Nico

It’s that time of year again- the time of year where we gear up for April, aka “Autism Awareness Month”. As in the past couple of years, Cafe Press has people vote on which charities/organizations they will donate to. They started doing this poll as Autistics and our allies protested their previous approach- to just donate to Autism Speaks. 

ASAN (the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) is the only organization on the poll run by and for Autistics. The others range from “meh” to espousing bad science, eugenic ideas, or both. 

POLL ENDS ON MARCH 8TH. THIS IS URGENT.

You may vote for one Organization to receive half of the donations. The organization with the most votes and the runner up will each receive half. Donations come from 10% of the sales of items using a specified tag. 

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US!!!

New blog post for my blog! 

Content: ableism, internalized ableism, mention of hospitalization and depression, mention of denials of reproductive justice to people with disabilities. 

When I was 20, I did not love myself. I was tired. I had been in and out of hospitals, been under the care of providers hopeful that a pill would fix my brain. I had been told repeatedly that there was something “wrong” with me. That there were somethings it wasn’t “right” for me to do.

sinshine:

This. Article. Is. Amazing. Somewhat triggering in spots, but well worth reading in its entirety.

She’s a doctor, and an “autism mom”. Then one day she met an autistic self advocate. And she listened. 

I would love to see you all become members if possible! (and if you have extra cash, maybe sponsoring a membership for those without?)

nekobakaz:

It’s my contention that calling a physical inability to see and to interpret nonverbal signals a failure of any kind of empathy is to make an unmerited interpretive leap. After all, people who are blind cannot see and interpret nonverbal signals — they rely upon spoken language and/or Braille text — and yet, to my knowledge, no one has alleged that blindness is a low-empathy condition. Blind people come to understand the mental states of other people through other means, just as autistic people do. And yet, for an autistic person, a problem seeing and interpreting visual phenomena — and the necessity of taking alternative routes to acquiring the information expressed by such phenomena — is the basis for defining autism as an empathy disorder.

- Quote from post linked to, written by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, in response to Simon Baron-Cohen’s reply to her criticisms about his views on Autism and Empathy.

scar-lip:

Part 1 is here

Our next part starts with an exciting situation in which a person without Asperger’s applies motives and thought processes to a near stranger based on his having Asperger’s. Let’s watch. Actually, you want to skip this. Put on some music you like, drink something you enjoy, and scroll down to where you see /Serious Trigger Warning letting you know that it’s slightly less dangerous to proceed. Serious Trigger Warning.

When I happened to be on a week-long group backpacking trip with a man with Asperger’s (he only told us about this at the end), it took some time to realize there was something different about him. I recall best that his normal ten-year-old son (they’d been sent out for a male bonding experience) was in agony from trying to carry a pack too heavy for him. His father told him it was because he had packed too much. This was surely the case, but Dad showed no sympathy or even annoyance.

This strikes me as being common. Also, it strikes me as being in need of context. Did the dad spend the time packing reminding his son to pack lighter? Were there arguments about what does and doesn’t need to be brought? Does the dad know his kid’s pack is too heavy because he spent time trying to get his kid to stop packing non-necessities? Did the dad offer to pack some things but his kid refused and insisted that he could do it?

Even just one of these being true and that’s not an unlikely response to the whining. If you warn someone about something and they ignore your warnings, hearing htem complain about it results in annoyance. That’s not a lack of empathy, that’s not a lack of proper social understanding/reaction. That’s the reason “I told you so” exists in the English language.

And it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that all of those happened, which makes it even more understandable.

Severe Trigger Warning (it’s that bad, seriously, consider just skipping this bit, if you are at all low on spoons- do not read this) It was not about teaching his son a lesson—that would have involved some complex social-emotional negotiations.

….Stop talking. Just, ugh, this is disgusting, the smugness. Did he say that? Did he say “No- Iw asn’t teaching him a lesson” or are you saying “this man clearly can’t handle the complex social-emotional negotiations involved in child rearing he’s just a cold-hearted jerk while normal parents who do the same thing are doig it for their kids own good!”

He was clueless about how to resolve this beyond next time seeing his son had a lighter pack.

Maybe this was teaching him a lesson, it was punishment, and making his kid carry the pack was so that he could spend a week having it drilled into him “I need to pack lighter”. 

Not the kindest thing- but it happens.

Something clearly had to be done, so my husband carried the boy’s pack on steep climbs. The father expressed no surprise or gratitude.

Your husband just interrupted his parenting without first running it by the boy’s father. Let me make it clear that I know full well that parents can be abusive- but how many parents do you know are grateful when someone undermines their authority?

