Is autism becoming infantalised?

Post Reply New Topic

This reminds me of this Ted Talk I saw. The autistic speaker is arguing that society needs to adapt for autistic people, rather than the other way around. A quote: "I'm actively being disabled by the society around me."

Have you ever stopped to think that there may be a reason why some people need such help? I have a bad sense of direction and a degree of agoraphobia. That means I'm very reliant on my stepdaughter taking me places. I didn't purposely decide to be bad at orientation .


Personally I find your glib and snide putting down of other people really annoying .

Temple Grandin has said something about it too in one of her books. She feels autistic kids are being held back and she says how autistic people are more employed in Japan than they are here. She also has met parents who said they don't want to bother teaching their autistic child social skills when they are in fact fine how they are. She has even said how there are those who have less severe autism than her but can't even order their food at a McDonalds.

My mom used to make me order my own food. The more I had to practice, the easier it became. She also wrote about how every time she had a "tantrum," she would always get a consequence. Unless it was sensory related, she got no consequence. She was pretty much forced to follow the rules and any rules her mom set out, she was expected to follow them too like the rest of her siblings. She was also expected to use table manners.

She feels autistic kids are not getting any of this stuff and it's not being enforced onto them. She even said it frightens her to imagine if she were an autistic child today. She does not think she would be where she is now if she were born in today's time.

I imagine to most of you it's no mystery that Autism has some degree of a "childlike" stigma to it. Indeed, most of the social groups for people with autism are mostly focused on parents with autistic children. All the social media groups relating to autism I have joined are almost exclusively parent and child orientated and very little is for adults despite the fact most people with autism are over 18. I have managed to find out very good group for adults with autism in my area but that's so far it.

Another issue (at least in my eyes) that has been grating on me is this sudden increase in making public places autism friendly despite personally thinking it does more harm than good and is far too specific to work in practice. I think all it does is make the stigma worse by people wrongly assuming autistic people can only cope in society if society conforms to them. Not only does that concept slightly annoy me but I think long term it harms the people it's supposed to help by effectively trying to make a societal and social "bubble" for them to live in that's removed from the norm.

I'm not deluded however, I know full well not all people with Aspergers or autism in general can blend in seamlessly with society, autism is autism and it effects everyone different including myself but Iv'e always thought it's good to at least try.

I have no idea what anyone's ideas are on confronting "normie" society instead of hiding to a limited extent from it.

Has anyone else noticed or had the same thoughts as me on the subject?

The tyranny of the majority? That has not worked really well for the LGBTQ and native populations historically, as an example.

I find you position interesting. You are a member of society. Should society not try to work for the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Or should society simply be ordered by those with the most power and influence for their own needs?

Have you ever stopped to think that there may be a reason why some people need such help? I have a bad sense of direction and a degree of agoraphobia. That means I'm very reliant on my stepdaughter taking me places. I didn't purposely decide to be bad at orientation .


Personally I find your glib and snide putting down of other people really annoying .

On a more serious note though, having a bad sense if direction is very common to many people, autism aside and plenty can drive hopeless sense of direction and all. You'll be surprised how few changes of direction can get you from one end of the country to the other. In the grand scheme of things how often do we all travel to the same places day in and day out too? It's only a matter of time before even someome with the worst sense of direction can make it to a destination. Nobody truly has NO sense of direction.

It seems to me that you can drive but the learning curve will be steeper. The two problems you listed certainly doesn't preclude you from driving and I think you jumped the gun a bit by assuming they do preclude you.

We're not helping each other's cases. Some people have more obvious difficulties than others, which is not an excuse to act like one's own struggles are the greater issue at hand. Simply put none of you want to know what I went through to achieve what I have nor where I'm coming from. Nobody here was thinking hierarchically, you projected that on us. People who may seemingly have effortless active lives may actually struggle with anything you might, or anything else.

Could I build a medical case for it & apply for disability? Sure, but I trust American doctors about as far as I can throw them; less than my own ability to get stuff done. Our healthcare is a ripoff even with the insurance I work for. Blindness to theory of mind is a problem for basically everyone. Yes, I have thought about getting SSDI for a long time. I also lived with sufficient pressure to just go & find liveable work anyway.

I wouldn't expect anyone to understand at a glance.

Yes I think overdependency like that happens, and a disability or an illness is sometimes used as a convenient excuse for it. And it's often hard to know exactly who could do more to help themselves and who couldn't. One of my own ideas is that if only we didn't all get pushed around so much, people might take a bit more initiative. In short, I suspect that people act as if they're powerless because most people are somewhat disempowered by the ruling hierarchy. But that political indictment of society might not readily explain why your motorbike refusenik acts like she does, or indeed why her aunt continues to do all the running. It's easy enough to see that as long as the motivation to help herself isn't there, she won't. What we don't know is what would happen if the help were removed and the motivation thus restored. The subject might firm up and find a proactive solution, or she might not be able to, and if not then the reasons why not might be soft-wired and psychological enough to be influenced by reasoning with her skillfully, or they might be too hard-wired to move one iota.

Judging by the apparent heat in some of the comments on this thread, you've touched a nerve. I guess that's because the subject of dependency is so politically charged, with the right wing appearing to use the sad spectacle of overdependency as a cloak for redistribution from poor to rich, while there's a perception of a leftist view that giving everybody unlimited, unconditional handouts would make for a great new world.

It would be pretty stupid to do that considering you're privileged enough to be hired and not only hired, but hired for your chosen profession.

Some autistic people are underemployed, with degrees far outstripping their work collecting trolleys.

Most autistic people are unemployed.

In my case, if I was just to apply cos I'm autistic, I would be put on UC and expected to take the job in McDonalds when it became available (bear in mind I'm auistic). I get ESA because I've got anxiety issues.

I never heard of someone who's healthy and autistic being put on ESA rather than UC. UC is a nightmare.

At least you're honest about your transphobia here.

When you grow out of your edge-lord phase, you'll realise that if you're not transphobic, you use people's pronouns and respect them.

I understand that when you're young, it's cooler to be edgy, though.

And when you're young, it's easy to think that the world is going to be set up for you.

Lol - the idea of someone who struggles socially doing well in McDonalds? OK then...

This site is getting worse and worse for trolls and right wing bigots which will put regular people off coming on here. I think it's due to the fact that it's anonymous so people have no shame in what they're saying & it's online so people really don't know who they're talking to & there's no block button so it's easy to say offensive things and have people in minority groups use them.

Trans women are women.
Trans men are men.
People that don't accept it are transphobes.