Relating to Truly Mentally Ill People(Aspies vs. NTs)

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This isn't a forum for schizophrenia, it's one for ASDs and ADHD (for those who want that listed seperately). I realize some here have had positive encounters with those suffering from schizophrenia I respect that.
But realize others are not so fortunate and have been quite traumatized by some of these people who can be extremely destructive IRL. So, it is hard to form an accepting, positive opinion.
And before someone mentions autism I want to add I have NEVER EVER had the same terrible encounters with ANYONE who has autism (that i know of) in real life there is just no comparing the two based on my own experience they are two entirely different things and those with schizophrenia have a much different basic mode of being ie, paranoia and a certain dysphoric meanness. That is what I have observed more than anything else in people I knew had schizophrenia. Sorry but that has been my experience.

I wasn't aware that a forum had to be for a specific group of people, in order not to make generalized negative statements about said people.

Replace "schizophrenic" with a number of other words, say it's based on your personal experiences with several of (whatever the other category is), and see if it sounds remotely acceptable.

If it doesn't, why not?

What would your response be to someone who said that about a group of people that you knew (from direct personal experience) were not all, not even most, like that?

What if they told you, then, that it was not a support group for (insert kind of people) so it was okay to say these things?

Or that you were just being politically correct, or that you were so fortunate not to have met the bad kind of (autistic people, gay people, black people, whatever)?

(Even if you told them that yes you had met very mean people in the category mentioned. Apparently that isn't good enough for them, they seem to desperately want to connect meanness to that category.)

Seriously. Think about it. Because that's how some of what's written on this thread comes across to anyone who actually knows a wide and varied enough group of people diagnosed with schizophrenia to know that meanness is not an inherent trait of the conditions that get them diagnosed that way.

Yeah, people with minds that work in certain ways will be mean in unique ways based on how their minds work.

Autistic people who are very mean, for instance, are often very obsessive and relentless about their meanness even after nearly anyone else would've given up on it due to social disapproval.

The location of Autreat is confidential because of an autistic person who used to stalk several members there absolutely obsessively as well as do incredibly, incredibly mean things to them that defy description in how mean they are (over a period of over a decade, maybe two). And his meanness is very plain even over the Internet, at least after his initial mask falls off, and he's not good at hiding it because his social skills aren't the greatest.

I imagine that the shape of his meanness and the way he expresses it is very related to autism. But what if someone had only met him and a couple other autistic people like him? What if they said "this is my experience with autistic people"? Would you not challenge what they said based on your experience of autistic people? What if lots of people had never met very mean autistic people like him? Lots haven't.

But some have and they form their opinion based on that. I even had a shrink once who told me he never met a person with Asperger's that he liked, and that they were just inherently nasty and unlikable. Doesn't make their opinion right.

Well, same is true of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, whether you can see it or not for having met only mean people with it. (Or rather, thinking you only have. I bet you've met tons more people diagnosed with schizophrenia than you think you have.)

It's not fair at all to make generalized statements about "these people" based only on having been traumatized by people in that category. If that were fair, then I could go on for quite a long time about the awful meanness and brutality of men, autistic people, straight people, manic people, white people, paranoid people, and people in a number of other categories, both valued and devalued. As a gay person I hear people all the time defending their choices to say bad things about gay people because a gay person sexually assaulted them, and it's really not-okay on many levels. (Personally, everyone who sexually assaulted me was straight, but several were neuro-atypical in various ways.)

And if this were not an autism forum I would still say it's wrong to make generalized statements about how uniquely mean autistic people are. It doesn't have to be a schizophrenia forum for some people on this thread to show a little respect to people here who have it or have loved ones with it or know people who have it and know that not only is not everyone with it like that, neither are most people with it like that. Nobody's saying there aren't mean people in every category of people, of course there are (unless the category is "nice people" ).

You have to remember schizophrenia is a mental disorder with a criteria for diagnosis so you cannot just exchange words here. It's very specific. It isn't generalizing.

