Do you feel like a concentration camp survivor?

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As usual aspie are taking things too literal. The thread is about PTSD
not the holocaust.

Okay. Um. I didn't want to get into this discussion because I think comparison to the Holocaust totally clouds the issue.

But on the subject of psychiatry and psychiatry alone I have this to say:

There is a lot you don't know about psychiatry in America if you say that is true. Spend even a few days locked in a little room, not necessarily allowed food, not necessarily getting clean water or any water, tied down if you resist or even often if you don't, including being punished for involuntary bodily movements or lack thereof, no access to medical care necessarily at all (including for infections). Have people giving you drugs that make your throat close up and pretending they don't notice the reaction, but they get caught, and then later (and in secret) doing it again and telling you it will continue until you do what they say. Then try a week, or a month, or for some people much longer. I know someone who said she was in a place where they had a guy in a little room for years, his body even looked just the same as when he'd gone in. Another person had the place deny to outside advocacy agencies that she even existed, the staff raped her for fun, she was denied things like shelter and food and clothing. I have experienced some of these things, the rest are from people I know, not even strangers in books. And you may have rights in theory to a hearing but you're not told they exist if you do, and in many places you might not even have that, they can keep you indefinitely and claim they plan to, solely because of aspects of you beyond your control or even that they make up about you.

Then maybe I'll believe you actually understand what goes on with modern psychiatry. Until then I'll assume you think that the abuses are a lot more minor than they are and a lot more infrequent than they are. And I'd love to see you try to create-your-own-reality your way out of six-point restraints with large wads of cloth tied over your hands and feet with tape.

There is one trouble with the idea that you create your own reality. The trouble is that so do other people.

Exactly. It only works in a solipsistic world.

I don't think it's so much about creating one's own reality as changing one's own perspective of reality. Yes, there are times when it's harder to do so and it can be negative to view some situations (like the one metioned) in a positive light, but via effort and preparation it's possible to make the struggles that come more bearable. When not getting into extremes, there are lots of people who make a big deal over things that aren't very big at all. That's a matter of perception. By learning to cope better, other people may respond differently but whether or not they do at least life's more enjoyable.

Remnant: PTSD from concentration camp survivors would have been like reliving every day of their hell, day after day, year after year until they either sought some form of help or topped themselves because they were unable to face it any longer. Vietnam vets went through a similar thing after the war, but it was nothing compared to the holocaust survivors. Now trying to equate living in a free country and being treated badly by your parents, saying you have had your possessions taken away, and even being told you can't own certain things because you may not be able to look after them doesn't come close to the analogy of what POWs went through. YOU survived, YOU can write in this forum, YOU can walk down the street to go shopping. A hell of a lot of people who survived those horrors and developed PTSD couldn't even leave their own beds because of the thought of what might happen to them. So unless you can show us the prison tattoo and the malnutrition scars, as well as the scars from the torture, you can't possibly understand. BTW, it may not have happened to me either, but at least I can make the connection.

Oh, about reality; you are in charge of your own destiny and you must take responsibility for your own actions. Don't worry about others actions, you cannot change what others do, but you can change things that you can do. Reality is being able to accept what is real, and everybody has there own. Someone else's reality cannot be imposed on another person, they can only put forward an alternate view.If someone tells you something, and you disagree, just accept that you differ, and don't try to change the other's view. Otherwise, you may lose your grip on reality, and expect things that you are never going to get.

It's indeed about perspective.
However, since no-one here actualy experienced the holocaust, it's impossible to compare it and say, my life experiences are better/worse than those who survived.
And different people cope differently. One experience completly changes a person, while another person in the same situation goes happily along with his life.
When you had sh***y life experiences that made you traumatised, what matters the most?
The fact that by some comparision, a different person had more troubles in their life, or the fact one is traumatised?

Are you telling a victim of rape in the U.S. he/she should shut up, because a victim of rape in Africa is worse off?

I should note that these comparisons have an awful history in the world of autism.

