Is autism becoming infantalised?

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A lot of older aspies in the autism group I went to seemed by in large more capable than the younger ones. The ones 35+ who didn't get their diagnosis until a lot later in their lives seemed to be doing well. Most drove and had jobs. Indeed it's reflected by some posters on this thread too.

The younger ones and I use the term young lightly, I would say in their early 30s and below didn't seem to have anywhere near the same abilities. There wasn't a single one below the age of 30 with a car or job. All were still latching on to their parents who rarely left their side and it seemes like a case of what they wanted they got, no questions asked. The exception to that was a group in a large town near by who all seemed pretty chill and we'll adjusted. Why that group is so different I don't know but it's the one I like.

I just don't want to live in a world where we have to use jazz hands, avoid to much deodorant for the scary smell and make panic rooms everywhere. That is not helping anyone
in the long run but I see it heading that way and I dread the day where I'm embarrassed to be an aspie as a result.

Being completely unsheltered doesn't work either. i'm a prime example of this. Having been neglected i was forced to learn for myself and guess what happened. I burned out at 13.. So clearly your method wouldnt' work. See yor problem is you are seenigw hat you want to see ignoring the fact tha ti'ms ure there are plenty of people who simply arent capable of being independent. However helicopter parenting is a huge prboolem i will admit. A problem that needs to be addressed. However your not seeing the reality. There's bound to be dozens of cases of peopel who are aspies who failed without support. Tey just probably aren't in said group. Probably because tey were put ina group home and aren't able to ome or because they are to isolated to go to said group.

The earliest I could have been diagnosed was 1992(was 35); if I'd had a competent mental health team. That was because Asperger's wasn't an official dx till then . I had to wait till 2018, and coming under a competent mental health trust to be taken seriously and assessed. Does that mean I'm doing better than someone born decades later who got the dx at 21? Not necessarily.

I was independent with very minimal support when living in Southend. Only a fool could have called it healthy independence. The care plan I have , here in Wiltshire,says the help I get is to help me to stay in my own place.

Here are the issues with what you say.

1. I don't know what country you live in but I come from the USA. I don't know if other societies says this or not. This is the same society that says be yourself and be true to who you are. So, it seems like a bunch of mixed messages.

2. Let me ask you this. First, Fnord was able to succeed in society and it was due to his DOD (dear old dad) method. Second, for every Fnord who succeeded with his DOD method what is the ratio of those who sunk even though the DOD was applied? How many of autistics were encouraged to succeed, encouraged to have the positive attitude, confidence and change "I can't" to "I can?" How many autistics had family members who believed in them and did everything they could to get them to succeed and be independent, functioning, contributing members of society? What is the ratio of those autistics who were able to be independent vs those who were not in spite of all the encouragement and methods done by various family?

3. Why is it that those with other disabilities like mental retardation gets a free pass? Do those who have intellectual disabilities have the same requirements by society that we autistics do? Why don't they have the same requirements as we do? Why are we expected to conform and contort ourselves no matter how much it affects us negatively yet those who have intellectual disabilities do not? We're seen as ret*d in society's eyes. So, why can't we get the same benefits as what society calls "ret*d" gets?

4. Has anyone looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reality is for disabled folks in general is that there are more disabled people who are not in the labor force then employed and unemployed. By, the way when you hear about the unemployment rate you don't hear about the "not in the labor force" which means they don't have a job and they quit looking.

5. At what cost must a person continue to try to contort and conform to society's expectations? At what point does the expectations by society become a detriment to a person's mental and physical health and when does the person stand up for himself and say no. No to all of the expectations they can't meet. When is enough, enough?

6. Is it reasonable to expect aid, support and guidance from society to conform and contort ourselves to all of their requirements? Is it reasonable to expect that places like Voc Rehab can have increased funding so the staff can provide effective services to disabled people in an efficient manner? Can we expect services from disability orgs like Voc Rehab to provide services that are meaningful to specific disabilities like ASDs? Are the taxpayers willing to pay for this through their tax dollars?

Last edited by cubedemon6073 on 01 Sep 2020, 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[color=#0077cc]10/10 would read again
memes aside
Very very well written post.

I added a 6th bullet point.

The reason it's easier for autistic people to get jobs in the past is that society has been changing to a hyper NT world.

If you were intelligent in the past and you were studious in the past and you used formal language etc, you got by easier than if you didn't. It was a good thing to be a quiet, studious, intelligent person.

Nowadays it's good to do well in groups and have good people skills. The rest of it doesn't matter anymore or is seen as a detriment.

And nowadays they create an overly bright, overly noisy world for you to do all that in.

That's why manual labour is a bad idea too. My dad went to uni to avoid all that. He didn't fit in with the thick, jokey types he met on a factory floor. He might have had the same lack of grades as them but that was about all he had in common with them.

