ITV spotlights young female Neurodiversity bloggers

Post Reply New Topic

"Autism is an ability not a disability...it is a superpower": Children blog about living with autism

If you could have one super power what would it be?

Correct and rapid decision making.

What a joke.

We need compassion, not lauding or fawning over.

Overhyping autistics as gifted has drawbacks but in a lot of respects it is the "lesser evil". When we were thought of as diseased and not really quite human we were institutionalized and the subject of drug experiments. That does not sound compassionate to me.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 28 Aug 2017, 9:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nope.....not compassionate in the least....

I don't feel like I have a super power, I just feel anxious.

"we" weren't the only people institutionalized. And it is a disorder/disease of the brain.

Schizophrenics, bipolar people, alzheimers, brain damaged, fetal alcohol syndrome, OCD. Do they also have a gift? Of all the disorders, autism is somehow special that people insist it is a good thing, but nobody says a single word of the others.

What a joke.

Some may be gifted, most are not.

In the USA, this may not be such a bad thing. As I see it, there is too much emphasis on fixing everything right now and not enough on letting a kid find out if she has any gifts or "superpowers."

What are we defining as "superpowers" ?

Back in the day most "mental defectives" or "mental cripples" as people with all sorts of conditions were called were either institutionilized, locked in attic, or thrown away into the streets. Autistics and thier families due to that fact that autism was a new concept and the "refrigerator mother" theory got a special kind hell. All sorts of drug experiments were done on autstics. Thier parents (mothers mostly) were perscribed years of therapy to try and find what they did to thier kid and why they hated him so much. Parents were told to get rid any reminders of the autistic child. This harm was done out of compassion. The home was considered so toxic it was thought removal from that environment forever was for the best. The drug experiments were justified as trying to bring back the humanity of the person that was taken away by thier mom. The shock treatments of the original Applied Behavoial Therapy was justified by Ivan Lovass as the compassionate thing to do because it was better then the treatments of that era.

Today there are all these nice politically correct diversity words used. But you have to see what they do not what they say. For the most part ABA is far removed from what it was in 1965. But it still usually requires 25 to 40 hours a week and is pretty much the go to treatment for Autistic Kids. Disregarding the controversy of whether ABA is a good treatment forcing any toddler or younger to do something all those hours is cruel. If ABA is so wonderful it should be the standard treatment for most behavioral issues. But is used mainly on autistic kids and not because they think autism is a gift.

Yes I agree seeing Autism as a gift only and the media stereotypes of autistics as cute, socially awkward brainiacs is harmful. It causes people to see autistics (really Aspie/HFA autistics) as spoiled brats that do not need help but to just try harder. Which is not all that different from back in the day when most of us were not recognized. That said I stand by my earlier statement that seeing autism only as a gift is GENRALLY less evil than horrible mutation it has been traditionally seen as. Of course it would be actually good if Autism was seen as many things are in life a mixture of bad, good and everything in between, pretty horrible for some, something to deal with and still be succesful with for others. For some reason I do not understand it can't be that way. It has to be a superpower or a horrible a damaging mutation so bad anything can be justified as compassion.

Cry me a river. Institutionalization and creul treatment went on for ages to many people with different disorders. You still haven't replied to my question why schizophrenics etc. dont view their condition as gifts or have a neurodiversity movement.

And again you are trying to pull "middle of the road" crap. Running over 10 people instead of zero or 20 isnt somehow the best option. Im giving you one more chance to answer my question about why people with other disorders feel no need for this histrionic sacharrine nonsense. Are they stupid somehow for not embracing their alzheimers, ocd, schizophrrnia, brain damage, etc?

Come on, shoot, let me see what you have to say.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness, Autism is not. That's a significant distinction, though apparently not one that is significant to you.

You have to ask them or read a survey about their views on their condition. Since on WP I cry myself a river about autistics not being asked how they feel and not bieng involved in a lot of Autism policy decision making it would be pretty hypocritical of me to speak for them. I know society in general and myself make negative assumptions about living with those conditions based on stereotypes, partial truth, and my experiences. I do not read thier forums.

As an autistic I am not supposed to think middle of the road. But from bieng told I am too negative and just from reading about bieng with and hearing people talking varoius conditions mental and physical for almost six decades most people experience good and bad. I have been on WP pretty constantly for four years and the topic of how do you feel comes about autism up all the time. I have read plenty of writings from neurodiversity advocates as well as oppenents. Where this idea that ND advocates think Autism is a mostly a gift comes from I do not know. Sure on occasion you have a poster mocking NT's as inferior and claiming Autism is the next stage in evolution. Pretty much all the leading ND advocates call it a disability. The experiences of WP posters vary greatly. Many if not most posters say Autism is a lot of challegers but describe benifits also. I am not going to say this is what autism is because this is how I experience it.

Maybe just maybe Autism is different and not as generally as negative as those other conditions. Maybe everybody labled Autism has different conditions. We just know only some of the facts because this is all relatively new.

I have not heard about rights movements for the specific conditions you mentioned. There has been a general disability rights movement for decades. The closest to the Autism Rights/ND movement I can think of is the Deaf community

Uhhhh buddy, schizophrenia isn't just a disorder where someone hallucinates and takes meds and that's it. There is evidence of abnormal neurodevelopment beginning all the way in the womb. Abnormal brain growth and synapses pruning all the way up to adolescene occurs. It's a ticking time bomb that goes off around a peron's teens.

It shares a ton of symptoms of with autism and many genetic markers also greatly overlap. Even when a person displays no syumptoms when younger, their brain is abnormally shaped, sometimes even moreso than with autism.

You want to keep up this fantasy of autism somehow being the exception where a person IS autism while everything else, a person HAS, be my guest. It must be a nice sweet delusion.