Namely, Bruno Bettelheim, a concentration camp survivor himself, claimed that autistic children acted like concentration camp survivors.

From this, he decided that the mothers of autistic children must have done something to them that they perceived as being as horrible as concentration camps.

And... awful things were done to mothers in the name of this theory.

No.

I feel like me (whatever that is).

My Dad was a cop and beat discipline into me, therefore, I never acted "crazy" enough to be committed. In that case, you can blame your parents for bad parenting and not knowing what they were doing which inevitably led to locking you up.


As for "creating your own reality."

You took my words to the extreme. "Schizophrenics" create their own reality to the extent of solipsistism. I have taken the time to cultivate my mind with philosophical thought to sophisticate my thinking and I see this as my way of creating my own reality. That makes my reality reasonable and logical. Not insane and conflicting with the outside world (in that case I would be committed). What I am getting at is I have learned how to live in an intersubjective world and how to cope with other people. In any case, it is more like YOU are being solipsistic by comparing YOUR life experience to something monumentally disastrous.

I think it is completely ignorant to even touch on this analogy, especially if you live in America. There is a reason you were locked up, you just have to be patient the first 18 years of your life and follow the rules closely enough. Society is a prison itself, but you can learn to play the game and understand why you behave like you do in certain social situations and reflect yourself as Autistic (I have).

It's not about me "being aspie and taking things too literally." I am not not even an ASPIE. I am, in theory, HFA. It was just a really bad analogy and like I said before, melodramatic. The big difference between psychiatry and the holocaust is that you can overcome the issues that got you committed in the first place. Jews were killed and beaten for reasons beyond their control; that is, given characteristics. When I tell people that I didn't speak until I was three and then reveal some of my autistic traits and behaviours, they would have never thought I was 'autistic'. Which leads me to believe that Autism isn't as real as you think. Just reminds me of self-indulged individuals who were thrown into a world where they had no say in its creation and where people determine their fate without asking their opinion. If anything, the Autistic label is a construction itself and its molding people as we speak.

And no, its not about someone living 150 years. Look at Africa, it was raped by Britain and has a history of apartheid.

If you live in North America you have nothing to complain about. Everything is set up so anyone can succeed with a little effort and responsability.

This thread has had so many replies, it's amazing!

I only identify with holocaust victims in so far as I feel like an outsider from 'normal' society. Like a Jew or a gypsy or a disabled or mentally handicapped person must have felt under Hitler's regime. I wouldn't put it more strongly that that really, although I think that many people here have been through a lot more difficult experiences than I have, so I can understand the analogy. I do feel like a survivor.

Mighty telepathic of you to know whether I was disciplined properly or not as a child. But utterly false, and ignorant besides. I had a psychologist try to beat normality into me. It didn't work. Thing is my perceptions and my ability to connect thought to movement are different enough from usual that all the self-discipline in the world won't make me look normal. (I went through a period where I did everything I could to do what I was told and to look normal, and guess what, I still looked extremely unusual.)

With these ones:



and



and



I am sure these beliefs are extremely comforting to you, because they would make a person feel immune to injustice I hope you remember them when you or someone you care about finally end up in a situation that proves you wrong. It will happen eventually unless you die first. And then you will end up re-evaluating everything you're claiming here.

Do you count Mexico as part of North America by the way?

By the way, I said that I was avoiding comparisons with the Holocaust, so don't try to tell me I'm comparing my life to that. I just posted on the thread about your ideas about psychiatry (which are fundamentally naive), I said I was leaving the Holocaust thing alone entirely, and I meant it. Or is that you want to create a reality where I compared my life experiences to the Holocaust, so that you could then dismiss what I'm saying more easily? That'd be convenient, I guess, but false.

Additionally, you are treating autism as if it is a trait that a person can simply disguise or get rid of. That is only true for some people, and the people it is not true of do not simply lack discipline or some other silly idea like that.

I think a better analogy would be a plane crash survivor.