People who weren't young in the 80s or in this century also had the advantage of more jobs. Especially those who were around in the 60s.

We're going to be entering a world which is Tory, covid still here, post furlough. People are going to be laid off. It's not like the 60s when work was plentiful and if you had what I'd consider aspergers' type personality traits, all you had to do was get a degree and you were pretty much guaranteed a job as a : librarian, statistician, professor etc. You also didn't have a diagnosis. I'd argue a grammar school boy in the 50s didn't really need a diagnosis for being a quiet, studious, nerdy type who couldn't handle flourescent lights.

My own social skills did a lot better in top sets around other kids who were focusing on studying when they did when I was put into bottom sets because my teacher assumed autistic kids were all stupid. Bottom sets kids were more interested in lazing around and picking on weirdos and looking at porn on their phones. Top set kids were like me, focused on studying. No offence to any autistic person who has to be in bottom sets but this is my experience of the NTs who were in them.

And honestly. Who do jazz hands cause a problem?

We have rules in our family:
1 avoid physical pain or severe mental distress of someone
2 then focus on ethics and things people genuinely can't do
3 then focus on trivial stuff like 'this is annoying'

The third one shouldn't take the place of the first. If someone's in physical pain and it's known about why and can be avoided with the worst thing being 'this is annoying', avoid that pain...

I'm saying this as someone who doesn't have any pain from listening to other people clap and whose own pain from clapping is minor & can be avoided simply by sometimes closing hands together rather than whacking them & being one of the last to start and first to stop. So I have no dog in this fight, I just care about others.

But do we really want to be seen as a group of people who need to have all this frankly weird special treatment? When people learn I have autism I don't want their first thoughts to be "ohhh, look out, he's gonna have a meltdown if I use a hammer or dye my hair a different colour". In my eyes that's a very good way of ensuring we have an even worse stigma and harder time finding a job. It'll get to the point where employers will just point blank never employ us by the back door. No reasonable adjustments, just "sorry we found someone better to have the job.

The mentality of such treatment can't be healthy too. If people won't even clap in the fear of us having a meltdown then I'm sure they would discourage us from doing pretty much, well, everything....

There was a viral video about a socialist meeting. I won't direct people to it becauae I don't know the rules on it but it should be easy to find. Anyway, there was jazz hands galore, a safe room and encouragement not to wear deoderant because of the "aggressive smell". They couldnt organise a p**s up in a brewery because everyones "special adjustments" contradicted everybody else's. It went viral for ALL the wrong reasons and the mocking in the comments section was in my eyes rightly deserved. Seriously...don't be like those guys. I'll fight tooth and nail not to be associated with people who think it's OK to treat adults that way. I and many other aspies would be devastated if after doing well in life they end up getting treated like that.

What you're doing is respectability politics.

Combat ableism rather than trying to fight against people more autistic than you.

SJW shaming is very 2016. Most young people are growing out of it. Most intelligent older (than me) people never grew into it and will see it as 'the kids bullying each other'.

We can't run the world based on 'I'm scared of being weird'. It's better to be ambitious and change social norms.

I mean tbh how often does it come up?

In tech, people will be thinking 'oh me too' or 'oh I knew this guy at college who was'. I know this cos that's how it went on my information studies course. The STEM people on the course would just say stuff like 'we're all a little autistic here'.

In video games? They're going to be anti-SJW edge lord types anyway. So don't tell them. They're doing it to be edgy.

Pick and choose who you tell. You sound high functioning enough to do that.

Judging by the video they couldn't even agree how to run a bath, yet alone the world because they were challenging social norms so much their meeting just decended into chaos. There is a reason why they are called norms.

It's coming up a little to often for my liking too.

Nades- a lot of your comments smack of the 'scrounger rhetoric' that this government has promoted. The same rhetoric that has seen hate crimes against the disabled increase.

It's the same ideology I think - the notion of the undeserving poor that's so often used as a justification for removing protection from the vulnerable so that the better-off can have a tax break. And last time I looked we have right-wingers running the show in the UK and the US, and benefits have been getting increasingly hard to get. Which is the more serious problem, people not "achieving their maximum potential" because of too much mollycoddling, or people dying because of the indiscriminate tightening of the welfare screw?

I think this is what I called veiled Nazism. They just want to kill off the disabled and anyone they feel is a burden.

They say that with sz-a(my dx) and sz the things that most affects outcome are the cognitive impairment . Yet there is little to no assessment of that in the UK. The only cognitive testing I have ever been given was during my 1st admission in 1975. It consisted of digit forward recall and counting down from a 100 in groups of 7.

To a lesser, but still signifiant, degree those on the spectrum can have cognitive difficulties . NB 'executive functioning' deficits .(occurs in sz/sz-a too)

Improving EF and other cognitive difficulties would be far more beneficial than getting people with ASD to have driving lessons.