The autism community is so split, how to bring it together?

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I think that if all the parties sat down and listened to the different sides, that would be a great start. People also need to listen to us as well.

I'm just not going to listen to non-autistic people lecture me about autism.

I think our main problem is that the autistic community isn't sufficiently well-organized to make itself heard by the groups of parents and professionals. Right now the autistic community is just barely an appendage to a much larger "autism community," which is dominated by NT parents and professionals.

Of course, organizing is a challenge for autistic people due to our social and executive functioning impairments. But we need to figure out ways to do it.

We need to organize in at least the following two dimensions:

1) Local in-person peer-led support / self-help groups.

2) Regional groups of autistic people who either work in or want to work in particular categories of careers. As I envision them, these groups would exist primarily online but would hold occasional in-person events. Hopefully, as such groups form and get publicity, more employers will be inclined to create autistic-friendly workplaces for workers in a variety of fields (not just computer programmers).

It's not like autistic people work together, either. I think that before we can demand for the society to take us seriously we need to take each other seriously first and help each other out.

Although I'm quite a politically minded person the political intricacies of being on the spectrum are way more complex to get my head around .

I just want people,if they are on the spectrum, not to have to wait till late middle age,as I have done, to get it recognised. More timely recognition and with that the help and support to have the best QOL , and functioning, would be my simple wishes .

How best to achieve that I'll leave others to decide. All I know is the sooner appropriate help and support is given the more likely a person on the spectrum is to achieve their full potential.

Some parents and professionals are autistic, but I get your point.

However, every generation of new autistics have NT parents involved, that often have no clue what they are doing and need in my opinion, connections to autistic adults to understand what they need to for the kids to grow up with less trauma.

Professionals are important because diagnostic professionals are the first for many personal introduction to autism so the attitude and solutions provided have a huge impact on how the families view and interact with their autistic, and many of us rely on professionals, when I try to move out I will need assistance and I've been in therapies for much of my life. Also, the direction of research is in control is in control of research professionals who often have currently never even meant an autistic person which is why the direction of research is so useless.

So all three are vital to autism communities and that's why I believe they need to become less segmented, even if professionals and parents are often not autistic they play a role that cannot be replaced and outreach we simply can't manage on our own.

Some of this changing is a disconcerting but natural part of the research process and progress for a condition that was not recognized at all a century ago. As with any change some will resist. Sometime the people who resist are an impediment to progress, sometimes they are right or at least serve as a necessary check on overreach.

When I was first diagnosed in 2013 there was a clearly defined split between parents of severely autistic children and adult “aspies”. While elements of this remain it is a lot more muddled now. There are plenty of parents who think their autistic kids have superpowers and plenty of WP members who think autism is a horrific impairment in need of a cure ASAP.

There is some common ground. Most of the anti ND autistics I read are appalled by what goes on at the Judge Rotenburg center and the mistreatment and discrimination of autistics in general. Jonathan Mitchell as anti ND as you can get, it is his special interest, does not like ABA.

Unfortunately there are NTs that think autism somehow does not exist at adulthood. They tend to not believe older members on the spectrum because they do not act exactly as we did when young. Our expert skill in masking becomes a double edge sword as it makes us less creditable in NT eyes since we appear to not be affected, even though we are. Those who tend not to mask well are looked at as “problems” that can be fixed by locking them away.

I deal with these misconceptions within my chemistry department at the university level. Some of the younger professors that I work with think of those on the spectrum as just “problems” that they have to deal with, not as people. Before I arrived there, they treated an extremely bright Aspie student like he was brain dead, so he left the school. That attitude sickens me. They have doctorate degrees in science, yet have it completely wrong. My goal is to modify their behavior towards better treatment of those on the spectrum.

^ Although I get your point about masking , it's not only masking that can lead to a late diagnosis . That can also happen if you have a diagnosis of severe mental illness prior to ASD being considered.

E.G. I first saw a pdoc late 1973. 1975 dxed with sz. Years of everything then being seen as due to SMI. 2018 -A more enlightened pdoc sees that I might indeed be on the spectrum. May 2019 dxed with Asperger's syndrome .