And also remember I have never met an autistic person who acts like the persons with schizophrenia. Two completely different disorders here. I've had the worse experiences with the ones who have schizophrenia. I don't have them now because I no longer know these persons and my life is so much better now. People here complain about NTs but the persons I have known with schizophrenia make most NTs look pretty darn nice in comparison. The so called normal people might judge me wrongly by the way I look but they at least don't make up a bunch of strange stories about me, must be on constant guard with me, think I am out to get them, etc. This is what those with schizophrenia that I have known think and do. Imagine someone you know takes money out their bank account turns arounds and tells people you have been secretly taking money out of their account when you just saw them take the money out. Schizophrenics I have known do this kind of thing. It's part of the disorder.

This is the kind of confusion I am talking about and I do not compare this in to autism except that they are both disorders that make people who have them somewhat different and are genetic and affect the brain.

(Edited to add -- yet again, if anyone needs my words condensed, ask someone other than me to do it.)

I'm not saying they're the same, and I'm not saying that meanness can't take specific forms in people who have schizophrenia diagnoses. (If you look up the criteria, by the way, paranoia is not a required trait in such diagnoses, and also not all people who have paranoia problems do the stuff you describe to people they know. Even "paranoid" in paranoid schizophrenia doesn't relate to what most people call paranoia, it relates to delusions in general -- delusions of persecution are only one kind that can get you that diagnosis.)

And yes, I have had people do the sort of things you describe, to me. They just form a minority, because I've actually known a wide variety of people with that diagnosis, or with paranoia in general (which is not specific to that diagnosis, nor universal within that diagnosis).

To give just one example, there was a woman at a psych drop-in place I used to go to, who was insistent about things like, that I was somehow threatening to run her over with my wheelchair all the time, and really mean to me about it. That's one woman out of 30-50 people I knew there who had schizophrenia diagnoses, and she didn't have any particularly more severe problems than anyone else there did. (And yes, I've known people who've done far worse to me on the basis of similar beliefs, I just really don't feel like reliving those experiences right now. My beliefs are not for a lack of having been well and truly focused on by anyone severely abusive who also happened to be paranoid.)

One woman with that diagnosis ran some of the groups, and passed completely as normal, and so did a couple other people. Most did not pass as normal, and did assorted exceedingly strange things, but were not particularly mean, angry, confrontational, or picking on anyone. A large number didn't speak to anyone. Many of the people who did, had speech that was very hard to follow. One woman who did, would sometimes be talking to me and I'd have trouble understanding, and then she'd say she had to go to the other room and write on the computer so she could beam her thoughts into my head. One man liked telling me his assorted conspiracy-related beliefs, but never harmed or threatened to harm anyone involved in them. A couple different men would say things that were almost comprehensible but that seemed to slide into another thing right after you got a handle on the first thing, and didn't quite make sense. Several different people had long conversations with people who weren't there. One woman would just stand in one spot a long time and start laughing, then switch to another position and start laughing again. Others I'd have suspected had Alzheimer's if they were older than they were. None of them were either verbally or physically abusive in any form except that one woman who was nasty to me about the wheelchair.

And there was the same sort of variety among people with the diagnosis in mental institutions too.

The whole problem is you can't seem to see the concept of all the various things that get called schizophrenia (it's not one single thing) separately from the people you've met who've done that to you. Which makes me think if you had met mostly really mean autistic people, you would do the same to them, and insist that their meanness was part of autism, because it was so obsessive, repetitive and detailed, and autistic people are known for doing things obsessively, repetitively, and detailedly. Similarly, the people I know who say bad things about gay people because of bad experiences, will say that absolutely the experiences are central to being gay, because "Gay people are into guys, and he was obviously into me given that he assaulted me, so of course the sexual aggressiveness is part of being gay."

The guy I talked about earlier, he absolutely does stalk people in a very autistic way, his methods of hurting people are very autistic in nature, and so is his long-term obsessiveness, disregard of social norms and pressure, and stubborn refusal to get a clue about the matter. There are people like Digby Tantam and even Hans Asperger who've proposed meanness as an integral trait to autism either because of people like that guy, or because of people who get misunderstood as being like him. They have written entire papers on the topic and view it just as seriously as you view people with schizophrenia. I could just as well switch it around and say that this guy I mentioned did everything in a very autistic way and I've never met anyone schizophrenic who acted like him, because it's true, but it's also kind of irrelevant.

