Autism and the word "ret*d"

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Because mental retardation is an extremely common comorbid condition, and laypeople often mistake very common comorbid conditions for symptoms of the condition they're looking at. E.g. some materials claim that poor attention span is a symptom of dyslexia, but it isn't, it's a symptom of AD/HD, a common dyslexia comorbid. Some materials claim that poor social skills are symptomatic of dyspraxia, but they aren't, by definition they're symptoms of ASDs, which are commonly comorbid. Some people advocate blurring the lines so that all of these conditions are thought of as being different sets of symptoms of one broad syndrome, because they're all obviously connected biologically, but that's only helpful in certain biological research settings, not clinical or community ones, because people with different symptoms will have very different needs.

I tried to break someones nose over the word ret*d in high school. This kid I use to play D&D with in high school he sat there while three jocks sat there calling me a ret*d durring the entire time we were in studyhall and he did nothing. A few days later I call a mutual friend of ours a ret*d when he forgot my last name as a joke so the one guy who watched me be called a ret*d for 30 minutes and did nothing decided to push me out of my chair for saying it so I punched him in the nose and got him kicked out of our D&D group. I guess its all right for me to be called a ret*d but if I say it I need to be pushed around like a b***h.

I was called a ret*d everyday in school in front of teachers, the principal, and my friends and no one said or did anything. Some of these people thought it was funny and laughed along with the people throwing the insults at me.

Last edited by Todesking on 02 Nov 2010, 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Blame the medical establishment. Many posters are blaming the ignorance of laypeople who are unfamiliar with autism. However, if an ignorant layperson decides to educate himself by reading a book on autism written by a doctor, he will be told that "75% of people diagnosed with autism are also mentally ret*d". Autistic authors such as Temple Grandin certainly aren't writing this. But non-autistic members of the medical community are.

When my daughter was diagnosed with autism (not Aspergers) she did very badly on the IQ test that was part of the assessment (thus not Aspergers). When the doctors told me this result along with the diagnosis, they also told me that "75% of all people diagnosed with autism have mental retardation". I bought a handful of books on autism and kept running into that 75% figure, generated by medical professionals and dispensed to any laypeople who happen to be listening to them. It was my attempt to find refutation of this 75% figure and an explanation for why my daughter had done so horribly on the test that actually led me to WrongPlanet. People discuss their IQs so much here that Google led me to several IQ threads here. Luckily Callista was posting in a couple of them. She has information about autism and IQ tests that seems to be eluding the medical community, which clings to the idea that the WAIS (or WISC??) test is an accurate way to figure out what- if anything- an autistic person is thinking. And I do mean "if anything". The medical community does seem to assume that not much is going on in an autistic person's head unless they did well enough on the test to get an Aspergers diagnosis. It's not just speech delay which is the dividing line between subcategory diagnoses.

So if you are wondering why so many people think autism=mental retardation, it is likely because medical professionals are telling people it is. Of course most people don't hear it from medical professionals directly. They get it from magazine articles. But those magazine article writers get it from the same books by medical professionals that I read (or by googling) and they regurgitate either the 75% figure or simply say "most people with autism are also mentally ret*d".

When Aspergers gets folded into autism in general, this 75% figure logically will change (one would think) because suddenly the people who did well on the IQ test will be statistically merged with the people who did not. This observation has given rise to a lot of threads.