Why are so many Aspies on here getting disablility income?

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Fair enough then - agreed, that was a bit personal.

So, back to the topic. ProtossX, why do you think anybody should have to justify themselves to you ? There are degrees of Asperger's / Autism. Some are able to hold down a job, sone ain't. What of it ? You'd be better off losing the hate and getting on with your own life.

I see I didn't register the swearing when I read it, ProtossX does seem to exhibit some low grade trolling behaviour which will tend annoy most people, he doesn't attack individuals but demographics - people who claim disability, women ect
I am all for tolerance but when it appears that this persons soul intention is to make ridiculous and unpleasant statements which are guaranteed upset and annoy others than it sure looks like trolling to me.

I would agree with people who suggest he is simply misunderstood and ignorant if he occasionally made ignorant posts of a non controversial nature but he doesn’t.

WPers....remember what ProtossXs other topics are [his attack on LFA WPers offending him,being one],before getting offended by this thread-or trying to defend own use of dis. benefits.
these topics are done either through a huge amount of ignorance and inexperience of as,autism and its differing abilities and needs,through trying to offend WPers on purpose [trolling],or both.

Why do you ask?

What the hell makes you think you're automatically entitled to decide if someone is deserving of disability or not? Who do you think you are, anyway? No one here OWES you any kind of explanation whatsoever, Why don't you focus on the employers who make it so difficult for anyone with any neurological differences to find and maintain employment? And do you have any idea at all just how difficult and convoluted the disability application process is? You don't just fill it out and then start collecting it. No sirree, no way, no how. It's actually much more difficult to get approved than most people think, it often takes years.

And, as someone else said, those "ret*d" people you see at ticket booths and the like are most likely in a supported employment program, which is nothing like a regular, on-your-own, forty-hour-a-week job.

The real problem is the lack of opportunities in this society for people who are a bit different neurologically that makes finding the right "fit" very difficult. There should be places for them to use their unique, individual skills, abilities and knowledge, but most cookie-cutter employers aren't interested. Why don't you try focusing on THEM for once?


I'm learning disabled with overlapping AS/ASD tendencies who has always, and I mean always, had trouble with every single job I've ever had. A lot of it was misunderstanding of social cues and other similar BS that employers put so much of a premium on, and nothing to do with my intelligence and abilities.

You get information on disability from You Tube? Please go to Social Security website and download the reams of paperwork describing eligibility and requirements. It will tell you why these people are on disabililty. You may not like it, but it is the law of the land at present. Please inform yourself before asking others to fill you in.

Also, your profile says you quit your job. Why did you quit your job? If it was inability to work, you have your answer. If it was choice and laziness, then why are you asking others of their work habits?

Either way, I don't think you even have Asp or Aut. You're just a curious kid or a pathological adult in need of attention. Well, you are welcome to it here. Everyone here has all the attention they need.

MR and ASDs cannot be compared like that.

Because mental retardation and autism spectrum disorders are different.

Few people with ASDs in my country work in the same places as people with MR.

Generalised:

A person with MR can probably work in a social sheltered workshop for people with disabilities.

A person with AS probably cannot, because for example he/she has sensory issues and needs to keep to routines.

Additionally, many people who work in such workshops and know a lot about others disability know little or even nothing about autism/Asperger's.

I've explained this for the benefit of people who do truly wonder these things, whether or not the OP really does. Since some people do wonder. I'm also going to say beforehand, the following is a frank description of my abilities and difficulties, but it's not like I feel sorry for myself about it, it's just there and I'm describing it the same way I'd describe the shape of my thumbs or something.

Yeah, they did the same to me.

I applied in November of 1999, and was told something like, "We don't normally tell people this, but there is no problem at all with your eligibility." I had to sign a form saying I would work in a sheltered workshop if they told me to. I asked them what this meant, and they told me that I would clearly not be capable of working in one (did not have the stamina or consistency required) and therefore would never be asked to do so. (I later found out there are entire day programs for people unable to work in those.)

They began paying me money immediately that I would have had to pay back if found ineligible. By sometime like (I think?) February or March of 2000, I was found eligible, and thus did not have to pay the money back.

What sort of stuff did they require:

They required interviews with my parents. They had an independent psychiatrist verify my autism diagnosis. This even included giving me an IQ test which showed both weaknesses and strengths typical of autistic people. They had to, of course, meet me. They sent a questionnaire to my parents asking what I did all day, like Callista said, down to the minute. They sent requests for information and verification of diagnosis to the psychologist who began working with me when I was thirteen, and the psychiatrist who began working with me when I was fourteen. They got a huge stack of psych records. And that's just the stuff I remember, there was more to it.

One thing they wanted was my work history, which was given to them. I already, at the age of nineteen, had a fairly extensive history of job failure.

My best jobs actually had been so-called "unskilled" work. However, I had a movement disorder and stamina problems that had progressed by then to a point where I could not reliably do some of that work, and could not do other parts of that work at all anymore.

I would have, at that point, jumped at any chance to do that work, and still would if able to do so. The amount of degradation and invasion of privacy a person is subjected to when being on the system, or trying to get on the system, is such that very few people would put up with it for the money.