If you go to FAAAS, you will find entire screeds written by women with autistic husbands who had bad experiences with them that they view as just as much related to "autistic lack of empathy" as you view the people you know as somehow related to a "dysphoric meanness in schizophrenia". If you go to ASPAR, you will find similar assertions but about people's parents. If you express another viewpoint, they will tell you that you don't know what you're talking about, that lack of empathy is inherent to and universal in autism, and that it causes all sorts of really awful behavior that nobody else could possibly understand. They will question your diagnosis because you are a nice person. And they will say that you, or the nice autistic people you have talked to, are either anomalies, only mildly autistic, or not autistic at all, because real, severe autism or Asperger's involves a lack of care for other people's feelings, period. And they will produce as much literature to back them up as I'm sure you could do with schizophrenia, because the beliefs are out there.

They will say that autistic people just make bad spouses and bad parents, end of story, and they're not interested in hearing otherwise because they have been so traumatized by their experiences. And they will tell you that you are just really lucky never to have met the bad ones.

I hope you would agree that their viewpoints are pretty skewed even when posted in places that are not autism support groups or related to autism at all.

That's the whole point, is that you do think it's absolutely connected to the traits that get people diagnosed with schizophrenia, when there are people with all those traits (even people with those same sorts of beliefs you mention) who don't do a thing to hurt anyone except themselves, and also plenty of people diagnosed with schizophrenia who don't even have the traits you're mentioning. Your views, your rationalizations for your views, and your ways of expressing them, are just like the people at FAAAS and ASPAR only they're about people diagnosed with schizophrenia instead of autism or AS. I actually feel a bit of deja vu here because I have had this conversation before, only it was with the people I just mentioned. And there's a reason very few autistic people even try to become involved with those groups anymore.

It is worth repeating what has been said before in this thread, Anbuend. This is not a support group for schizophrenics.


Magliabechi.

...how absurd. do it yourself. there aren't any servants here.

Why does a group have to be a support group for a specific group of people, in order to extend basic courtesy and lack of negative stereotyping to such people?

I for the most part loathe going to support groups, why would I come here if I thought this was one? It's mostly been in support groups that I've seen the worst defenses of prejudices, because in support groups, if something's your personal experience, nearly anything goes, the rule is generally that if your experience is phrased as just your own experience then it's okay to say it even if it's really offensive to the group of people you're generalizing about.

How can we expect the rest of the world to avoid stereotyping autistic people in FAAAS-type ways, if we're ready to turn around and do it to other people because this is "not a support group" for them? I have seen people diagnosed with schizophrenia refer to autistic people as stuck up and snobbish because of this exact sort of thing, and I have seen autistic people who've experienced psychosis in many forms slowly fade out of participation in forums like this because they find it too hostile an environment.

Acting like a place has to be a support group in order to act with common decency to a group of people is really disturbing. I would stand up just the same here (if I happened to read the thread and notice it) to broad generalizations based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical impairment, any other psych label besides schizophrenia, etc. Especially if people seemed to be going along with it. I would find it highly, highly disturbing and telling about people's views, if they believed that these views were okay because we were not in a support group for whatever sort of people they were saying were inherently awful in some way. Civil rights for any group of people would've never advanced even an inch with that attitude.

You've stated your opinion, others disagree. why go on about it. especially at such length.

It serves your interests to pontificate politically correct pseudo philosophy. They're not universal truths or innately righteousness ideas. You just like to pass them off as such.

Anbuend, are you well?


With concern,
Magliabechi.

Anbuend, I agree with you I know there are mean autistic people too I just haven't come in contact with any. I know you have and have witnessed another side of things. Honestly, I am new to this forum and I don't know of the one who stalked people at the retreat or was mean to them over the internet. That was before I started posting here. I wasn't aware of Wrong Planet until June of this year.
Reading your post is the first I have heard of this individual. I was just talking about my experience in real life with schizophrenia. It has not been that great but maybe one day the right therapies will exist that will distract from some of the negative symptoms, particularly paranoia and dysphoria, ( I don't know if those are really negative symptoms because they add to the person not take away but they seem to be a part of having the disorder even when not psychotic unless the person is really withdrawn and has a lot of the negative symptoms. I notice people with the paranoid variety don't have as many of the negative symptoms) which is where I think the meanness comes from. Also less projection with better insight would be easier on everyone. The thought blocking is kind of frustrating, more for the person who has the thought blocking than me.