Now, it apparently/allegedly didn’t upset the boy’s father- not enough for his response to be worthy of noting- so it’s not that bad. But that still doesn’t mean “Look at this man tormenting his poor child by making him carry a heavy backpack”

He was a very nice man, a nurse by profession, and a good one when I was injured on the trip.

So… Possibly someone who’s more aware of his child’s physical limits so would be more aware of wehther or not hte pack is “too heavy” as in “this will do damage to my child if I don’t help” vs. “too heavy” as in “I don’t want to carry this pack so I’m gonna whine but I can do it”, so it’s even more likely than it usually is that the dad would know he wasn’t hurting his kid by making him carry his own pack?

He could talk readily about his problem, and the fact his marriage had ended because his wife could not stand his lack of emotional empathy.

It happens.

But there was no way that he could be confused with an HSP, except perhaps by his acute awareness that he was different, which made him very sad. He could experience his own emotions, but he could not read the signs of the emotional experiences of others.

But if a lack of empathy is the problem- I’m definitely liable to confuse this person with what they seem to think a person with Asperger’s “disorder” is like (note: this has nothing to do with what people with Asperger’s are necessarily actually like).

/End Severe Trigger Warning

(trigger warning: Anti-Intersex/Dyadism, Binarism, Cissexism) We do know these disorders are genetically based—[…] For example, most but not all of the genes put boys more at risk than girls.

anti-intersex/dyadism and binarism and cissexism. I just love the smell of it in the morning. I will bet you money that she means “That put people with one X chromosome more at risk than people with more than one X chromosome.”

Just say that.

This whole part is just a lot of stuff that may very well be pseudo-science (Autism Spectrum conditions might be caused by “the zillion chemicals we are all ingesting these days”). It might have some basis, but I don’t know. so I’m skipping the rest.

An early diagnosis followed by the right treatment makes a huge difference in the outcome, so you do not want to make any mistakes here.

What the hell is the right treatment? Because often times treatment is incredibly abusive and damaging to people on the autism spectrum. It might make them more “socially acceptable”, but at what cost? When we stop living in a world where PTSD is preferable to being on the autism spectrum (being trans, having an intersex, not being straight, being anything not “normal”)- then I won’t have as much of a problem with it.

But really- depending on the situation, sometimes the right “treatment” is teaching the kid how to handle a world that doesn’t like them. Which isn’t a “treatment” like she’s suggesting.

Severe Trigger Warning (just go read something else, have a nice day) no one who loves a child or their parents would want to think about autism

…

If I have to explain why this is busted to all hell- get the fuck off my blog. Unfollow me right. now. if you don’t understand why it’s problematic to say no one would want to think someone they love might be autistic. Right now.

or is happy for twenty minutes merely watching a bicycle wheel spinning

I am so jealous of that kid. Why is it a disorder to be made happy by little things?

Sometimes sensitivity and ASDs are confused because the child with an ASD may have little or no ability to regulate emotions, and sensitive children, too, are more emotional than other children. But with ASDs, these behaviors are due to incorrectly processing perceptual stimulation all the time, not just when overstimulated.

Whereas HSP are just overstimulated by the world so are always overstimulated so…

Yeah.

[Suggesting an “insiders” book that’s written from the autistic perspective by a man who does not have autism. … What?]\

Again- if you don’t see the problem, get off my blog right now.

Everyone may be relieved to find a biological explanation, an ASD [as opposed to high sensitivity], especially since it absolves the parents of any blame.

Why the hell is high sensitivity not a biological condition? What the fuck is it?

Alas, such a diagnosis also reduces the hope of changing, of developing stronger social connections with practice.

…

I… yeah. Right. Of course.

Is this true? At all? Can people with Asperger’s, if they want to, not look at how they naturally interact with the world vs how most people do and find a way to help the two jive a bit better to improve reactions?

Emphasis on “if they want to”. If the rest of the world wants to jive with them- maybe we should be asking them how they interact with the world and work to change ourselves to fit that better.

Part 3 is here

Just want to add one or two things:

1) A lot of the stuff in this article does the distancing thing- the “oh, we aren’t one of them.” Crap that is so so so destructive. Distancing = Horrible WTFery. It is just as horrible as when MH folks distance from people with DDs, or people with Physical disabilities distance from people with MH disabilities, or even people On the autism spectrum with high IQ scores distance themselves from our Intellectually disabled brethren. It is distancing, and attempts to say that you are somehow less disabled, or at least not one of those “bad,” “wrong” sort of disabled folks. 

I guess it comes off as someone who is so desperate, because of their internalizing of ableism and anti-autistic bigotry, to make sure everyone knows they aren’t one of us. That they are some better, less disabled person. Ugh, Sorry, I hate distancing. 

