other was backing them up through movement. Their movements were coordinated with each other and sort of bouncing off and reflecting each other all the time.

The movements of the woman were quite often something I don’t know all the words for but know when I see it. There were some incongruous movements in there that were presumably to mask something or other. The rest of the movements and noises she was making were quite often to convey a sense of “I’m superior to these students, they are doing all these, sort of silly kid things, and I am laughing in exasperated tired adultness as they go through all these different things.” This is a knowing sort of movement, designed to convey a connection to the person watching it, sort of like, “We all know what this is like,” inviting the viewer to join in the knowingness.

The man moved in more subtle ways, but they conveyed precision and confidence, very much the way many psychiatrists or scientists move. He moved in such a way as to say, “We know what we’re doing, we do not even need to be forceful in arguing anything, because we know exactly what we’re doing.” His voice reminded me strongly of something a friend calls the “male human services accent,” and also conveyed a great deal of precision in the way that he pronounced words. Sometimes it acquired condescending tones, or his equivalent of the woman’s “knowing” tones.

The overall effect is, “We know what we’re doing, even you ought to know what we’re talking about a good deal of the time, and we agree with each other totally on this stuff, seen it all before. We’re not only in control, but it is only natural that we are in control.”

An AS person isn't supposed to "pick up on" social cues. Well, not so much from faces, no. Facial expressions lie and we find that utterly disorienting. Complete body language is much, much MUCH harder to mask. I know, I've had several forms of training in doing just that, and the consequent understanding of how to penetrate the obscurity, and how to reply to it appropriately.

However, it's at that point where my sense of "appropriate" and the expectations of the NT world tend to diverge. But perhaps another post would be the place for that, other than the observation that the fact that I come to a different conclusion about what is "appropriate" does not mean that I misunderstood. It means, quite often, that I understand quite well. I GOT it. I just didn't WANT it.

Anyway, Amanda demonstrates the skilled observational abilities and insight into dominance driven hierarchal manipulation as well as any hunted animal who studies their predators with an eye toward evading their clutches. My abilities are similar in that respect, but Amanda - as usual - says it better.

It seems that non- participation in a social structure, including being visibly un-shattered by exclusionary behavior, is something that strikes immature neurotypicals - particularly - as a visceral threat. The idea that it's perfectly possible to refuse to "go along to get along," to not participate in the ongoing "Stanford Experiment" that is school in this nation, is to put the lie to everything these people found their personality and self-worth upon. Fitting in, a place in the pack, is more important than whatever one might have to do or risk in order to "earn" that place.

I accept this as being natural to neurotypicals, it's not toxic by definition, though in practice it often is, mostly due to perps who ruthlessly manipulate the social instinct. See example film above. I'm certainly glad to benefit from their skills when they can be made to understand that I want to benefit without any desire to participate. I've had NT friends, and generally it relied on a mutual exchange of strengths. I am not so arrogant as to think that my mind or way of doing things is superior - but I'm damn sure it's not inferior; I know this because I'm able to cope with situations and achieve things that would for sure drive anyone on the NT end of the spectrum stark, raving mad. And if I'm high-maintenance, which in many ways I am, I'm also worth it, due to my relative scarcity. For instance, I can see the behavior as Amanda did, above, and often, I've helped NT friends avoid pitfalls based on their "superior socialization." The favor, of course, was often returned.

None of this was not something I learned as a child, in school. There I learned that to be "non-compliant" was to be useless, irrelevant, or in other contexts, cowardly for not doing something stupid and dangerous because everyone else was. I "learned" to trust authority and obey without question. Or rather, not being a complete idiot, I learned when I had to pretend, and to what degree and under what circumstances compliance really mattered.

One of the most depressing things I learned was that NT's expect to be manipulated emotionally and by social dominance that some cannot even comprehend that one might actually just mean the words they just said. That there might not be any "subtext" or "hidden agenda" or indeed any implication other than what was communicated in actual words. Therefore, they refuse to take the plain meaning at face value.

I will bet you five bucks this is one factor in "autistic regression." What's the point in using words if words get you an unexpected and often painful result, for no reason you can comprehend?

That, and ... well, some people just can't stop talking, worse yet, they don't prioritize in any way between "oo, a butterfly, isn't that pretty" and "that car is going to hit us!"

And yet they are insulted if you find that filtering for content is more work than their information content is worth. I suppose it is insulting - but alas, not inaccurate. And at fifty years of age, with the prospect of thirty to fifty more to get through, I have less and less patience for putting up with walking wastes of time.

C/F "Dilbert."

The Problem With The Puzzle People

clipped from hopelessbleakdespair.blogspot.com Unfortunately, one of the issues their father and I have is what's in their best interests and how to treat them. He's one of the anti-vax folks, ready to try the cure-du-jour the minute he reads about it, and thinks that I don't work hard enough to "cure" the younger one (because otherwise he'd be cured already, don'tcha know) He is typical of many of the folks you'll see in the media this month -- stuck at the "devastated" stage of having your child diagnosed with a disability. He is desperate. He refuses to accept his son for who he is, to take joy in what he CAN do, rather than bemoan what he can't do. I understand this. I can sympathize with this. But I cannot condone this eternal wallowing in the general unfairness of life. No one promised you a "normal" child, and having one who doesn't fit the traditional categories of "normal" is also not the worst thing that ever happened to anyone.

From a mom with AS spectrum kids and an ex who's a curebie.

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.

Autism Awareness Month Postage and other things.

April is Autism Awareness Month Stamp by webcarve

Click the stamp to put your company or organization url on it and order a sheet or two. This one is my own design, and one of the very few templated stamps. Zazzle is pretty good about quickly checking designs for postage, but I expect an approved template will be approved even faster.

I HATE puzzle piece designs - and so it has to be an amazing design for me to link to it.

AUTISM - Still a Mystery by pickyourpostage

Pickyourpostage has a ton of other autism designs, and one of the few postage designers on Zazzle that I'm tempted to collect. (And remind me to find out whether it's worthwhile, numismatically speaking.)

And finally, maybe not the best graphic design, but it made me laugh out loud.

STAMP AUTISM by PERFECTLYUNPERFECT

While I was doing all of this, I had a thought that there are situations where you'd want your autistic kid to carry identification that gives authorities a clue. I've created two - one to be carried as a form of ID, not to be given out, and one that is intended to be used in a school setting. Both are templated to include a current photo. The design has been kept deliberately institutional, with highly visible colors. Yellow for the ID, green for the student "advisory" card.

There is a helpful paragraph at the bottom advising whoever the card may be given or shown to that they may have responsibilities under the ADA and a reference to the ADA Department of Justice Website.

Autistic Student Card by webcarve

If you don't like my design, you can always use zazzle to create your own - and there are many other options that might help safeguard your children with a little imagination. Don't be afraid to ask me if you need an idea or two or even design help.