Lost Generation s**t end of stick

Post Reply New Topic

We need to be teaching people how to deconstruct the ASD fallacy. We need to be banding together and punishing perpetrators and getting reparations for survivors, and protecting the children of today.

Convincing someone that they have some kind of defect, disorder, or difference is extreme abuse.

Richard

I also don't like the term, Lost Generation. I don't feel lost at all. Not anymore, anyways. I'm glad that I was diagnosed before ABA therapy was wide spread.

Do you accept the diagnosis, or do you see such things the way I do, as just White Coats promoting themselves, and as a mechanism for further and very harmful identity abuse?

Richard

I accept the diagnosis and I live my life to the fullest instead of sitting in a corner all day.

But isn't that pretty much what we got anyway, and with even less understanding? I wish I'd had a diagnosis early on, if only so I could have made better decisions for myself instead of believing the people who told me I should keep trying to fit into those wrong-shaped holes.

If I were to get a diagnosis, I don't want to have someone tell me I have to accept less. This has been my experience so far. I will just live my life the best I can. I would like ideas on how to move forward, something the psychiatric profession hasn't done, in my experience.

Maybe the issue is that the doctors are trained to change the patient, but the "cure" really requires changing the environment around the patient, which is largely out of their control.

I wouldn't blame the "White Coats," who are simply responding to the perceived needs of the larger society. As I see it, our main problem is that we live in a society increasingly reliant on superficial charm; a society where the ability to sell a product or service is increasingly treated as being much, much, much more valuable than the product or service itself; a society where, in more and more professions, an almost superhuman level of superficial charm is required in order to get a good job. In such a society, any cluster of personality traits that results in a lack of superficial charm is necessarily regarded as an extreme handicap.

Hence, IMO, we need to build autistic-friendly subcultures that run on a different set of rules, with the help of sympathetic NT's who can help us organize and be our interface to the larger society.

As for the label "autistic": Yes, it's a stigmatized label, but we need just such a stigmatized label in order to pull us together, as fellow outsiders, to create the kinds of subcultures we need. Otherwise there's nothing to pull us together. I, for example, left to my own devices, would seek out other people who share my specific interests, but would NOT seek out other people who share the mere fact of being the kind of person who has unusually intense interests of whatever sort. And the more introverted people among us would not even seek out people who share their specific interests. Without labels like "autism" and "Asperger's," this forum would not even exist.

Agreed that we need to be banding together, but I don't think a focus on "punishing perpetrators" is productive (except in the most extreme cases). Rather, we need to focus on figuring out how to build the kind of world in which we can live well.

I think most parents, and most teachers, and most mental health professionals, are simply doing their jobs as best they know how, doing what they sincerely believe, however misguidedly, is best for the children under their care. It is up to us to band together to influence and hopefully educate them, but it's counterproductive to try to punish anyone other than deliberately malicious abusers.

Nice posts, Mona. You have some good opinions. I think one of the hardest things getting non-autistic people to truly understand things like sensory sensitivity, shutdown/meltdown, etc. For example, an autistic woman on my caseload was recently moved to another home. A sudden change in routine like that can feel abusive, and I'm not sure many of her support team really understand what that might be like for her.

Cockney, you don't need to go along with a diagnosis to live a full life. I would say that rejecting the diagnosis is better.

Talks about personal experience with that rejection of diagnosis:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/02305 ... bl_vppi_i2

One of the co-authors said that that was what allowed him for the first time in his life to get employment and pay which he felt was commensurate with his abilities and age.

Richard

The linked page includes:


I think there's some truth to this, regarding not only boys' and men's social and emotional behavior, but women's and girls' behavior too. Standards of social and emotional behavior have definitely ratcheted up within my lifetime, thereby making people with social impairments stick out more than we used to. I think the primary reasons for this are economic rather than ideological. But I don't think "rejecting the diagnosis" will solve this problem. On the contrary, a label like "autism" is the only thing that can bring affected people together, thereby enabling the possible creation of a movement to fight back.

The label "shamanic experience" is not an adequate substitute for the label "autism." The label "shamanic experience" will attract Pagans and New Agers, most of whom are not autistic or autistic-like, although many probably are. On the other hand, the label "shamanic experience" will NOT attract the many autistic and autistic-like people who have no interest in spirituality of any kind.

I say that Sami Timimi and his co-authors have got it right, "Autism does not exist."