Newsweek Article on Autistic Adults

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Here's an interesting article about autistic adults:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15792805/site/newsweek/

I am not sure how I felt about this article. It seemed like they focused too much on the negatives in autistic adults. I know that we aren't all created the same, but I had pretty minimal therapy and I'm an executive by day and adjunct college professor by night. My social skills are lacking, but that doesn't mean that I need to be locked away from society. I was in a special physical ed class due to coordination problems, but that's about it. Otherwise, I was encouraged in activities like music, science, and foreign languages - I was never encouraged to try stuff that I didn't have a fixation with.

Well, let's face it. Dealing with the positives isn't exactly a big concern. I've got no idea on the numbers, but those of with some sort of Autistic Spectrum Disorder who can lead normal lives... well, at least full lives... don't need action. But my heart goes out to parents who have to deal with the lower-functioning folks who can't take care of themselves.

I'm very curious about the legislation that was discussed... does anyone know the bill's name, or have any idea on its current progress? The notion that "the legislation specifies that the research oversight committee should include at least one person with autism and a parent of a child with autism" fascinates me.

Well, I didn't quite see it that way. The reason I thought that the article needed more positives was because someone could pick that magazine up in the grocery store and find out 6 months later that they have an autistic child. I wouldn't want that person to think that their child is going to be a non-verbal and wetting themselves into their 20's. It's possible, and I would hope that a cure or some better therapy could be found for someone who is that low-functioning. But I wouldn't want the potential parent of an autistic child to make that generalization. I know that not all of the kids in that article were quite that low-functioning, but you get the idea...

Your perspective made me feel better about the article, so thank you. Often if something in the news upsets me I can post it here and get some different views on it that make me realize it's not all that bad.

You might want to delete this thread since this one is double.

There are two threads that I started on two different articles in the same Newsweek.

This article talks about a few autistic adolescents and young adults. The other article I posted is about some new scientific research into the causes of autism.

My bad!

No problem

You *do* have a point, though. There is something sad about the fact that tragedy sells, and the fact that most of the attention we're going to get is for those people who just can't get by is something we're probably going to have to live with. Those of us who can by in the NT world, albeit with difficulty, just don't need as much attention right now. As the rate of ASDs keeps increasing, I expect that we'll see an increase in "this is a problem" type articles, eventually followed by "it's not always the end of the world" when people really start to get scared. I too, am concerned about the curebie mindset running amok.

I would say most autistic adults are not like the 20 year old guy they mentioned. Probably most have become more higher functioning over time.

I know that autistic adults like that are out there, albeit rare. My concern is that the really severe cases and low-functioning adults were overrepresented in the article.