General Autism Discussion

It's rather sad that while bigotry is stupid, not all bigots are stupid.

With all the portrayals of autism in fiction, and all the talk of trying to get employment for autistics, here's an article claiming that such fictional portrayals are actually hurting autistic people's chances of being employed. How Hollywood's Autism Fantasies Undermine Autism Employment

Autism has indeed exploded in popular culture. We even have Billy in the 2017 Power Rangers movie (which I thought was pretty good, btw), who is autistic (unlike his TV counterpart; they're basically different characters with the same name).

Small Reference Pools. Also note the similarities of the two characters. Both brilliant with bad social skills.

There is a problem with the constant portrayal of autism as being genius with social skills issues, though. And I'm sure you can guess what that is!!

So basically media is treating autism as a Disability Superpower?

It's the Magical Negro all over again.

Positive Discrimination isn't the same as, well, negative discrimination, but it still SUUUCKS.

Honestly, I'm not sure if Magical Autistic has the same ring to it.

But either way, it still sucks.

Not to mention the appearance and race/gender stereotypes it perpetuates. Aside from the blue ranger, aren't these all just white men who look like they could be siblings?

On a similar note, I can really see how there savant portrayals affect people's beliefs about autism. I've heard so many people say things along the lines of "Autism either makes you really good at something or completely unable to function in day to day life." Like you can either be one or the other. Not somewhere in the middle where most autistics are, or both like many also are

edited 9th Dec '17 5:23:27 PM by Cailleach

Autism as a Disability Superpower has its ups and downs. Personally, I think it's a cool story device (in fact, I use it myself in the story I'm writing), though I can see the Unfortunate Implications of it.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the play Unstrange Minds won't help as much with that as I'd like.

It stars two severely disabled autistics, one male, one female. It also has two aspies, one female, one male. While it featuring two females is a step up, it still perpetrates that myth that autism is either one or the other. It does not, for instance, portray an intellectually disabled person with mild autism.

However, IIRC, its two aspies are not prodigies with a special skill; they're just smart.

One is a man who has many college degrees but can't keep a job.

edited 8th Dec '17 10:38:53 AM by BonsaiForest

MOVIE NIGHT STARTS NOW. The movie itself beings in a half hour, but the pre-show starts now. It's at https://cytu.be/r/TroperCoven

Not Autism, but relevant to the wider Disability rights movement.

Ohio bans doctors from performing Down syndrome abortions

https://apnews.com/6b1fed3f62f045a8a26a6b98d76bfb15?

I can see this being very contentious. Many of the people who support legal abortions also hate discrimination. And I've read that the abortion rate does go up with parents who discover their unborn child may have Down Syndrome.

We're also getting closer to finding genetic markers for autism - some forms of autism have very specific genetic markers, such as an enlarged portion of a specific part of chromosome 15, for instance. Other forms of autism have been linked to other specific genes, and the majority seem to be caused by a combination of genetic factors (which explains why so many autistics have family members who share traits).

Considering the fear many people have over autism - including autism of the "intelligent but poor social skills" variety, I can easily see many parents thinking, "No, I can't handle that" and choosing to abort if they are given evidence that their baby will have autism.

And that will create more controversy over which cases abortion is or isn't acceptable. Is it acceptable if it amounts to discrimination? That will be a question we'll probably hear a lot.

Have you ever "come out" as autistic to younger family members that are not in your immediate family? Like nieces and nephews, or younger cousins?

At one point, my cousin, when she was 11 or so, started calling me a "retard" and all that stuff, along with my younger brother. I tearfully told my mom to explain what autism is and that I have it (bear in mind that back then, the understanding of what autism is, was pretty much nothing!). That put a stop to it.

