Reverberations (Part 2)

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The recent spike in diagnoses of autism […] has prompted some to suggest that it is an excuse for bad behavior or the latest clinical fad.

Amy Harmon

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[…] the stamp of medical authority.

Increasing numbers of children are given increasingly specific labels, ranging from psychiatric and neurological diagnoses such as Asperger’s and attention-deficit disorder to educational descriptors including ‘gifted’ and ‘learning disabled.’

Maia Szalavitz

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Today, autism has broadened into an almost catch-all social category. Anyone who is withdrawn or rigid or awkward might be suspected of being ‘on the spectrum.’

Caroline Narby

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Remotely diagnosing famous geeks has become a kind of hipster parlour game.

Steve Silberman

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Every generation has its defining psychiatric malady, confidently diagnosed from afar by armchair non-psychiatrists. In the fifties, all those gray-suited organization men were married to ‘frigid’ women. Until a few years ago, the country of self-obsessed boomers and reality-TV fame-seekers and vain politicians and bubble-riding Ponzi schemers made narcissistic personality disorder – diagnosis code 301.81 in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition – the craziness of the moment. And who among us has not proudly copped to our own ‘OCD’ or ‘ADD,’ deemed a mercurial sibling ‘seriously bipolar,’ written off an erratic ex as ‘obviously borderline,’ or nodded as a laid-off friend pronounced his former boss a ‘textbook sociopath’? Lately, a new kind of head case stalks the land – staring past us, blurting gaucheries, droning on about the technical minutiae of his boring hobby. And we are ready with our DSM codes: 299.00 (autistic disorder) and 299.80 (Asperger’s disorder).

[…] Such elasticity is nowhere so relevant as at the fuzzy, ever-shifting threshold where clinical disorder shades into everyday eccentricity. The upper end of the spectrum is the liminal zone where Aspies, as people with Asperger’s call themselves, reside.

But this is not a story about Asperger’s, autism, or the spectrum […]

It is, instead, a story about ‘Asperger’s,’ ‘autism,’ and ‘the spectrum’ – our one-stop-shopping shorthand for the jerky husband, the socially inept plutocrat, the tactless boss, the child prodigy with no friends, the remorseless criminal. It’s about the words we deploy to describe some murky hybrid of egghead and aloof.

Benjamin Wallace

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While delving into discussions on neurodiversity, I came across fanciful lists of fictional characters headcanoned as autistic. Character X strives for justice: they are autistic. Character Y likes reading alone: they are autistic. Character Z is passionate and talkative: they are autistic. In fact, any character even slightly atypical/loner/enthusiastic is likely to be promptly declared as having autism. This is how I found out that the main characters in My Little Pony were autistic, because they all had significant interests and plenty to learn about friendship and social relationships. My god. Is autism supposed to be the sole reason people have any depth at all?

La Chouette

(translated by Axelle Ezhr)

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[I]t has become fashionable in some circles to describe the spectrum as the very womb of modernity.

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The same rose-colored impulse has driven an Aspie wave of revisionist psychopathography, in which such diverse historical figures as Thomas Jefferson, Orson Welles, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Andy Warhol, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are supposed to have been residents of the spectrum.

The time-traveling diagnoses often feel like cloud-reading – the case for Darwin as Aspie, as set forth in Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Changed the World, relies on diagnostic bullet points: his childhood as ‘something of a loner,’ his ‘obsession’ with nature, his routine of counting the laps of his nightly walks in later life.

Benjamin Wallace

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People write characters based on personal experience, stereotypes, and personal ideas of what seems interesting. Unless you are a hermit, you’ve met multiple autistic people. (You may have thought they were ‘quirky’ or ‘very introverted’ or ‘stereotypical engineers.’)

You’ve read or watched media with characters based off of autism stereotypes. They’re ‘geeky,’ ‘awkward,’ or ‘free-spirited.’ […]

Some of these characters are stated to be autistic. Other times the authors dodge the question to avoid needing to write a well-researched and responsible portrayal. Other times the writers wanted to write someone ‘quirky’ and didn’t realize that their idea of ‘quirky’ looks very autistic.

