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Autism Speaks is controversial for many more reasons than "removing the human aspect". Things like their "I Am Autism" video. Putting a lot of support into anti-vaccine research (to their credit, they have reversed from this position). One of their staff members, on recording, and in the presence of her child, saying she had contemplated driving off a cliff with said child. Questions about their spending of funds. For the longest time not having any adults with autism in leadership roles. On and on. Autism Speaks portrays autism as basically a death sentence to quality of life, marriages, everything. They make no difference between the levels the spectrum can come in. They suck for a lot of reasons.
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Oct 6, 2019 17:16
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Cephas posted:What do you think about those behaviorist programs for kids with autism? The ones that will do something like have a kid do a page of homework without behaving in a way deemed inappropriate in exchange for a reward of some kind (candy, 10 minutes of tablet video game or something). I'm on the spectrum, and my son is as well. He's more severely affected than I am. Anyway, we've had to use methods like that with him, because it was the only thing that got through to him, and the behavior we were trying to modify was legitimately dangerous. Before he got in a special autism specific schooling program, he learned that taking a swing at a teacher or other staff member got him exactly what he wanted, which was to be sent home. Once he got in the program, which didn't send him home just for that, his behavior started escalating, and getting more and more violent. Punching, kicking, throwing any furniture he could lift, elopement from the classroom (this was not violent, but still dangerous), etc. Nothing else worked. And multiple strategies were tried. It took "You go a day without trying to punch a teacher in the face, you get video game time" to start making a dent. I can see both sides of the argument. It really shouldn't be used for things like nonviolent stimming. But if that's all that gets through for actually dangerous behavior? Have at it. That's another thing though. I often see people who say that all stimming should just be left alone, it's fine, just leave them be. And I think they only think that stimming is hand flapping, rocking in place, that sort of thing. And it is for me. But stimming can be bad too. My son's, when he was younger? Self-harming. He bit his hands and arms hard enough to almost break skin. And slammed his face into walls. So occasionally those sort of behaviors absolutely do have to be controlled, and redirected or otherwise minimized, because of the danger they can present to the person and the people around them.
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Oct 7, 2019 18:38
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credburn posted:How did you help your son transition from that kind of behavior? Or is it still something he struggles with? He was on Abilify for several years to minimize the behavior, and had therapy to help deal with the stressors that caused that particular manifestation of stimming. He's been off Abilify for a while, and is pretty good about asking to remove himself from a situation if it is starting to become overwhelming for him. He still occasionally hits himself in the face, but is far less violent towards himself than when he was younger. Honestly, even then, therapy only helped but so much. It certainly helped lessen the behaviors, but they were still there. What really seems to have helped is, weirdly enough, puberty (he's 15). As he started aging into that whole rodeo, it was like a switch was flipped for a lot of things, that therapy had been slowly minimizing before that. He was able to wean off Adderall (he also has ADHD), trying to fist fight teachers stopped being a weekly thing (which was still a lot less than multiple times every day), doesn't try to pull a runner from his classroom every day, so on and so forth.
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Oct 21, 2019 13:22
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lllllllllllllllllll posted:How did and do you feel about SA's and the internet's general use of the word autistic as narrow-minded and obviously ignoring the human/emotional aspect of something? I missed this, but I'll answer it too. I have never liked it. It's just another step on the euphemism treadmill of legitimate conditions becoming perjoratives. Moron, cretin, imbecile, and idiot were all once genuine terms for people with intellectual disabilities, then they started being used offensively. So they were replaced with mentally retarded. They started losing their sting, and retarded/retard took their place as the offensive term of the day. Now people are acknowledging that calling someone a retard is kind a dick thing to do, and autism/autistic and the one I especially hate, autist are taking its place, even though the condition really has little to do with intellectual disabilities, besides often being comorbid with them.
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Oct 24, 2019 12:36
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credburn posted:How do you feel about the autistic person/person with autism identity conflict? I personally prefer to identify as a person with autism, because I don't consider it so much a part of my identity as much as it is a burden that I find to be just a big rear end hindrance. I know it's kind of regressive to say, but I didn't get any of the "perks" of autism. My cousin, for instance, while being technically disabled, is a genius, with a stupidly high IQ and an incredible knack for electronics, programming, numbers, etc. His social skills are almost nonexistent, though; I know I've had it better than him, but there's no real advantage in any way to what I have. Honestly, I really mostly don't care. I refer to my son and myself as autistic, but I guess I can see why people prefer "person first". On the trans topic, an interesting tidbit, and one where no one is quite certain why, those who are transgender show a higher degree of autism spectrum disorders than you find in just a general slice of the population.
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Oct 25, 2019 01:12
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Dance Officer posted:I'm just going to answer this as well, because I'm squarely in the "autistic person" camp, myself. So much of who I am and what I do is affected by the autism, that I think the autism is a fundamental part of who I am. If I wasn't autistic, I would be a completely different person. I feel the same way. I had a mom in a bowling league my son was in get like...personally offended when I said that I, and a lot of other autistic adults I'd spoken to, wouldn't want a cure even if one did exist. Because...well, at the time I was late 20s, now I'm early 30s. Who would I even be if I didn't have autism? It's been part of me my entire life. A cure can't suddenly take away the time it took me faking it until I made it with social rules, and the like. It can't give me back my childhood years wanting friends but not understanding why I struggled to keep them. So on, so forth.
