Essay on Autism
24 Apr 2008, 3:21 pm
WOW! I never expected I'd get so many responses! Thank you all very much, it has been fascinating reading your replies and now I've got a plethora of ideas for the paper.
A couple of you mentioned Tony Attwood's book and I definitely agree that it's a useful and interesting source of information.
I really love that point you made! I can imagine that some students would write essays focusing on things that are "wrong" with ASD, but I'm sure most people would agree (especially those of us on Wrong Planet!) that it is just a different way of thinking.
Yes, I'm going to try to use it more as a reference point than anything else, since (I believe someone else mentioned this point) Dibs is rather out-of-date. And indeed, it's true that Asperger's didn't "exist" as a criteria when Dibs was written, yet while reading the book I couldn't help but think that Dibs was clearly on the upper end of the spectrum. Oh! And thank you for the summary, Woodpeace. I read Dibs way back in December (I was bored so I did all the readings for my classes before the semester began), so it really refreshed my memory.
Anbuend: Thank you for the comment! It's quite fascinating, to see how definitions have changed so much and even today there's a lot of controversy over whether some people should be classified as ADS or not. You are certainly far more knowledgeable on the subject and I hope you do get to write that history. That would be a really great, lengthy research paper. Unfortunately, we're merely allowed to write 1,500 words and I doubt I'd be able to really get into the nuances with that limitation and so I'm thinking of focusing more on a broader outline of various types of ASD--with particular attention to Asperger's.
Danielismyname: If you could find that article, it would be really helpful! Thanks!
Again, I'd like to thank you all so much! If you have anything else to say, please add it. I'm going to begin typing up a rough draft and I'll see how that goes. ^__^
24 Apr 2008, 4:18 pm
I've seen some papers that go into parts of it, but I haven't really seen much that covers it in the detail that I want to go into.
It's also very difficult for me, in terms of what words to produce, to work simultaneously with:
1. What someone (say, Kanner) has actually observed happening.
2. What someone (say, Kanner) believes he observed happening.
3. What someone else (later on) believes they saw on the basis of what Kanner believes he saw.
4. Their guesses about what is inside autistic people.
5. What is actually inside autistic people.
6. How autistic people are actually acting.
7. Autistic people diagnosed because of what is actually inside them matching the guesses made by Kanner and all guessers-on-top-of-Kanner since then.
8. Autistic people diagnosed because their behavior matches the behavior of people who have those things going on inside them.
It's a lot of levels, and all those levels and layers combine and influence each other in complex ways, yet when I do reading, nobody has adequately separated out those levels of interpretation. People seem to have real trouble just observing autistic people without putting a judgment on why we do things or what we are and are not aware of. And they seem to abstract so much from us that what they're dealing with is not direct observation but the guesses-piled-on-guesses stuff.
I'm not yet good at holding out various forms of academic nonsense, using words to describe and differentiate them, and then using words to describe what's actually happening, and making sure that the words can't be mistaken for each other. Larry Arnold is better at that than I am by far. That is a lot of what has held me up in such a paper: I'm not just content with describing what they thought, I want to describe the apparent distance or closeness between what they thought and what they saw, and how that has influenced perception of autistic people over the years, and how the thought of one person could go to the thought of the next person without touching reality first to make sure the thought fits.
There are so many strands of that I don't know how to draw them together, and it aggravates me as a writer.
_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
24 Apr 2008, 5:30 pm
A couple of you mentioned Tony Attwood's book and I definitely agree that it's a useful and interesting source of information.
I really love that point you made! I can imagine that some students would write essays focusing on things that are "wrong" with ASD, but I'm sure most people would agree (especially those of us on Wrong Planet!) that it is just a different way of thinking.
Yes, I'm going to try to use it more as a reference point than anything else, since (I believe someone else mentioned this point) Dibs is rather out-of-date. And indeed, it's true that Asperger's didn't "exist" as a criteria when Dibs was written, yet while reading the book I couldn't help but think that Dibs was clearly on the upper end of the spectrum. Oh! And thank you for the summary, Woodpeace. I read Dibs way back in December (I was bored so I did all the readings for my classes before the semester began), so it really refreshed my memory.
Anbuend: Thank you for the comment! It's quite fascinating, to see how definitions have changed so much and even today there's a lot of controversy over whether some people should be classified as ADS or not. You are certainly far more knowledgeable on the subject and I hope you do get to write that history. That would be a really great, lengthy research paper. Unfortunately, we're merely allowed to write 1,500 words and I doubt I'd be able to really get into the nuances with that limitation and so I'm thinking of focusing more on a broader outline of various types of ASD--with particular attention to Asperger's.
Danielismyname: If you could find that article, it would be really helpful! Thanks!
Again, I'd like to thank you all so much! If you have anything else to say, please add it. I'm going to begin typing up a rough draft and I'll see how that goes. ^__^
tell us what grade you get, ok!?
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