Autism Speaks: Don't Speak for Me - petition

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That film was about the parents. Not about the autistics. And in no way am I saying it isn't hard for them and they don't deserve sympathy and help and that treatments for ASDs like Behavioral Therapies shouldn't be as outrageously expensive as they are now.

But I am infuriated that these parents continually speak FOR autistics when they're actually just speaking for themselves-- and they don't realize it. What's worse is they don't realize they're not necessarily speaking for their children who can't speak or communicate effectively. They ASSUME.

Louise, sounds great. The public needs a fuller view of the Spectrum. Good, bad, "low-functioning," "high-functioning," everything.

I, for one, watched the video and liked it. It gave a good view of what raising a child with SEVERE autism must be like.

My parents -- who did not have an easy time raising me at all, and I was labeled as low-functioning, no hope, and all that, at one point -- reacted to the publicity around this video and various murders by trying to reassure me that they had never wanted to kill me or even once thought about it.

They thought I needed to be told this. They thought I might not have already surmised that loving parents don't seriously consider killing their children, even when their children are labeled "severely autistic", even when several kinds of hell are going on in their lives that these parents on the video absolutely did not have to deal with. They thought I needed reassurance.

The fact that this video (and subsequent interviews in which it was claimed that most parents have these thoughts if they look at themselves hard enough) in part drove them to think that I'd have ever suspected them of wanting to kill me, is reason enough to say that the video does totally warped things to families and does a damaging portrayal of actual family life.

Believe it or not, most parents of children with severe disabilities of any kind do not fantasize about killing their kids.

There is no evidence that most of those children were severely autistic. They displayed behaviors that my son did at that age-running away, tantruming, not being toilet trained, etc. He is not severe. He is borderline. Regardless of the "severity" of those kids, it's never right to say that you almost killed them-while they're in the room! Those aren't just everyday moms, they are leaders in the "autism community".

If autism is presented as something that turns people into subhuman tyrants who do nothing but have tantrums all day... then how will people with the milder forms of it ever get any help in school? There's already enough, "Oh, you talk so well and do math so well; you can't possibly be autistic"... without a movie to make it even worse.