Intellectual work was and is out of the question. I certainly have some good intellectual skills, but these skills are not available at my command, they occur largely in response to my environment, and largely in restricted areas. (This was borne out by the testing they did, where my scores ranged from above average, to very far below average, which is a pattern they have always had to some extent or another.) I can't deliberately focus my attention that way for more than a short period, and sometimes not even that. So the ways in which my mind works well, are incredibly unruly and not even subject to my own interest or control, let alone an employer's.

The only way I could get a job in that area would be if I could do it whenever capable, which would mean, not part-time work (I found out this word apparently still means more work than I can do), but actually sporadic work, where the job was entirely tailored to my talents and difficulties. And such a job would have to pay a great deal, in order to allow me to support myself with it. And that's without the increasing problems with health and stamina that I have had.

So the only alternative would be very concrete and physical work, which I used to be good at, but my body would no longer tolerate. (Not as in, "would be uncomfortable", but rather, "would physically collapse and/or freeze up after a fairly minimal amount of work".)

The other thing is, at the time that I applied for SSI, I had no ability to even get through a day at home, minus work, and take care of myself while doing so. I had no formal support system. My limited informal support system was not up to helping me with more than minimal food and water, and I was experiencing symptoms of food deprivation.

I actually worked very hard all day. But I had very little to show for it by the end of the day. The amount of work that I was doing, sapped my energy, such that by the next day I had even less of it. My inability to get enough food and water to sustain myself properly, just added to it, so it was basically a feedback loop of a very ugly kind.

I did try several fairly unusual techniques to get myself food. One of them was to leave rice cakes and peanut butter in bags around the house. Then whenever I happened to be near one I could eat. The problem was due to the movement disorder I could not always reach the bags, and due to cognitive problems I could not always recognize them as separate from anything else in the room.

It's quite interesting when your body gets depleted of nutrition and water to the point where it feels like gravity is working sideways. But that combination of vertigo and weakness is not a good kind of interesting.

The way I perceived my environment then was a bunch of colors, shapes, sensations, etc., that weren't differentiated into the usual categories. This was made worse by the effort it took to find my body and move it around (my body just being several among the many sensations out there, and I could not easily differentiate sensations that related to my body from sensations that didn't, still can't always -- and that's something that was/is related to a movement disorder I have that apparently only autistic people get).

Having some good cognitive skills can't fully make up for responding to and understanding your environment (including your body) in such sporadic and unusual ways. It's not a matter of merely feeling uncomfortable with some kind of stimulus (which is what many people mean when they say "sensory issues"), it's about interpreting stimuli in such a different way that it's difficult to relate to them in any kind of standard way.

(And some of this stuff gets more prominent with time in some autistic people, at least for certain periods of time. I'm among them. If you're actually interested, you might want to read this article that explains some of the difficulties I have in more detail. According, at least, to some physiological measures I've been subjected to, typing is among the movements in me that are affected by this, although it is affected by tendonitis and other pain related to repeated hyperextension of my fingertips as I type.)

Then there was always the fact that I didn't always process cabinets and fridges as "things that contain food," I processed them as textures and shapes and colors. I still have that problem to some extent, so there are now pictures of the contents, on the door of all those things in my house. I was not capable of putting the pictures up myself, so I couldn't do that back then. And the pictures are of course not foolproof, I still have to remember to be looking at them and understanding them. (Which is why signs don't work for me.)

There's more details, but I don't feel like getting into them right here and now.

All of this was documented during the application at social security. They ask about things like that. In long, detailed questionnaires that I was not even able to fill out on my own. (I was not even able to describe the full extent of what was happening to me until years later -- that kind of delay in ability to communicate things is another thing that makes work difficult. At the time, my only-partial ability to communicate what was happening very much frustrated me, especially in situations online where I was assumed not to be experiencing what I was experiencing. I would make a stab at describing it, only to get a partial, cursory explanation. Reason #284 why I couldn't do deliberate intellectual work well.)

I did get services to help me with the things I could not do, as well as services intended to train me in how to do these things. (Most of the training failed, since the problem is not fully one of not understanding things.) I was, like with SSI, subjected to a long, similar process of assessment, only about my daily living skills rather than my work skills. And I was determined eligible, in fact so eligible that they threatened to put me in a pretty intensive group home.

But even with services that help me enough that I'm not in that constant state of chaos anymore, there's still no way that I could do anything other than quite sporadic work. Which I do some -- very, very occasionally and sporadically, and when the task is utterly and completely tailored to me in a way almost no employer would ever bother doing for an employee. And when I do it, I still pay for it for days or weeks afterwards.

Just as I pay in the exact same way for "fun" things, so it's not just work I'm restricted from doing. It's not like I can run around doing recreational activities all day either, those come with the same cost as anything else. Something that people who imagine this is all about luxury, do not, in the slightest, understand.

People who say they'd give up their jobs for this, obviously have no idea that if you can't work, and have trouble taking care of yourself on a daily basis, there's a lot of fun things you can't do either, that most people would not want to give up. To anyone with a job who wants to trade places with me, I say fine, as long as you are willing to avoid most recreational activities, and as long as you take my assorted health and pain-related conditions off my hands so I can do the physical work I was used to before. Not many people would take me up on such an offer, I suspect, even if it were possible.

