Auties, Aspies, and other CloudCuckooLanders!

I planned on writing a short email. I now have two full pages on Word, and am still typing. But if they're going to do autism advocacy, they are reading the whole thing

Oh that does not sound good.

This is giving me some serious anxiety. Because now I have to get involved, or I'm going to have to look at "autism awareness" all over my school

It's just so ridiculous. Whenever there's a group dedicating to "helping" me, it ends up making me exponentially more anxious and uncomfortable than I ever was before

Ugh I don't have time to fight "autism awareness" right now. I'm already stressed enough about next semester, I don't need this stress too

Hmm, do you think you might be able to eliminate the anxiety and also participate at the same time?

Hi, I'm new to the forums and Autistic. Sorry if I'm interrupting your conversation.

You're not interrupting anything! I often have no idea what we're talking about and I can't focus for these long paragraphs so I just kinda post whatever.

Same here. Though for me, it's less that I can't focus and more that I don't want to focus. Most of these ridiculously long posts make me go 'TLDR', and while I can stand a few of them, having what feels like so many of them just makes me skim through them rather than giving each of them proper attention. Mind you, I've been guilty of making overly long posts myself, so I guess I shouldn't really complain, but it doesn't change the fact that so many long posts still puts me off a bit.

edited 13th Aug '16 12:03:42 PM by kkhohoho

Sorry I'm the one making all the long posts. It's just that this thread is the only place I have to discuss autism matters with anyone. But if I'm annoying people I'll stop

edited 13th Aug '16 11:12:06 AM by Cailleach

No, no. You're not annoying. If I'm lucky, I could maybe finish a post. It's not you, and it doesn't annoy me.

Also, Cailleach, I have been reading the recent conversation, (well, as much as I could focus on), and honestly, props for going out of your way to explain things to people, even if it feels like talking to a wall. You certainly have more patience than I do.

Also, yeah, the exclusion feeling sucks. Sorry you had to deal with that.

Well hello there fresh blood. *bares fangs*

Welcome to the club. :D

Please don't eat me, I taste like cheap energy drinks and manic depression.

But, yeah; good to finally join. The tropes have been a minor SI of mine. Helps me understand things much better too.

I was talking with my cousin during my vacation, and he mentioned encountering an autistic woman in a bar. He didn't realize she was autistic until after she'd already left, and a coworker told him.

He said that she gave him a dirty look, though in hindsight, he thinks the look may have been unintentional and had no relationship to whatever it was she was actually thinking. He also says at one point she left suddenly without a goodbye. I pointed out these are normal behaviors.

====

Is Applied Behavioral Therapy, the Most Common Treatment for Autism, Cruel? Honestly, if I didn't get it when I was little, I wouldn't be talking or interacting with humans today, or have gotten so high-functioning by kindergarten age.

At the same time, a common criticism is that harmless things such as stimming are punished (they were for me). The focus is also at times too heavily based on getting autistics to act normal, rather than changing who they actually were or what they actually were like inside.

Nowadays, more and more autistic self-advocates are speaking out against ABA's effects in regards to punishing autism-like behaviors instead of the more important things like teaching children to talk and interact. Parents of autistics are reading the writings of autistic self-advocates and becoming influenced by them.

And they most certainly did face institutionalization. A follow-up study comparing kids who received ABA vs. those who didn't showed the ones who did were higher-functioning, higher-IQ, and improved overall as opposed to those who did not receive ABA.

One thing that worried me about that article is that the two sides could be broken down to:

People who support ABA: Parents and therapists of autistic kids

People who don't support ABA and/or believe it needs drastic changes: Actual autistic people

It's not that simple. There are non-autistics who think that ABA has flaws and limits; for example, punishing stims is a stupid idea, and the focus should be on making the person able to function.

edited 16th Aug '16 12:37:52 PM by BonsaiForest

It just appalls me that the abusive practices were able to go on for this long. Abusive practices were commonplace for a lot of medical and psychiatric conditions in the past, but have started to subside in the present day once people started pushing ethics instead of just cures, and once victims stood up for change. Bu abuse is still commonplace in therapy for autism. Because people don't listen to autistic victims the same way they listen to neurotypical victims.

What has to be done now is dissecting ABA and other therapies, weeding out the abusive practices. It shouldn't be that hard. What makes it hard is that people still barely listen to autistic victims. They listen to the lobby that abusive ABA has, Autism $peaks, parents and teachers who only see the outward change that abusive ABA causes ("My child is behaving so much better now!") over the voices of abused autistics, who should be the ones to tell you which practices helped them and which ones didn't.

I think a lot of abusive practices still exist in many other things, actually. Check out articles on centers for troubled teens. Lots of abuse still going on even today. It's not just autistics, though I don't doubt people typically do treat us as if we can't possibly know what we're talking about.

Also, autistic self advocates are getting louder and increasingly getting paid attention to - as that article pointed out. Parents are starting to question ABA as a result of us speaking up online.

Anyone wanna watch Fist of the North Star with us?

It's showing right now, if anyone here is interested.

edited 16th Aug '16 5:17:45 PM by BonsaiForest

@BonsaiForest: It is my belief that you would currently be high functioning right now without behavioural therapy. I can't prove it, doing so would require going back in time and actually finding out, but it is my current guess.

Education is not magic. All humans naturally learn stuff. Especially if we decide to apply ourselves towards it for whatever reason. And as much as I don't want to disparage the efforts of past psychologists, I consider behavioural therapy the same as normal guided education. It is no magic bullet. It probably helps, but like with regular education, most students will get where they're going without it, just at a slower pace.

edited 16th Aug '16 8:14:06 PM by war877

When I was at that institute, I saw a lot of lower-functioning autistics. I didn't understand that I was autistic, or what autism was, so I didn't get what was up with these kids and their strange behaviors. It confused me. I didn't see what I had in common with them.

Speaking of going to class with lower-functioning autistics, when my mom was trying to figure out where I would go to school in the fifth grade, instead of going to KKI like she wanted, DCPS and the DC courts, not understanding what Asperger's is, decided to just stick me in a class with some (and I think a couple of the students may have been literally mentally retarded, but I'm not sure) and call it a day. One of the teachers claimed she had Asperger's but in retrospect she could've been lying as far as I know.

Did your mom later realize there's a massive fucking gulf between certain ends of the spectrum and some individuals within it?

You do realize my mom was against me being put in that class for that very reason, yes?

Really tired of people assuming shit about my mom every time I mention her on a forum.

Sorry. I was in a hurry and I read it wrong.

Schools are very systematic. Anything that's systematic fails to take into consideration individual difference. Anything that takes into account individual difference could potentially go wrong: costing too much, being too difficult to do (see: homeschooling, as many cannot fit it into their lives), or screwing up its understanding of the difference.

It's a tricky balance.

Well, eventually I was put into Kennedy Krieger. Though that ended up sucking for different reasons, so *shrug*