I said I was going to write an article for school, and I thought I would post the draft here. Let me know if you have any suggestions for things I could add, or subtract, actually, because it may be just a little wordier than I'd have liked.
Quote:
April is Child Abuse Awareness month. It is also Autism Awareness month. However, the thing most people are aware of when it comes to autism is the one in one hundred ten statistic. That’s right, one in every one hundred and ten children will be diagnosed with autism. Or an autism spectrum disorder. What is not spread along with this “alarming” statistic is how it includes people who function on the higher end of the spectrum, either with “High Functioning Autism” or “Asperger’s Syndrome,” and that the poster children are not on this end.
Autism is not synonymous with mental retardation, as shown by autistic adults such as Temple Grandin, who invented an efficient and humane cattle run after observing the herd behavior of cattle. Autism is a neurological disorder where the disorder lies in communication and overactive senses. People with autism process thought differently, and express thought in ways that may not compute with the neurologically typical. In some cases, this goes beyond the socially stigmatized and into self-injurious territory, such as head-banging or slapping oneself. Carly Fleischmann, a severely autistic girl who learned to communicate through typing, wrote that she sometimes feels as if her skin is crawling or the floor is pulsing (the floor is not, but the lights are). For safer behaviors, such as hand-flapping or rocking back and forth, she explained that their senses are overloaded, and “[autistic people] create output to block the input.”
Despite the breaking of barriers preventing communication through nonverbal mediums such as writing and sign language, more barriers are raised by lack of understanding. For example, people with autism have low levels of seratonin, a hormone that makes people social, or aggressive. Low levels of seratonin are synonymous with depression, but it’s not hard to figure out why. Seratonin is a signal given off by one brain to another brain, and strong signals of seratonin meet weak signals and create a predator-prey relationship. People with autism and other so-called cognitive disabilities are more likely than the non-disabled to be victims of violent crime such as assault or rape, are more likely to be attacked by a weapon, are more likely to be attacked by someone they know, and are more likely to be hospitalized as a result, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
It is not entirely uncommon to hear about mothers killing their autistic child soon after receiving a diagnosis. They hear ‘autism,’ they hear, ‘institution,’ and they hear, though it is rarely said, ‘no hope.’ Autism is compared to a kidnapper, snatching normal children and replacing them with “non-functioning imposters.” One mother, in the Autism Speaks-funded video Autism Every Day, said, “I had sat in the car for about fifteen minutes and actually contemplated putting Jody in the car and driving off of the George Washington bridge...It’s only because of Lauren, the fact that I had another child, that I probably didn’t do it.” Her daughter was in the room. Murder-suicides on disabled people are not under the same stigma as murder-suicides on the neurologically typical. A 22-year-old man with Autism was victimized by his mother this year, prompting the Autism Self Advocacy Network to hold a vigil in response to the murders of the neurologically atypical.
Why there is an Autism Self Advocacy Network is largely due to other organizations seeking to benefit cure-seeking rather than actually helping autistic children learn to function while still maintaining their own personalities. Autistic individuals do not have a token presence on Autism Speaks’ board of directors, and are often told that they are “too high-functioning” to understand “real” autism. Most organizations prefer to prevent autism, create medications to “cure” autism, or generate sympathy towards the families of autistic people.
This, however, is in America. In Europe, it can get much more overzealous. In the French film Le Mur, a reporter exposes the outdated practices employed in France by close-minded psychologists who still believe that autism is caused by “refrigerator mothers” or mothers who are aloof to their newborn children, and that autism is “Juvenile Schizophrenia.” They use humiliating practices such as packing, in which a child is stripped near-naked or naked and wrapped in cold or wet blankets for several hours. Mothers fear refusing this treatment, as social services can take children away because mothers refuse treatment. In Sweden, after a girl with Asperger’s syndrome was raped, judges dismissed the case on the grounds that a girl with a communication disorder couldn’t efficiently say “no” even though the rapist’s story had inconsistencies but the girl’s did not.
Maybe Autism Awareness Month should be dedicated to hearing the stories of autistic people, rather than the secondhand accounts of detached relatives or psychologists. Remember primary and secondary sources, and how some teachers require that they be used? Primary sources are vital to raising awareness, and when it comes to autism, not enough are seen.
29 Mar 2012, 9:32 am
