Common Sense Strikes Again!!
People who are taught problem-solving skills are less likely to be pathologically stressed when faced with solving complex problems!!
Want to alleviate the depression?? Wow, that's a lot harder.
1) For the Clinician: Be aware of "Clinician's Error" in your writing, especially your writing for the general public. Pretend, just for a moment, that you are Hans Asperger, and that your writing may be used to justify or facilitate the extermination of the very people you based the paper on. Write about PEOPLE, not merely collections of symptomatic deficits.
2) For the Parent: Remember that THIS IS THE SAME CHILD you have loved for X years. They have not changed. How you see them has-- and YOU HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT HOW YOU SEE THEM. Don't "fix" them; that is, DO NOT feel obligated to turn them into a "typical" child. It won't work-- for either of you. Even if you, yourself, are the very definition of "neurotypical." Love them, accept them, and teach them to cope. Don't think that you need to control all these "problem behaviors" tomorrow. Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say-- and it takes 18 years to raise a TYPICAL child. Did I say "raise"? I meant "teach them enough that they probably won't die after they go out to make their own mistakes and have the world (hopefully) sand off their considerable rough edges. I wasn't "finished" at 18. Neither were my NT friends, or my NT husband.
3) For the Bystander: Stop being so damn judgmental, please. Stop believing everything you hear on Dr. Phil-- or for that matter, on CNN. Please bear strongly in mind that Piers Morgan, far from being a serious journalist, is a British tabloid writer who somehow convinced CNN to let him take himself seriously. His show is, basically, Jerry Springer in a suit and tie. Stop looking for assurances that "IT" (whatever "IT" is) can't happen to YOUR kid-- the fact is that "IT" can happen to anyone. My kid's autistic?? Well, yours could wind up with moderate brain damage in a car accident on the way home from soccer practice tomorrow-- and suddenly you find yourself with issues that look a lot like, oh yeah, MINE (seriously-- I have a friend on another board who was hurt in an accident and now suffers from visual and auditory hypersensitivity, impulse control issues, processing speed deficits, zero frustration tolerance, and a defective social filter; we spend a fair bit of time commiserating!!) PEOPLE ARE JUST PEOPLE-- so be forgiving of yourself, and apply it to the vast majority of everyone else, too.
That'll help a lot.
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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
11 Dec 2013, 4:51 pm
