With

Previous (Part A)

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[…] health is frequently presented as an absence of symptoms. No more soaring mania, no more blood, no more voices  […] So many of us would rather soar and crash like Icarus than crawl the face of the earth like insects. What we crave is the wildness and the depth without the agony and destruction.

Out of context, Sarah K Reece

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… I still do hate meltdowns. […] Meltdowns are hard, messy, frightening.

I still want to avoid having meltdowns. […] But I vow to honor and respect my meltdowns.

Meltdowns teach me what is too much for me and what my body can handle. […] Meltdowns teach me how to take care of myself.

Max Sparrow

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part of living well as a person with a disability is accepting the body and the brain that you have, and working with it rather than against it.

Because you can’t live in an imaginary body; you can’t live in an abstraction. You have to live your own life, as you actually are. […] You can’t willpower yourself into being someone else.

part of living well as a person with a disability is accepting the body and the brain that you have […]

Even if the therapy helped you. Even if you gained new […] abilities. Even if you learned things from it you wouldn’t have learned without it. […]

You have to live your own life, as you actually are. And sometimes that involves medical treatment, sometimes it involves equipment, sometimes it involved therapy – but always, it involves reality.

Ruti Regan

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Optimal

Previous (Part A)

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McGuire writes in more depth about the influence of capitalism in producing childhood and children as sites of ‘investment’ in potential futures (McGuire 2016 119-133). This in turn creates pressure for parents to produce optimal futures for their children by embracing interventions aimed at preventing, curing, or at least mitigating, disability (Carey, Block, and Scotch 2019).

In this conception of childhood, neuro-developmental disabilities, like autism, are constructed as an information-commodities. They are both a justification for clinical intervention, and a framework for understanding which interventions should be prescribed. In this process Autistic bodies and experiences are abstracted and objectified. Far from being an economic burden, Autistic people’s lives, and experiences of disability, become the grist that form the basis of an industry (Mallett and Runswick-Cole 2012; McGuire 2016, 126).

Manidoo Makwa Kwe

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I think therapy can be a great thing for kids, even a life-changing thing. What I object to is the attitude that all kids with disabilities need therapy, and they all need it from the start, and they all need as much as they can get.

Garden of My Heart

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Lovaas’s rhetorical construct of “recovery [to normalcy]” has proven to be so powerful and so culturally resonant for nearly 25 years […]

This explicit linking of the rhetorical construct of recovery [to normalcy] with a particular intervention methodology […] functions ideologically […] foregrounding and naturalizing the notion of ‘intervention’ as the only commonsense response

[…] Implicit in the testimony of both Carmen and Maurice is the assumption that one must do something upon coming to understand that one is the parent of an autistic child, one must intervene in some sort of active way, and that this intervention must involve changing or altering the child in some way.

The question considered by the parents above appears not to be whether to intervene, but rather, how to do so.

Alicia A. Broderick

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Next (Part C)

Brutal

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Violence protects us from our violent selves: this is where the rhetoric lies.

Melanie Yergeau

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People do a lot of brutal things to people with disabilities […]

We identify, as a culture, as having got past that point.

In practice, whenever people do brutal things to someone with a disability, it will be called the last resort.

This is an empty claim. Everyone who has ever used harmful reinforcers and brutal punishments has claimed that they are only used when they are necessary.

Calling something ‘the last resort’ means “it’s that person’s fault I’m doing this; I could not possibly do otherwise.”

Ruti Regan

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Next (Part B)

Atmosphere – Rays (Part 3)

Previous

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When I say things like “I don’t believe in the diagnoses in the DSM,”

that does not mean I think people are faking it, or making their experiences up. […] Their experiences are absolutely, definitely real.

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I agree that we need a language,

but I disagree that the DSM provides a good one. […]

Out of context, Sarah K Reece

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Diagnosis recognizes reality; it doesn’t create it.

The way medical diagnosis works can often make disabled people feel fake. (Any kind of disabled people, including people with mental illness or chronic illness). There’s a widespread culture misperception that real disabled people have a clear professional diagnosis, and that everyone else is just faking it for attention or something. It doesn’t actually work that way. Diagnosis is more complicated than that.

People with disabilities are disabled whether or not anyone has diagnosed their disability. […] But it doesn’t change the reality. Someone diagnosed today was already disabled yesterday. Many people are disabled for years or decades before they get access to accurate diagnosis. […]

In addition, some conditions aren’t currently diagnosable, because they have not yet been identified and named by doctors. If a condition was discovered for the first time today, someone had probably already had it yesterday. And last year. And back and back and back. […]

Ruti Regan

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Words, like the chisel of the carver, can create what never existed before rather than simply describe what already exists.

Martin Heidegger

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Was There an Autism Before the Name?

Were we here before the world called us ‘autistics’?

Was there an ‘us’ or a ‘we’ before we and the world called ourselves so?

How were we, autistic people, autistic, before we actually were autistic?

Adapted from writings by Dallyce Potess

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