aren't ret*d people the opposite of autistic people?

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johnnyh
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28 Jun 2016, 6:56 am

Because in my daily life, I've seen NTs who sucked at school and could not read a book to save their life yet have displayed more these intelligence-type qualities that I lack. They do better at work, have better memories, never make silly mistakes, can read and get things without even trying, can plan effortlessly, and find everything easier behind a reception desk (where I used to work).


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28 Jun 2016, 7:31 am

I see your frustration. But, at this point, you are thinking quite "cut and dry" and "black and white." I am prone to this mode of thinking, too--that's why I know it when I see it.

Everybody lacks something. What you have to do is find a way to compensate for your "lackings" by accentuating your strengths. That's your job as a person.

I might suck at football; but I may be good at table tennis. I may suck at biology, but be great at physics. I might have a great memory, but suck as far as general knowledge is concerned. I might be great at being a receptionist; but when it comes to managing money, I suck.

The best friendships are where one can, say, fix one's computer when it has a glitch; while the other one fixes one's refrigerator.

Making many "silly mistakes" is part and parcel of doing great things. Many famous people have looked like total fools before they were able to "put everything together" at one moment in time. Once they became famous for that "one thing," their little quirks were ignored--because they were able to accentuate their strengths.



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28 Jun 2016, 11:39 am

Ganondox wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
The answer to the question is hell no. The Autism spectrum ranges from people who are mentally ret*d to savants. Savants represent 10% of the Autistic people. Arguably 90 percent of us are not the opposite of intellecually disabled. Although functioning labals for autism are going out of style the definition of low functioning autism are those people the OP from long ago thinks she is the opposite of.


You do realize that most savants are technically mentally ret*d...


Which proves I can fall for stereotypes and collequal language also.


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28 Jun 2016, 6:01 pm

johnnyh wrote:
Because in my daily life, I've seen NTs who sucked at school and could not read a book to save their life yet have displayed more these intelligence-type qualities that I lack. They do better at work, have better memories, never make silly mistakes, can read and get things without even trying, can plan effortlessly, and find everything easier behind a reception desk (where I used to work).


There are a lot of different kinds of intelligence and aptitude. Emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, visual reasoning, working memory, long-term memory, processing speed, and so on. You can't boil intelligence down to a "have it" or "don't have it" binary.

As KraftieKortie said, everyone has different areas that they are strong in, which is why standardized tests (IQ or educational) tend to get a lot of criticism--most older tests only test one kind of reasoning or are culturally, economically, or gender-biased. One IQ test I took had questions about American history--what if I were a recent immigrant, or came from an impoverished school with a poor history program? I've taken three IQ tests and got very different scores: 132 (Stanford-Binet), 108 (Weschler), and 153 (Raven Progressive Matrices). The areas tested are different in each. The Weschler was perhaps the most broad-based, with some areas scoring very low and others very high.

It's possible that that job was just not a good fit for your aptitudes, or that you needed some help with your weaker areas (e.g., software to help with planning, a mentor or job coach). Also, you may be comparing yourself unfairly to others. People may not have it as easy as you think, or may have gotten in trouble for poor performance and you didn't know it. They may have more experience, and have already gotten the silly mistakes out of the way.


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26 May 2018, 9:00 am

Also the person with a learning disability may be used to triangulate Autistic people without learning disabilities but mental acceleration. In lets say a sheltered work place that caters for all disabilities and run by allistic people the autistic person is likely to get bullied by the staff or other people. If a person with a learning disability does work well then he or she will be rewarded with praise or something else. An autistic person with allistic levels of intelligence or mentally accelerated will get taken for granted. If a person with a learning disability lies about an aspie/autistic their care worker would yell at the autistic like the allistic has some kind of hypo sensitivity. It would never be an aspies word taken in that circumstance. Why because the other person is on the neurotypical spectrum so an allistic is likely to believe someone else on the neurotypical spectrum rather than on the autistic spectrum. My experience that for some autistic people they are treated the opposite of people with learning disabilities to the point of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and get victimised or goaded by people on the neurotypical spectrum allistic or some with learning disabilities. All would enable an aspie to be taken advantage but not a person with a learning disability. That is from my won experience. :idea:



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26 May 2018, 9:43 am

Autistics and Intellectually Disabled people, that is the new word for mental retardation now, are not opposites. Like several of you said, both conditions can exist together or separately because they are separate conditions. Also the intellectually disabled community is as diverse in personality traits as any other community and they also, like with Autism, can be very varied in severity levels. I know one MR young man, I use that term for him because that is the term he uses for himself, who achieved much more at school than I did and who is on a career path to become a chef. He has actually surpassed me in school and career even though his IQ is lower than mine and he is legally mentally ret*d. But if he did not tell you himself that he has is MR, you would never be able to guess it just by hanging around him. So it can be very similar to Autism in that regard. I also know some intellectually disabled people who don't like animals and who are actually afraid of them. So we have to be careful not to make the same stereotypes about other people that we don't want people making about us.

And the other thing is that because Autism is a developmental disability, some of us can have areas in our functioning where we are exactly like people who are mentally ret*d. I, for one, am emotionally and socially ret*d and very much so. I have the emotional capacity of a 4 year old and the social awareness of a four to six year old. I also have the practical application intelligence of a 10 to 12 year old. So we are not opposites, we can have many similarities and some Autistic people are mentally ret*d as well.


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drgafanovich
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03 Nov 2022, 3:02 am

This is a pretty aged yet useful thread, so just FYI the source link no longer works but here is the one that does - https://nevadaautism.com/iq-testing-underestimates-autism-spectrum-intelligence/

aghogday wrote:
Verdandi wrote:
Dillogic wrote:
Verdandi wrote:
Not empirically confirmed. At best you can say that a good portion of autistic people do badly on IQ tests. If you provide IQ tests that don't require verbal comprehension (such as Raven's Progressive Matrices) the scores fit a more typical curve.


Doing badly at IQ tests is actually the definition of mental retardation (verbal + performance + math). Raven's just measures the performance part. If they do well on performance IQ, they'll still be mentally ret*d and require help with verbal stuff (which most of schooling is). Whilst it sounds all nice and fuzzy*, a specific test for a specific type of intelligence is only that.

So, we're back to about half or so with mental retardation.


I think you misunderstood what I was saying. One of the core features of autism is difficulty with language and communication, which means that the answers to questions that rely upon language and communications are likely to be wrong, even if the autistic person would be able to correctly answer if they understood the question. This isn't about being nice and fuzzy, this is about understanding the science, or rather lack of science behind the claim that half of autistic people have mental retardation. That is to say that autism itself can interfere with the ability to take an IQ test.

http://foa.sagepub.com/content/21/2/66.abstract

Quote:
There are frequent claims in the literature that a majority of children With autism are mentally ret*d (MR). The present study examined the evidence used as the basis for these claims, revieWing 215 articles published betWeen 1937 and 2003. Results indicated 74% of the claims came from nonempirical sources, 53% of Which never traced back to empirical data. Most empirical evidence for the claims Was published 25 to 45 years ago and Was often obtained utilizing developmental or adaptive scales rather than measures of intelligence. Furthermore, significantly higher prevalence rates of MR Were reported When these measures Were used. Overall, the findings indicate that more empirical evidence is needed before conclusions can be made about the percentages of children With autism Who are mentally ret*d.


The full text is free:

http://foa.sagepub.com/content/21/2/66.full.pdf+html

While epidemiological studies found approximately 40-55% of autistic children had intellectual disabilities, empirical studies in which appropriate measures were taken to account for the difficulties autism causes, an even lower percentage of autistic children scored as intellectually disabled. In other words, just giving an autistic child an IQ test is unlikely to produce an accurate result because autism interferes with input and output, without also interfering with intelligence.

