anbuend wrote:
I don't think depression is properly acknowledged among people who have more trouble communicating their feelings. It can be passed off as 'just the autism' even when it involves severe aggression or self-injury as part of it. I also think that at least some of the so-called accidental deaths of autistic people are suicides. I know of one man who learned to type, and his parents didn't believe he could do it, and took his communication device away from him, and he walked in front of a train right after. It's just that many autistic people are not ascribed the intellectual or emotional capacity to be suicidal, so their deaths are written off as "not understanding". I also know of one man who used to deliberately refuse to take his migraine medications, thinking the headaches would kill him if he didn't take them. That was just written off as not understanding the point of them. Etc.
This. Reminds me of my childhood (though fortunately I didn't die). It seems that people are used to seeing depression in tears and the emotional outpourings, and so when those steps happen inside the head, then everything gets filtered through the expections of "what autism looks like".
In the junior high I would often be in this separate room, and I would be there most of the day, repeating something, or having seizures or sitting there stimming, looking out the window. I would plan out scenarios of how to kill myself, and eventually just walking out the school and getting lost. Nobody knew and nobody cared, and those who cared didn't have a clue, as long as they got their government funding for my getting to school.
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"There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain"
--G. K. Chesterton, The Aristocrat