General Autism Discussion

Yeah, kinda. There's some pretty big legal cases brewing, and the various provincial health organizations at least get that maybe it's a bad thing for long term care nurses to be bullying people into it.

Good. I’m gonna step away from this thread for a bit. This whole affair is making my blood boil.

The Canadian supreme court has REQUIRED that euthanasia be provided to physically healthy neurodivergent and mentally ill people who request it, and they’ve got a lot of very loud voices claiming it’s discrimination not to do it.

It’s deeply disturbing and scary.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 1st 2024 at 3:34:05 AM

Wow Euthanasia because of having autism is disingenous.

Edited by general_tiu on Feb 26th 2024 at 6:56:27 AM

Autistic people held back by job interview questions

I wonder which questions on the application process could be replaced with tick boxes?

It's a whole thing that the interview process filters out autistic people at an extremely high rate. It's either that autistic people are less able to adjust to the idiotic way things are handled (an increasing number of employers put these absolutely impossible to understand tests to weed out anyone who might be a "troublemaker" but most people just straight don't understand the questions) or that the interviewer isn't actually testing for ability to do the job, they're just testing for the ability to be superficially friendly and charming in the interview.

I know one thing that would help is being able to say if a question isn't relevant. I hate that "how have you handled a conflict with a coworker?" question. I've never had a conflict with a coworker as far as I know, but most people who ask that keep pushing and pushing and pushing so I literally made up a scenario that's just the like "we didn't like each other, but we agreed to not let it impact our work" stereotype from children's cartoons and it almost always gets accepted.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 28th 2024 at 8:45:41 AM

One tactic that can work for the “give an example when you’ve done X” is to give an associated example. So I was asked the “describe managing conflict between your staff” question a bit ago and instead spoke about how I’ve acted during tense and stressful union negotiations, including talking about the actions I would take if things escalated despite them never having actually escalated.

That however requires an interviewer who is will to be more open with the question and accept asociated examples and/or expelstionexplenstion for how you’d manage a hypothetical over an actual example.

This all comes in large part from the fact that many modern employers have abandoned training staff, they don’t want you to have the potential to do the job with some support, they want you to already have experience doing every single part of the job. It’s been a buyers market for employees for so long.

That, and legal liability issues. If you punch somebody on the job, they want to be able to say they took every precaution to screen out potentially violent people.

Uh...I guess, but that'd be more filtering out really stupid people.

There's the occasional question where everyone who it might apply to is just going to lie. I applied to one place where the questionnaire had a "have you ever shoplifted without being caught" question on it. Like, even if I have, I'm not gonna say yes.

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 1st 2024 at 3:48:24 PM

One thing I've learned over the years is the depressing fact a lot of people care more about style than substance. So-called "soft skills" are often more than enough to get by in life even if your ability to do jobs is below par.

"Uh...I guess, but that'd be more filtering out really stupid people."

Oh, there's no evidence that it works, in the sense that it keeps violent people out. It's just legal protection in case someone tries to sue them.

The point of questions where anyone with a yes answer will lie is so that they can be punished for lying even if they can’t be punished for the thing they did. You might not be able to fire someone who having done a thing in the past your company disapproves of, but you can fire them for having lied during the job interview.

Plus in some jobs they are actually going to care more about if you can be honest with them then minor shit you’ve done in the past, though that mainly a thing in jobs deals with sensitive information (either government, legal, medical or financial).

Actually, in the US at least, we mostly have "At Will" employment, which means that employers can fire anyone they want to for any reason at all, as long as the reason isn't illegal (there are some additional restrictions). So they don't need to trick anyone that way (if only they were that restricted in their power).

Except Zendervai is in Canada and I’m in the U.K., so there’s no reason to focus on US law. Plus you’re describing the legal minimum for the US, contracts can still grant a person greater protections. In the U.K. you can be fired for any non-protected reason for up to two years, but my contract grants me significant protections after the end of a 6 month probation period.

Such questions are used in the US but most commonly for more contractual stuff like visas, the reason visa applications ask if you’ve ever supported groups with X beliefs is so that they can easily prove wilful deception on your part when they find out, instead of leaving you the opportunity to say you didn’t think it was an issue or that such support doesn’t make you ineligible.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 1st 2024 at 9:43:48 AM

That's good to know. I wish we had those protections.

Yeah after two years here you need solid grounds to fire someone, though you can make them redundant but doing that means providing a payout and scrapping the job alongside them.

I've been reading this super long article on ABA therapy. It's got a lot to say, including things like this:

That's a perfect example of how little the people who want to forcibly change the Different care about what effects their efforts are having on those they're trying to change. It's not hard to see why many autistic people have called ABA "conversion therapy." Which is as effective as antigay conversion therapy.

I'm not against using ABA for extreme cases where you have kids who have self-harm-related stims. My online friend Amy knows someone who works in ABA and is very against forcing autistic people to robotically act "normal." Instead, she thinks ABA is only for things like when the kid is unable to communicate in any recognizable way (pointing, talking, writing, etc.), or self-harms. And special interests are incorporated into her form of ABA.

But obviously, that's not what most ABA is.

I'm not done reading the article. I'm halfway through. It's massive.

The article goes on to talk about a new therapy called Floor Time, which uses the kid's own interests to get them to open up.

There's also talk of a teacher who has autism, who very much disagrees with ABA practices, and had little ability to change things at his workplace.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Mar 11th 2024 at 4:35:04 AM

I think you skipped the step of 'what is ABA'.

You mean, I didn't explain it? I figured most people here know what Applied Behavioral Analysis is. I figured it was well known in autism communities, especially as many of us experienced it.

But either way, the article does talk about it, and since I assumed (probably wrongly) that what ABA is is common knowledge, I skipped to the parts that talked about its effects on people and criticisms of it and alternative methods and so on.

ABA is conversion therapy but for autistic people.

That's not even hyperbole, it was invented by the guy who created gay conversation therapy and uses all of the same techniques.

Ugh… made a mistake of looking at my area on my map app… went down a rabbit hole of people living in an area vs undeveloped and wooded areas. Like, I got obsessed and anxious over the population. One of my weird little autism things that’s come out in the last few years is worrying over how many people live near me, like I need to have the option to interact with them.

About autistic people struggling to get jobs: I was going to go into a long and depressing rant about the hiring system, because yeah, I've been there. Jobless for years, running myself ragged with cover letters and interviews day in day out, only to still get called lazy for being unemployed. (Thanks to a few employment support groups, I'm in work now though.)

Instead, here's something a lot more hopeful, and other companies need to take this as proof that we absolutely can be valuable team members: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/joyous-nyc-coffee-shop-hires-and-trains-people-with-autism-and-down-syndrome-to-work-there/

A silly question about autism, or at least a common perception of it:

Do people with autism actually have strong fascination/obsession towards trains (as in, railroad cars) or is it just a stereotype?

Edited by dRoy on Apr 30th 2024 at 12:12:27 AM