In other words, the science doesn't really agree with your position that scoring low on an IQ test means that an autistic child is necessarily intellectually disabled. There is very little current empirical validated data as to what percentage of autistic children actually have intellectual disabilities.

This is one of the problems with research into autism, when so many things are taken at face value and misunderstood, even when the researchers know - in theory - that autistic impairments can easily skew the results and even cause the apparent meaning to differ from actual meaning by a significant margin.

Regarding aghogday's cited numbers, if they were tested conventionally, the results are rather dubious.

Also, I believe that Hans Asperger found that his patients scored a relatively normal IQ curve when he accounted for their communication and linguistic impairments. They tended to score lower when he did not.

* I am not, as a typical rule, "nice and fuzzy." Not without effort, at any rate. I am concerned with factual accuracy, which is why I responded in the first place.


The article you cited, was from 2006. The data I provided was from the same huge peer reviewed study that the government gets it's 1 in 110, statistics from for Autism, in 2009.

It is definitely from an empirically validated source. There is a link to the full study, from the CDC link I provided, where it notes "related article."

The testing of individuals with Aspergers has been challenged by traditional IQ testing methods, but in the most recent study done by Michelle Dawson and her associates, it is reported there is not a significant difference between testing individuals other than those with Aspergers, with traditional IQ testing methods. The study calls for Raven Matrices methods only for individuals diagnosed with Aspergers.

By default, all the individuals studied, in the government statistics diagnosed with Aspergers were among those measured with average or above IQ's, so the addition of Raven matrices testing for individuals with Aspergers, would have made no difference in the Government figures, for the percentage of individuals with lower than average IQ's.

They aren't going to go to the trouble to change the IQ testing methods, if the IQ testing methods, don't provide a significantly different result for individuals who aren't diagnosed with Aspergers. Per the most recent study, there is no basis for it.


http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/10/03/iq-testing-underestimates-asperger-autism-intelligence/29999.html

Quote:
A new study finds that traditional intelligence testing may be underestimating the capabilities of individuals displaying an autism spectrum disorder.

Traditionally, autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome, have generally been associated with uneven intellectual profiles and impairment.

However, a new study of Asperger individuals published in the online journal PLoS ONE, suggests specialized testing are needed for this special population.

Researchers discovered Asperger’s individuals’ scores are much higher when they are evaluated by a test called Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which encompasses reasoning, novel problem-solving abilities, and high-level abstraction.

By comparison, scores for non-Asperger’s individuals are much more consistent across different tests. Interestingly, Asperger participants’ performance on Raven’s Matrices was associated with their strongest peaks of performance on the traditional Wechsler.

A previous study by the same group found very similar results for autistic individuals as well, whose peaks of ability are perceptual, rather than verbal as in Asperger individuals.



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03 Nov 2022, 3:49 am

This thread is a history of how the r-word has been removed from common use to describe people with intellectual disability.

I agreed with one of the more enlightened posters from 2011 that the thread is quite patronising.



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03 Nov 2022, 4:47 am

cyberdad wrote:
This thread is a history of how the r-word has been removed from common use to describe people with intellectual disability.

I agreed with one of the more enlightened posters from 2011 that the thread is quite patronising.

I would say not removed from common usage but lessened usage. I would not use WP, or the mainstream media as guides as to what is common usage. Even here on WP I have seen it used a handful of times recently. It is not starred out.

I don't view the original intent of this thread as patronizing. IMHO it was self-hate. All of those ret*d people had all these positive qualities the opposite of us.


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03 Nov 2022, 5:37 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
This thread is a history of how the r-word has been removed from common use to describe people with intellectual disability.

I agreed with one of the more enlightened posters from 2011 that the thread is quite patronising.

I would say not removed from common usage but lessened usage. I would not use WP, or the mainstream media as guides as to what is common usage. Even here on WP I have seen it used a handful of times recently. It is not starred out.

I don't view the original intent of this thread as patronizing. IMHO it was self-hate. All of those ret*d people had all these positive qualities the opposite of us.