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Oct 25, 2019 23:35
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Gantolandon posted:I don't really understand the difference between "autistic person" and "person with autism". English is my second language, but a similar distinction exists in Polish and I don't prefer one over the other. The common reason for a preference for what's known as "people-first language", such as "person with autism", compared to "identity-first language", such as "autistic person", is to avoid dehumanization, to 'mentally separate the person from the trait", or the implication that the person is somehow inferior. I personally fall to preferring "identity-first language", and this quote from Lydia Brown of the Autism Self Advocacy Network really says why better than I could myself quote:In the autism community, many self-advocates and their allies prefer terminology such as “Autistic,” “Autistic person,” or “Autistic individual” because we understand autism as an inherent part of an individual’s identity...It is impossible to affirm the value and worth of an Autistic person without recognizing his or her identity as an Autistic person. Referring to me as “a person with autism,” or “an individual with ASD” demeans who I am because it denies who I am...When we say “person with autism,” we say that it is unfortunate and an accident that a person is Autistic. We affirm that the person has value and worth, and that autism is entirely separate from what gives him or her value and worth. In fact, we are saying that autism is detrimental to value and worth as a person, which is why we separate the condition with the word “with” or “has.” Ultimately, what we are saying when we say “person with autism” is that the person would be better off if not Autistic, and that it would have been better if he or she had been born typical.
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Oct 26, 2019 01:30
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Dance Officer posted:The distinction is about seeing autism as an integral part of the person, the autistic person, or seeing it as mostly separate, some sort of baggage you carry around, like say a broken leg. Deaf and blind communities have also had things to say about it, and also tend to fall squarely in the "identity-first language" camp.
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Oct 26, 2019 15:14
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Ferrosol posted:As someone with autism I can see a lot of myself in these posts. I'm wondering now what my "stimming" response. Maybe I dont have one as such but I find I need to verbalize my thoughts a lot and tend to as a result be constantly muttering when dealing with a difficult task or experience. Could that be it? That absolutely can be stimming behavior. Hand flapping, and rocking in place, are commonly known ones, but certainly not the only ones. Repeating words, muttering, making particular noises, all sorts of vocalizations can also be stimming behavior. Once my son's self-harming stims started to die down, he actually replaced them with muttering for the most part.
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Nov 19, 2019 01:15
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Trans people are seemingly significantly more likely than just a general slice of the population to have an autism spectrum disorder or to display traits associated with ASDs (like me, autistic and trans  ). That is not to say one causes the other, or that doctors won't be dicks about it, but there is potentially some currently not understood link between the two.
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Dec 6, 2019 16:03
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Tjadeth posted:This is a near decade-old study, but I vibe pretty hard with the term "gender incoherence". The only reason people accept how old I say I am now (mid-30s) is I started going gray. Even then I still get the "Really?"s.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:40
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It's basically level 1 - requires some support, level 2- requires substantial support, and level 3 - requires very substantial support. I don't see it used very often, at least in the circles I roll in.
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Jun 11, 2021 07:43
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I was tested for the gifted program, but my ADHD and general self-destructive behavior kicked in and I bombed the tests.
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Aug 15, 2021 11:47
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King Baby posted:Have any of you been or known someone that went from non-verbal to verbal? My son is 7 and has been making some great strides with talking and listening, but I fear the day where he will be too big for me to handle and need to be in a group home. My son was nonverbal up until about six. Then almost solely ecolalia or however that's spelled for some time. He's 17 now and talked my ear off about Paper Mario Color Splash yesterday.
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Jan 9, 2022 01:19
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It could be worth checking with your local libraries if they have rooms available to be used for meet ups, if you just need a place to get together, and not a place with something else going on. Some have them, and might even have things like hook ups for laptops to show a movie or similar.
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May 6, 2022 01:39
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I am treading on the edge of an Epic Meltdown, because my work is changing SO MANY THINGS all at once. I am just crossing my fingers I can be in private when said meltdown totally happens.
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Jun 17, 2022 13:49
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There's also that the more 'milder' forms of autism would have been contextualized a lot differently in the days where kids were mostly educated at home, and worked with their family, and outside socialization was when you rolled up into town for church or whatever. This is not to romanticize the past. It absolutely was a loving poo poo show for people with many forms of disabilities, but a kid who would probably absolutely get pegged for autism now in public schools, was often in smaller settings more along the lines of "Well, Jebidiah doesn't talk too much at town gatherings, but he watches the sheep real good."
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Aug 16, 2022 16:42
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I agree the social model is not even close to a one-size-fits-all solution. It's almost entirely geared toward those people who would be classified as "high functioning". Some people absolutely need support that are going to come under the umbrella of the medical model, though. Social norms being adjusted wouldn't have stopped my son from slamming his face into walls or biting himself.
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Sep 24, 2022 20:33
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