My nephew right now is 9. At some point, it'll be extremely obvious to him that he has a weird uncle, and he may start asking why. Not only that, but we live in a time in which "autism" and "autistic" are thrown around on the internet (and probably in person, in some social situations) as meaningless insults by people who don't have a clue what they mean. So now explain that Uncle Bonsai has autism, that horrible thing that everyone uses to insult each other with...

edited 23rd Dec '17 9:53:08 AM by BonsaiForest

Get ahead of it. Explain to him now, while you control the conversation. The more confident and open you appear to be, the more "normal" he will accept the fact of your having autism. Children appreciate adults who share information with them, so if you take the initiative, it should work out fine.

Of course, you should check with his parents beforehand...

My nephew tends to not like when I want to tell or show him things, since he wants to play all the time. It's one reason I appreciate his parents forcing the kids to have a limit on "screen time". More specifically, time that they control the screen. I'd have to find a way to get him to be willing to listen.

Promise him a reward afterwards.

That means you have a choice to make. How important do you think it is, both for yourself and for him, that he understand your condition? If this is a high priority for you, something that you think is going to be very useful for the two of you to have a conversation about, then you should do it anyway. Part of your decision should reflect the kind of relationship you have with him—how close are you? Is there some reason (other than his being nine) that he tends not to listen to you? Do you think he basically likes and/or trusts you? If so, then you simply need to explain to him how important it is to you that he understand you better. He is old enough to understand that when an adult tells you that something is important, then he should take it seriously. And if you checked this with his parents ahead of time, then they tacitly agree with you. So he needs to pay attention. Your goal should be to appear confident in yourself, and to let him know that he can ask you any questions he may ever have about people with autism.

Don't expect some sort of dramatic reaction from him, even if he gets it. Kids his age hate letting adults know that they take any life issues seriously, so he'll downplay it, probably want to get back to his video games right away. That's normal. But clearing the air now will pay dividends down the road when his peers start talking about autistic people and spreading misinformation.

I attribute his "oh please, not another thing I have to listen to/watch/etc" attitude to simply being a kid. Kids in general don't want to be told "Okay, now it's my turn to tell/show you something." My cousin, when he was 8, said, "When you're done showing me this game, can I play Skyrim?" which is of course very rude, since the obvious message is "I want to do my thing and don't care about your thing."

I'd have to find the perfect way to explain it first. I don't know how to do it without being confusing, and while explaining it well. If I casually drop that I'm autistic at some point, that doesn't explain what it is. If I explain how it affects me specifically, that could cause confusion when the kids are exposed to other autistics who are absolutely unlike me. So it would have to be done in a way that explains the spectrum and what it is, and what my form of it is like. And that will be tricky. I don't know how to do it. But it needs to be done at some point.

Personally, I feel your overthinking it. Reduce what you need to say to 2-3 points, because thats all he will remember anyway. 2-3 minutes. "Keep it simple."

The more casual, the better. You dont have to say much more than "You know Im autistic right? There's a whole spectrum, and Im at the high functioning end. That means I sometimes have trouble understanding what other people are feeling. But its no big deal. Listen, if you ever have any questions about people with autism, come ask me, ok? I wont mind."

edited 24th Dec '17 5:21:39 PM by DeMarquis

Yeah, basically that. Your nephew doesn't need to know ALL THE THINGS about Autism, because most of them are irrelevant to him. I get that you probably have an urge to tell him everything you know (you certainly do that to everyone here and sometimes on the discord server) but he just should know the basics. And the basics are essentially "it exists, it's not actually a bad thing, I have it, it affects the way the brain develops, please don't use it as an insult, that's mean, and if you have any questions, ask me, I've done a ton of research into it."

If he asks more questions, great! (And I doubt he'll be as disinterested as you think. He might not be super into it, but an eight-year-old probably won't be completely disinterested in something like that, especially if he's heard of it before.) You can answer them. If he doesn't have any questions, that's also fine. Just make sure his parents know you're telling him about it, because it's basically guaranteed that he'll throw random questions at them about it six months later right when he's supposed to be going to bed.

edited 24th Dec '17 5:28:46 PM by Zendervai

Yeh when explaining autism you’ve got to realy dumb it down for post people, they don’t need to details, just a broad brush approach.

