Anyone else afraid of an aspie backlash

Post Reply New Topic

Quite possibly, and yes.

Yeah, I'm worried about a backlash, mainly regarding my son. He's 14 and has AS and yesterday I got a call from one of his teachers about problems with him. Never got a clue of problems the whole school year up till now, the same week the VT shootings happen so I do suspect psychological profiling. I'll be talking to the teacher next week so we'll see. When I was his age I was just like him and in retrospect, if I was a kid in school in today's miliu, I would probably raise a lot of red flags.

Bullying happens mostly with young people, who, as a whole, tend to be ignorant of past events. Who, among teens now days, knows that the first mass murder at a school, by a lone gunman, occurred in the 60s?

How many more commas can I squeeze into those sentences without violating structure?

I may be optimistic but don't anticipate any major backlash. I think, if anything, we'll see some major stories/action about 1) the fact that Cho shouldn't have been sold a gun, 2) bullying, and 3) this issues of early diagnosis, treatment and intervention. It's very obvious that a lot of balls were dropped; there are so many places where this situation could probably have been prevented, over the course of Cho's life, and people will be aware of that. Plus, there's been a lot of 'anti-bullying' awareness stuff going on over the years since Columbine, and I think if anything that will become more of an issue.

Plus, we don't even know for sure if the man had Asperger's. It may have been elsewhere in the Autistic Spectrum (given his lifelong lack of speech) or some other possibly undiagnosed mental illness.

Exactly. I've pretty much been a lone wolf all my life, and I've suffered for it.

Still, acting like you're at least trying to fit in the pack is probably a good way to allay people's fears.

Just try not to carry an automatic pistol slung into your waistband.

From all I have read of Cho, he wasn't even trying to make friends. Who the hell doesn't even talk to their own roommates? You've got to live with these people, you know?

But on second thought maybe bullies will start leaving the "loners'' alone if they think
they might pull out a gun and shot them.

Those who have said we should be, or at least try to be social, are right!

That makes all the difference between us - and Cho, with his blunted, flat, detached affect.

I certainly try to be sociable, even though in places like work where I'm interacting with a lot of people, it sure is hard work.

I just had a thought, any backlash would not be against AS or autism as such. It could never be. Rather than a backlash against autism, people will be looking for the characteristics that Cho had (i.e. things like the flat affect mentioned above, and lack of sociability) and a backlash would come against them. Which could potentially cover a lot of things besides autism.

Added to my previous post:

a) When I was at university - I was a little younger than Cho was when he died - but at that time I certainly came across like him. "Blunted, flat, detached affect" were exactly the words used by my doctor in reference to me. I was totally unsociable then. I thank God, it literally is because of his works, that since then I have become more sociable than I was.

b) I have had the sort of backlash before, that some of you are fearing. I won't say why, or how. But thinking about what we've been discussing, it would have been avoided if I'd been more sociable.

In my experience, neighbours have been a problematic area for me, and I'd definitely make sure you are sociable with those you live right next door to. I can say they'll definitely feel threatened if you are not sociable, living right next door to you. That said, even though lack of sociability got me a backlash from one neighbour in the past, I HAVE repeatedly had dysfunctional next door neighbours.

Me.

Good points, Keeno. Just the surface appearance of some 'normality' (and I use that very much in quotation marks) can save one a lot of trouble.

You know, when I'm not depressed, I really enjoy 'surface' (superficial?) contact with strangers & sometimes acquaintances. Just the hi, how ya doin'? it looks like rain . . . type of thing can make me feel very good. Then I go back home from the grocery store & into (often happily) into my turtle shell!

Just because Cho killed people doesn't mean that it was his autism which caused him to do it. It is quite likely that he was also suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Of course, the media aren't going to mention this, they are NT idiots who cannot understand Autism.

And even then having schizophrenia doesn't automatically mean you're going to be violent. That was my impression of him though, from the very little I've read about it. He seemed paranoid and went on about stuff in a way that reminds me of that.

If spinning what happened as being caused by Autistism can make it easier for the American goverment to gain more control over the population at large, and justify a reduction in the nations idividual freedoms. Then yes I am very concerned that they will do that. However I think it would not.

There will however be a reduction in peoples freedoms as a result eventually if school shootings continue but in my opinion it is unlikely to include anything to do with gun control, until the goverment has established a CCTV network comprable to that in the UK and brought in ID cards relying on retinal or at the very least fingerprint identification.

I am more concerned that we are moving into and beyond the fantasy world John Orwell wrote about in 1948. In his book "1984". And yet the only thing that he wrote about which we are lacking is effective policing!

IMO, there are simply too many quiet students for them to all be suspected as abnormally or imminently violent. "Quiet" kids are one of the most basic kinds, so that alone wouldn't likely be enough to spur a blacklash. You'd have to be quiet, creepy and rude, all the time, in order to stand out as seeming Cho-ish.

I am glad that even the news media's suggestion that Cho could be autistic will certain spur more autism research, because much, much more needs to be understood about autism in general, not to mention Asperger's Syndrome, about which virtually nothing neurological is known for sure. I don't want to be "cured", and I certainly don't want a forced "cure". But I do want more study on what it is that I have. As always, greater public knowledge of this will be a mixed blessing.

Not really.