You can read or watch media with autistic or autistic-coded characters. You can meet autistic people whether you know they’re autistic or not. And when you write about interesting people, you’ll probably aim for writing people who are a little unusual. […]

Luna Rose

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Autistic Representation and Real-Life Consequences: An In-Depth Look

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When you are an unusual person, especially if you are disabled, people will often tell you that they “want to hear your story”.   

Often, it’s not really your story that they want to hear. Often they have a story in mind that they want, and they want it to come out of your mouth in order to validate their theories about people like you. […]

Ruti Regan

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Telling your story without being a self-narrating zoo exhibit

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Reverberations (Part 1)

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Autism has taken over mainstream media to the point where people discuss Autism around the water cooler now.

Every parent wonders about it, every new parent fears it, schools need to be aware of it and anyone within the Autism community promotes it’s awareness.

Stuart Duncan

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Autism Spectrum Disorder is now among the most commonly diagnosed developmental disabilities […] A flood of professionals and programs has emerged to serve these children: physicians, therapists, schools, afterschool programs. There are karate classes and theater programs for children with autism, sports camps and religious schools and yoga classes. […]

Barry M. Prizant

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Autism is now part of the mainstream, whether you are autism accepting or looking for the cure, we are all pretty much in agreement that autism is a fact and everyone knows someone who knows someone… You get the picture.

Cheri Rauser

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My Son’s Swim Coach’s Second Cousin’s Wife has a Student With Cerebral Palsy: The Disability Anecdote

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Autism has become to disorders what Africa is to social issues, the celebrity cause du jour. […] Awareness of autism has seeped into the culture enough to make it a handy metaphor.

Caryn James

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Becoming an object of popular fascination is the opposite of humanizing.

Caroline Narby

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Talking about a disabled sibling: burden narratives and funny stories

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Pop culture’s more interested in disability as a metaphor than in disability as something that happens to real people. […]

Of course, in some sense, we all know what it’s like to feel self-divided, or alienated from the world […] Disabled characters are often seen as symbolizing the triumph of the human spirit, or the freakishness we all feel inside. […]

Christopher Shinn, Charles Isherwood

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Remembering that people with disabilities have always existed – Institutions, communities, and visibility

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Next

Lines – Amber (Part 1)

Continuation of the series:

Lines – Glass

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As a person with developmental disabilities, I get a lot of autism stereotypes and a lot of intellectual disability stereotypes thrown my way. That means some people expect me to be a heartless mind and other people expect me to be a mindless heart.

And they actually believe those expectations to be honoring my strengths.

But that’s not necessarily how it works. There are autistic people with huge strengths or interests in social areas. There are people with intellectual disabilities whose main strengths or interests are intellectual. We don’t have to have a stereotypical set of strengths. […]

And people will either doubt your disability or doubt whether you really have the strengths and interests you do.

They’re always trying to prove that autistic people’s empathy isn’t real, that the intellectual achievements of people with intellectual disabilities isn’t real, that autistic people can’t be compassionate and people with intellectual disabilities can’t be geeky or nerdy or have cognitive talents.

And they’re always trying to say that different disabled people are allowed to have certain things and not others.

Each type of disabled person is supposed to be missing one thing and have something else: Body, mind, heart, whatever.

So we have bodiless minds, mindless bodies, heartless minds, mindless hearts, and whatnot, and that’s supposed to be a good way of looking at us!

The truth is that however you divide it up, every person really has a mind, a heart, a body, a soul, whatever you want to call these things. I don’t personally divide people up that way, but if you’re gonna, those things are universal. Disability doesn’t mean one of them is missing.

Mel Baggs

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The idea of some shared humanity is just that: an idea. One that is too often used to exclude and dehumanize people. But I do think that it can be a useful idea if it’s deployed just so. When it comes down to it, we are all just animals fumbling around on a rock. That is what it means to be human. We do not always make each other feel at home here on Earth, but none of us is truly an outsider, either. We all belong here. None of us are strange visitors who can only hope to be tolerated and accommodated.

Caroline Narby

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Abnormal is often shorthand for extreme. Ah! they say, you simply fail to understand the spectrum! Yes we all experience a little of this and of that, but until you’ve seen mania full blown, an acute psychotic episode, someone so debilitated by anxiety they cannot leave their house, you simply can’t appreciate what real mental illness looks like. This definition seems to work until you look at other examples of ‘extreme behaviours’, at social activists who put their lives at risk for a cause they are passionate about, at kids moving across the country to have a chance to train in the artform they eat and breathe, all the hope and joy and optimism of a couple in love and about to get married. Extreme can be dangerous, can be horrifying and destructive. But it’s also the place of hope for so many, their centre, their joy.