“You know that word isn’t actual meant to be used that way”

“What word”

“Autistic, it’s not an insult.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s a way some people are, it just means they don’t know about dealing with people very easily, so they have to learn a lot more about it and it takes them longer. Some people can learn people stuff almost as fast as normal people, I’m like that, but for others it’s very difficult”.

I'm thinking that I'll explain autism in terms of how different people are good and bad at different things. Like, maybe if my nephew makes a remark about a character in a game or a show being good at one thing but bad at another, I could then say, "Yeah, I'm good at [fill in the blank], but bad at [fill in the blank]. And it's because I have a form of autism." And casually explain how it comes in many different forms, and I have only one form, and it affects me like this.

Or, since everyone will be eating dinner together while on Christmas vacation, and the kids will have no choice but to be there, I could find some way to work it into a conversation, so the kids have no choice but to hear it. If they have the ability to leave the table and play, they most certainly would immediately take it, and saying, "Stop, you have to hear what Bonsai says first" would make them not want to listen.

thing scientists learned about autism by working with autistics.

Here's one story I wanted to share:

Behaviorism (Applied Behavioral Analysis - ABA) is based around the idea of forcing the autistic to follow behaviors, by copying what's being modeled. Many autistic adults have said it's bullshit, while many people have said that it helped young autistics learn how to talk and model appropriate behaviors so they could be more accepted in the world.

But here, we see a boy reacting to the standard behaviorist idea of "mimic this normal behavior to prove you can fake normalcy", by shooting a look of disgust, quickly doing what the researcher wants him to do, then immediately going back to what he wants to do anyway. He doesn't want to do pretend play with a baby doll. He wants to line up his trains! But he knows what's expected of him, so he rushes through the motions of "do this 'normal' thing" so he can get back to doing his own thing.

You go, boy.

It also is a perfect example of how, to a lot of autistics, especially when they're younger and still learning the social rules (particularly ones as artificial as "play with a baby doll"), see no purpose to the random things they're being told to do, and just think "screw this". I wonder if he recognized what the pretend play was even meant to be about. Maybe he did, and just didn't care to do it. Maybe he didn't, but just saw it as a random set of instructions he was told to mimic. I even heard of one autistic boy complaining to his mom that ABA was "training me like a dog", causing his mom to pull him out of the program and work with him differently. Saying "Why? So they can train me like a dog?" showed a lot of awareness of what was going on there, and how dehumanizing it could be.

edited 26th Dec '17 8:49:51 AM by BonsaiForest

Yet more proof that therapy cannot be stadardized, but must be individualized for each person.

How absolutely true. Just like the education system, which has been based for the longest time around the idea that people are generally the same, with only small differences. Someone having a totally different learning style really throws off the educators.

One recent trend, I'd read, is the recognition of people who have high skill in some ways but disability in some others. There's a term for that now: "twice exceptional". I'm not a fan of politically correct terms that fail to explain what something actually is, and I wish they'd come up with a term that makes it more obvious that it means "gifted and also disabled". But either way, schools are starting to recognize that fact at least.

But about what you said, that there is an example of an instructor doing what they're told to do - follow the very specific rules of ABA, and force the child to do what they're told, under very specific rules ("play with this doll this specific way, to prove you're capable of pretend play"), only to be thrown off by a kid who doesn't fit the assumption - that being that autistics don't follow directions because they don't understand them, not because they, in some cases, are disgusted with pointless directions.

The problem is that individualized intervention, in therapy, education, or medicine, is significantly more expensive than a standardized form, so the public is reluctant to pay for it. 'Course, one of the parties is reluctant to subsidize anything at all, so there's that.

There are also practicality concerns - how many different iterations of treatment can you develop?

Anything you need along pre-designated dimensions of care. In the case Bonsai shared, that child should be encouraged to help develop his own theraputic goals, under guidence of course.