Well at least among WP users anyway
Back in 2011 the threads were awash with the r-word, there was also a lot of Aspie supremacists who hated being called autistic (remember them).



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05 Nov 2022, 7:58 am

Its a dumb thread.

Was dumb in 2011. Probably even dumber now.

In my experience its true that people with Downs Syndrome are more outgoing, affable, and sociable, than...I am.

That was certainly true of the big guy who grew up across the street from me (lived with his parents and older sister, he was as big as an adult man early in his teens, but had the mentality of five or six year old). Very friendly. Sometimes I wished I had been more like him growing up, lol.

But that doesnt make conditions like Downs "the opposite of autism".

There is a condition that IS sometimes labeled by experts as being "the opposite of autism", and thats Williams Syndrome. Even more rare than autism. Stereotypically an autistic kid will sit in the corner of the room and not interact with you, while a Williams kid will compulsively interact with you, and refuse to NOT socialize with you. But even thats a bit of poetic license to call it "the opposite of autism".



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05 Nov 2022, 1:01 pm

there isnt an opposite to autism

people with williams syndrome also have learning disability and probably share some traits with autism .
i went to a school for children with all sorts fo disability and including downs,williams etc
so i know a lot of differences between autism vs learning disability vs nt

to answer the op

saying ret*d is not politically correct


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05 Nov 2022, 1:19 pm

Yeah I get it, autistic people suck. We're uncanny valley, rude, creepy and gross. Intellectually disabled people can be uncanny valley, rude, creepy and gross too, but they get away with it more because people think of them as toddlers that don't know any better. And of course people wish everyone could have Williams syndrome, but I don't. Just because people with William's syndrome love to socialize doesn't mean they understand the many unwritten rules about it.I read they have higher anxiety and phobias, developmental delays and suffer all kinds of health problems, much like aspies but people think they're all so kind and sweet while we aspies are all cold, unemotional axe murderers with freakish obsessions with anime and don't shower or brush our teeth. :roll:



Last edited by lostonearth35 on 05 Nov 2022, 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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05 Nov 2022, 2:27 pm

Quote:
And of course people wish everyone could have Williams syndrome, but I don't. Just because people with William's syndrome love to socialize doesn't mean they understand the many unwritten rules about it.I read they have higher anxiety and phobias, developmental delays and suffer all kinds of health problems


if this isnt also sarcasm then i agree

a highly social person is probably called extrovert

if highly social is a disorder like williams then it obviously comes with challenges too otherwise they would just be called extrovert people


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05 Nov 2022, 4:11 pm

lostonearth35 wrote:
Yeah I get it, autistic people suck. We're uncanny valley, rude, cteepy and gross. Intellectually disabled people can be uncanny valley, rude, creepy and gross too, but they get away with it more because people think of them as toddlers that don't know any better.


And people with it are more likely to be registered sex offenders. This is based from anecdotal experiences I have read by people who worked in places for people with IDs and many of them were registered sex offenders.

I have no sympathy for parents who whine about how unfair the law is for their adult Billy snowflake because he sexually assaulted a woman, she pressed charges and judge put him on the sex offender registry, now the parents are whining about how hard this all is for them and how they suffer too. Well maybe you should have taught your child approppiate boundaries and no touching without permission Karen.


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05 Nov 2022, 5:03 pm

The most polite thing I can say is the premise of the thread is naive. There are autistic people (like my daughter cybergirl) who have genius level intelligence but who are socially awkward to the point she get's called the r-word at school. Infact one girl who currently bullies her about her social skills is the same one who came up to me several years ago at a school function and commented that everyone in her class thinks cybergirl is a genius.

The problem with all this is that being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean having the capacity/inclination to apply this in mainstream school. My daughter is too distracted (due to her ADHD) to focus in class and she will obsess over one silly comment in the playground to the point where nothing else get's done.

So the line between r-word and autism is usually in the eye of the beholder.