2) anyone else pick up that for an “inside” look at what it is like to be autistic, they rec a novel by someone who is not autistic themselves? Who apparently in 2009 on his blog stated he’s not an expert on Autism, and the book wasn’t meant to be specifically about Autism? (You can have an autistic character and have it not be an Autism Book just as you can have a gay character and not have it be a Gay Book.) That in fact it goes directly against his wishes to be presented as an expert on the topic.

It’s not like there aren’t a ton of Autobiographical books by Autistic people. Some of them are certainly better than others, true, but they still exist. They are actually looking into the thoughts and experiences of Autistics themselves, instead of the speculation- however well informed- and dramatization of an outsider’s fictional account. 

But, perhaps, the Autobiographies didn’t play into the article’s Author’s distancing crap. Maybe some of them had things that were too familiar. Or things that destroyed the stereotyping that their dividing up HSP and ASDs into entirely separate worlds plays to. I know some if not most display experiences that play into the “intense world” theory which it does NOT look like the author is in favor of, going by what they describe ASDs as. 

(Source: korenaphotos)

scar-lip:

korenaphotos:

This, I don’t know. I read it and all I could do was cry. Maybe someone else can be more coherent? I don’t have the energy to do this.

I don’t know enough about this…

But:

Okay, let’s start this out with an explanation- this article is from a site about ‘HSP’ or “Highly Sensitive People”. So if you’re confused by hte use of a very wide-ranging word like “sensitivity” which includes everything from feeling something placed in your hand to being aware when others have different needs, this writer presumably means “Sensitivity” to mean “overly sensitive”.

Here are some traits of a Highly Sensitive Person, for reference.

• Are you easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens nearby?
• Do you get rattled when you have a lot to do in a short amount of time?
• Do you make a point of avoiding violent movies and TV shows?
• Do you need to withdraw during busy days, into bed or a darkened room or some other place where you can have privacy and relief from the situation?
• Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations?
• Do you notice or enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, or works of art?
• Do you have a rich and complex inner life?
• When you were a child, did your parents or teachers see you as sensitive or shy?

Now for some quotes from the article:

Others have been told that the entire trait of sensitivity is just a mild form of one of these disorders, the higher functioning end of the “autistic spectrum.”

The site is made and run by a person who sells books about “HSP”. One is called “How to thrive when the World Overwhelms You”. Anyways- a few problems before I go into even more.

1. Autism is not always a disorder. It can be. There are autistic people whose autism is very disordered for them. There are other autistic people whose autism is not a disorder, again, for them.
2. What the heck is with those scare quotes around “autism spectrum”? Not cool.

To give some perspective, I’m definitely highly sensitive. Over sensitive, I’d say. Freaking out and having to find a literal nook (between the end of a bookshelf and the wall at the least crowded end) to tuck yourself into to calm down because the Barnes & Noble cafe got a bit too loud… Good times.

Sunlight can literally blind me (no, really, my entire vision has gone white and I cannot see at times, other times it just hurts too much so I squint and try to cover my eyes), being gently poked or nudged feels like it’ll leave a bruise, walking past someone with perfume makes me dizzy, if the tiniest bit of food has been slightly burned I feel like I bit into solid charcoal, being in a loud room (as I pointed out) is just horrible. I wish I was exaggerating.

So, now, being a HSP is not the same as being autistic. That does not make me autistic. I am 95% certain that I am not autistic. I believe autism often comes with over-sensitivity like that, although not always to those  degrees and, hell, probably not always. Let’s take a look back at those traits of HSPs, most notably the first few:

“Are you easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens nearby? Do you get rattled when you have a lot to do in a short amount of time? Do you make a point of avoiding violent movies and TV shows? Do you need to withdraw during busy days, into bed or a darkened room or some other place where you can have privacy and relief from the situation? Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations?”

Now notice that upsetting and overwhelming situations for these people are all rather every day humdrum situations- having a lot to do isn’t uncommon, bright lights and strong smells and sirens (okay, the last one it depends on where you live) also aren’t uncommon. Being annoyed by all that is relatively common, depending on just how “bright” a bright light is and just how “Strong” a smell has to be. Going out of your way to avoid them, however, is pretty uncommon. Depending on the degree you have to go to to avoid those things, it can severely negatively impact your life- and very well can be a disorder.

Now, it’s not necessarily autism (for one thing- autism is not a disorder), and it isn’t always. It is for me… But that’s me.

Breaking this down because walls of text- I don’t read them. This is too long, quite frankly. I can put them all together at the end if other people prefer that.

Part 2 is here

Part 3 is here