Sarah K Reece

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I don’t know who invented the idea of a carefree childhood, but such a myth has never been the case for the majority of children in the world.

I never felt cheated out of a childhood, despite experiencing some of the things that a lot of people seem to whine on and on about in that respect. […]

Just as some parents believe they’re entitled to a perfect child (where perfect is defined by some pretty biased standards of perfection, at that), some people believe they’re entitled to perfect (again, pretty biased standards of perfection) relatives in general.

I have to believe that this sense of what the stages of life are supposed to be like, and what people are supposed to be around for others to relate to, that somehow excludes the experiences of probably the vast majority of people on the planet, is relatively recent, and entirely mythical.

Mel Baggs

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‘Normal’ people still get sad.
‘Normal’ people still have self-esteem issues.
‘Normal’ people still wish they were someone else.

There’s this misconception among some people that ‘normal’ is this beautiful land of milk and honey and double rainbows, where nobody has any problems or is ever made to feel inadequate.

Chris Bonnello

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[We’re not only autism, but] an intricate amalgam of our innate character traits, our strengths and weaknesses, our personal histories, our thoughts and desires and fears and embodied experiences of the world.

[Like everyone else, autistics have] many of the common experiences and challenges of growing up that most adolescents and young adults experience. […]

People learn and grow and are affected by their histories as they age. People become competent at dealing with the circumstances of their own lives. […]

Just because we’re new to many non-autistic people’s conception of the world, doesn’t mean we’re actually new to the world.

chavisory

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[…]  I have this niggling suspicion, though, that there are an awful lot of people in the world who have been told that they don’t count, don’t get to be in the stories, things were never quite bad enough, or maybe they were too bad to be real. I have this feeling that there are an awful lot of us, and that if we just stopped keeping ourselves a secret, we might blow that lie out of the water.

Julia Bascom

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In recent years, I’ve noticed that we tend to divide the world up into ‘trauma survivors’ and everybody else. But I’m not sure this distinction is entirely real; I think what we’re actually dealing with is people who know they’ve been traumatized and people who have forgotten. Or maybe the division is between people who are visibly shaken by their trauma and those who look solid; after all, we live in a society that places an extraordinarily high value on appearances, where people get a lot of credit for acting as if everything is fine, and a lot of criticism (or pity) for letting their pain show. […]

Lundy Bancroft

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Isolation from support and reassurance is the essential part of the trauma. I was surprised when I first learned that people who are put thru traumatizing experience, if they immediately get support, comfort, reassurance and love, both during the trauma and afterwards, they mostly don’t develop post traumatic stress disorder, they’re able to process and incorporate it. Basically, a human’s ability to accept and survive trauma largely depends on how supported they are, on having a strong community and knowing things will once again, be okay. […]

Furious Goldfish

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Next

Outside of Stereotypes

Extra section related to:

Blossoming

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[…] for every behaviour or response or trait that even we think of as being ‘typically’ autistic, we can find someone on the spectrum who doesn’t have it, or do it.

We come from both genders and the inter-gender, all races and nationalities and religions and sexualities, all classes and sub-sections of humanity, and all ages too […]

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are autistics, for instance, who are fine with eye contact, extroverted autistics who enjoy other people’s company […] and autistics […] who are comfortable with change and variety […]

There are autistics who have never had a meltdown, who are hypo-sensitive to sensory input, especially pain, whose stims are non-existent […] or non-obvious, who have no particular ‘special interests’, or who are hopeless with maths and/or technology, preferring the social sciences or the arts or just about anything but computers.

There are whimsical autistics, and those who are totally serious. […] There are autistics who can handle and even do sarcasm and metaphor, and those who can understand and use abstract or figurative language and/or philosophical concepts just fine.

And while many autistics struggle with friendships and/or relationships, choose not to try for them, or truly don’t want them, many others are able to build long-lasting connections with others […] There are also many autistics who have no problem with physical or verbal affection […]

There are even autistics who can read facial expressions […] Some of us [are] actually quite socially savvy, and some are just naturally ‘social beings’ […]

StrangerInGodzone

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