If I were to take the same attitude to your inability to read my posts -- to tell you there were no "servants" (wtf?) around, and to read them yourself, because your assertions you can't read long posts are just "absurd" -- then I am sure you would be highly offended.

Please grant me the courtesy, even if you totally disagree with me on something else and are annoyed about it, of not saying nasty and snarky things to me just because I can't always write in a way you understand. (I can't always write long things, either. Sometimes I have more ability to "translate" from short to long or vice versa than another, sometimes it's just not possible.)

I'd say that over half the posts on this board are difficult or impossible for me to understand. It's reasonable to want a translation of something into language you can understand. It's not reasonable to expect a specific, single person to always be the one capable of doing it, or sometimes to ever be capable of doing it. It's not reasonable to call someone "imposing" on you for writing the only way they can write something. It's not reasonable to demand that they (and only they) do it. It's not reasonable to call their sincere attempts to resolve the situation in the only other ways they know how absurd, and act like they're asking for "servants" in doing so.

If you want to know how I got the idea, I have been on a few forums where there were mixes of people with receptive language problems, people with expressive language problems, people with both, and people with neither. And everyone's abilities varied day to day. On the worst forums, it devolved into name-calling, insult-flinging, and such, from both sides to each other, because some couldn't write any different and some couldn't read any different and both demanded the other "just try harder", much as you're doing here. On the best forums, people who were willing and able to translate would do so when necessary, so that everyone understood each other.

I am fully aware of both what it's like to have receptive language problems and expressive ones. So I totally accept that you can't read my longer posts. Please in turn accept that I can't always write something you can read, and that my attempts to resolve the matter are sincere and have nothing to do with absurdity or wanting servants.

I think that's whats know as playing the victim. You seem quite accomplished at that.

You're really asking an autistic person why they go on about their interests (in my case, disability rights issues, cross-disability stuff, and assorted historical comparisons) at length?

But also... see below.



My interests are to see that people I know, love, and care about are not shut out of places they expected to be welcome because other people were different too and they thought they'd understand. As well as more generally, not to see the world splinter into a bunch of little groups that all demand everyone be nice to their kind of people -- but only that kind, nobody else.

If you want to know, two good friends of mine quit the autistic community because it was full of such statements about people like them. One of them did so very recently. It's personal to me. I hated seeing how upset she was, how hard she tried, and how badly she was treated for trying. This was a place she thought she could belong -- and she found out, in very cruel ways, that she was wrong. What a different friend referred to as "little acts of degradation" beat down on her and piled up until she couldn't take it anymore, so she left very upset and disillusioned. She didn't want or expect everyone to love her, or even like her. She just didn't want to constantly read there was something awful about people in her category of humanity.

I decided at that point that if I saw this stuff I would stand up to it, because I know from experience that it helps greatly to see other people contributing thoughts about the wrongness of stereotypes that I run up against on a daily basis but don't always have the strength to fight against on my own. I was very glad, for instance, when someone posted on another thread here about how saying that incontinence ought not to be discussed because people might think we're all like that, was really offensive to people who actually were incontinent. I said it, but I was glad not to be the only one saying it, glad other people could recognize why it was offensive and degrading to say to those of us who do have those problems.

...so it's personal. I've just watched someone I care about leave places like this because of things very much like the things being said on this thread. I want to make places like this less of a place that people think, "Clearly I can be autistic here but I have to check the rest of my non-typical traits at the door because these people are really prejudiced against other things that are equally a part of me." It's a common but really uncomfortable phenomenon for anyone who happens to fit a number of devalued categories, and it's not just about emotions, it also affects our lives in direct and tangible ways because people act towards other people based on their stereotypes.

If there's something wrong with those interests, I'd like to know it.

like i said in my previous post.

How is it playing the victim to ask that someone not insult me for trying to solve the problem they explicitly asked me to solve, and explain how I arrived at that solution? Or should I be taking you less literally?