Well personally I don't agree with splitting anyone up into groups. I don't believe in the stupid ''Aspies are aliens'' thing. I know there are silly articles about it thrown around on the internet, but I actually get offended, and personally I find that racist really. If I turned around and said, ''all African people are aliens because they're black'', I would be racist, wouldn't I? We're all people, we're all humans, and having a disorder does not make me any less of a human to a neurotypical. We may emotionally feel like we don't belong at times, but we are not biologically aliens. I just had to get that one off my chest. I suppose it would cause many arguments, but I'm not trying to cause any arguments, I just find it a little offensive to be called alien just because I struggle in certain situations.
So anyway - I don't really like to go around splitting people up into groups just because of their neurotype. I'm just saying I prefer to call myself ''Aspie'' rather than ''Autistic'', because I was originally diagnosed with mild AS. If other people want to call me Autistic then that's fine - it's totally upto you what you call yourselves. Some people just call everyone on the spectrum Autistic, whether they have AS or some other ASD. That's upto them. Some neurotypicals even call people with learning disabilities ''illiterate'', whether they can read or write or not. Personally I don't call people that who have got a disability, but some people do. Anyhow, I'm just not going to be talked into calling myself something that I've never called myself. My parents say AS, and so do I. I won't change that. It still doesn't mean I'm splitting anyone up into groups.
When I done a computer course at college, I was put in a class of students who had other disabilities like Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, ADHD, Epilepsy, Fragile X, Soto's Syndrome, learning difficulties, and AS (not sure who had what, but they all had some form of disability). Actually, I knew who had ADHD and Epilepsy and Fragile X, but you know what I mean. Then there was a class of students with severe disabilities like Down's Syndrome, Mental Retardation, severe Autism, Cerebral Palsy, other conditions where they're in a wheelchair, and there was even one or two with severe facial deformities. The college didn't mix them with us, and we weren't mixed with them. I just saw a group of them a few times in the cafeteria with some carers they were required to have with them at all times. We didn't need carers with us at all times - we were all able enough to go off campuss at lunchtime and walk up the town together, buy our lunch, sit and eat it in a field, and come back again then carry on with our lessons. But the more severely disabled students were severe enough to need a carer with them at all times. I once saw a severely Autistic boy (one out of the group of severely disabled students) having a meltdown because the cafeteria got a bit crowded and noisy, so a carer had to take him outside and let him sort of run around a bit, which must be his little way of calming his nerves. But the good thing was, just because these severely disabled people were severely disabled, doesn't mean they weren't able to learn. So they were organised a group at the local college, instead of being isolated from the rest of the world and treated like they can never learn. So I think that is pretty good of colleges.
So sometimes places do have to split neurodiverse people into groups of ''mild'' and ''severe''. I'm not too bothered one way or another about it, I mean, I can't control how services arrange to group their clients up, all I know is sometimes people with different needs meet different requirements and so grouping certain disabled people together will just help to coincide more with how they're going to learn and cope, etc.
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Female
03 Sep 2011, 2:16 am
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