Yes, exactly.

My experience with people dxed with MR is that they have pretty consistent abilities. They might have trouble with something, but it's roughly the same amount of trouble, all the time, so they can find consistent ways to work around areas they have trouble in.

Whereas, my abilities can go from really good at something to terrible at it in the space of moments, unpredictably, and then back again. Most people I know dxed with MR are far better at comprehending their environment with some degree of abstraction, and relating to their own bodies, etc., than I am. Unless they are also autistic.

There's just no comparison at all.

Well, when I want to know something, I read the research. And the research I read on this said the employment rate for adults on the spectrum is about 10% (most frequent estimate).

I also found a paper that looked at high IQ adults with learning disabilities, and five years after they'd been in a program for their LD, 76% of them were working at mimimum wage. They were estimated to have IQs in the top 2% and 76% of them were working at minimum wage. Anyone else find this as mind boggling as I do? These are LD people, who normally can communicate in person just fine, no? At least they were working. (I think the employment rate for this sample was pretty close to 100%.) But this just goes to show that disability can trump anything else, even being smarter than God.

People here seem to be higher functioning than average for the spectrum (or at least well enough off financially to afford a computer and internet access), since the employment rate here appears to be much higher than 10%. So this may not be the best place to ask about this, since it's not representative. But for the record, I'm on disability. I hate it. But I found out the hard way I need to be self-employed. If someone had told me that as a teenager, I could have started trainging for it then, instead of twenty years later after having failed repeatedly in the work world. I will be self-employed at some point (mostly writing, I guess) but for now I'm on the dole, and very grateful it exists.

I must say I'm appalled by the stories I'm hearing out of the US. Since when do disabled people deserve to be treated like criminals because they need help? All I needed was for my doctor to fill out a long form and send it in, plus a financial check. And if they need to interview people about you, who do they ask if you're so socially isolated there's no one for them to ask? (No friends, no family, no support system whatsoever.) There's something very wrong with current economic/social models in North America.

ProtossX, first you say you're genuinely interested in what people have to say, then you react very negatively when people say what you don't want to hear. So you certainly don't come across as being genuinely interested. So I'm not particularly interested in what you have to say, either. This post is for everyone else.

Oh, great, you're assuming everyone can work at a carnival or in a restaurant? Geez. My son can handle a carnival once a year, but it is overwhelming and he needs a few hours to pace when he gets home in order to shed the stress of it. Do you have ANY understanding of AS at all? Such a comparison is really inappropriate.

As I posted earlier, the world of work is about just about every skill EXCEPT IQ.

I do feel you are trolling here and I probably shouldn't respond, but I don't think you are the only one asking these sorts of questions, and so the discussion needs to be had.

It's getting old, to be honest... whenever others don't fit into your expectations, you find fault. It affects everyone differently; those who are more socially impacted can have difficulties in work environments that others who have challenges are unaware of or unaffected by. Who the hell do you think you are to make the general determination of who is able to work, anyway? I've considered the possibility, because of the problems I have had - but I also have alternatives that many do not, and would prefer to find my own way than rely on others. Quit whining, and worry about your own life.


M.

ProtossX, how old are you? Do you live alone? Do you wash all of your own laundry, grocery shop, prepare all of your own meals, wash all of your dishes, clean your whole house, remember to pay your bills on time, run your own errands, remember to eat, bathe, AND hold a steady job that can pay for all that stuff completely without assistance? It's not just about getting a job. It's about being able to do all of those things, everyday in an organized timely manner that trips most up on the spectrum, some more than others.

Thank you.

Anyone else here took 5 minutes to read the OP's other posts and thread ? Please gang, stop feeding the troll.... there is no way that guy has AS, he stinks NT

Another observation:

In order to work a job, you have to be hired.

Getting past the interview can be a little tricky for some AS. That social skills thing, you know. And, wouldn't you know, it's like THE most important thing in the interview process, to show reasonable social skills.

One of the firms I consult with hired a young man as a favor to his mom. The mom was a client of the firm, and her son had been unable to find a job. Well, knowing the mom, and having heard about her son all those years, the owner of the firm figured the young man was probably fairly bright, and took him on, figuring he would see what he could do. He knew it was a huge risk to hire this young man, but because of the relationship with the mom, he was willing to try. It ended up working out really well.

But how many people who consistently flunk interviews have the connections to get hired in such a manner? Without that first job, that first person willing to take the young man under his wing and help him learn how to navigate the world of work?

I think the fact that you are asking the questions you are asking indicates that you have very little sense of what employers look for when hiring, and what it takes to do well in the world of work.

I know. I've been the person on the other side of the interview desk, and I've mentored young associates who were failing.

To those who have taken the time to share their personal stories here, thank you. I know it takes a lot, but I do feel we tend to be speaking to a broader audience than we are aware of on forums like this, so perhaps somewhere somehow someone now understands when they didn't before.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 09 Sep 2008, 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.