The plane is psychiatry.
The crash is the effect of going the wrong direction.
The aftermath is a result of a misled pilot who was in control of your destiny.

But the plane has crashed and now it is up to you to heal.

Dear Ana,
Wow, that's very extreme. So sad you feel like that. To you, it's real, I understand. But try and focus on the good things in your life, of which there were none in Auschwitz. They hated the jews so much they systematically tried to eradicate the entire race. Now, c'mon, no one wants to do that to you. People might think you're weird, "off" or something, but they sure are glad you're there when they need computer repairs or any kind of fact checking. Aspies are a very important component of the human race. They've invented things and thought about stuff most people can't even comprehend. When I was in school, I won every math contest there was, I even won a huge contest with a trip to Europe. I never understood why everybody didn't get 100% on every math test if they actually read the material. To me, it was SO simple, and never subjective, which I loved even more. People want you to be more like them because they need the reinforcement that their way of thinking is right, and unfortunately, they are the majority, or at least the rulers. But you rule your own world, and it can be a beautiful one once you let go of the anxiety and the pressure of the outside. No, really.

/agree

Hmm... interesting to see how much people reply to that was never actually said. It is beginning to feel as if I am having a conversation, and others are simply hallucinating elements of the conversation that don't exist.

Believe it or not, I am a pretty happy person. I don't look remotely normal, and that doesn't at all conflict with the fact that I am a happy person. (It does make it dangerous for me to go outside alone though, and that is simply a part of present-day American reality.) I acknowledge the ugly parts of the world and that does not conflict with being a happy person either. Concentrating only on the positive aspects of life can buy a person a false sort of happiness, one that actually comes from escapism. That is not the sort of happiness I have sought or found. The sort I have found has had to encompass the reality I have seen, which includes some pretty nasty aspects of the present-day world, yes even in rich developed countries. (And as a matter of fact there are people who want to kill me, right now, have said so publicly and solicited people to murder me, and that does not affect my emotional state at all by now. There were people who wanted to and tried to kill me in an institution too, saying that people like me were a waste of space that could be devoted to better sorts of people. These experiences have, in the end, toughened me rather than broken me -- there's very little that could be done to me that has not already been done, so there's very little I have to fear.)

So, no, I'm not really into creating my own fantasy-world where this stuff doesn't happen. There's a deeper kind of happiness that exists within a world where these things do happen, that gives a person the strength to try to change that world rather than berate the people who are affected by the unpleasant sides of that world. And that does not turn away from unpleasant things because they are unpleasant.

This is probably either a surprise or unbelievable, but it's the reality I happen to live in. And I'll note yet again I have made no Holocaust comparisons in my posts, and have only been replying to some of the concepts people have brought up (so anyone who thinks I'm trying to compare my experiences to Holocaust survivors can save their breath and not respond to that idea because it's simply not in my posts). But I will say this: It is a ridiculous idea that if something is better than the Holocaust or than the bad things happening in Africa then it's perfectly fine. Somehow I think that's setting the bar way the heck too low. It's like the people around here who go, "Well it doesn't matter if the services are abusive, because at least they're not the old state institution." Well the old state institution was by all accounts a snakepit so saying things are better than that is hardly a glowing endorsement of something. Likewise, being better than the worst atrocities in human history hardly makes something good or not in need of improvement.

I also think a plane crash is a really bad analogy for psychiatry, because a plane crash happens in a short duration. A plane crash might cause PTSD, but it would not cause Complex PTSD. Psychiatry frequently causes Complex PTSD, which is a reaction to ongoing abuse in a totalitarian environment of some sort (can be any number of sorts of places). It's not an official diagnosis yet but it entails far more long-term personality changes than PTSD tends to cause.

But, yeah, it's possible to be a person who doesn't look normal, and who's seen the sorts of things I've seen, and be a generally happy person. Those who think it's impossible (or who automatically assume I'm miserable simply for describing certain aspects of the world) ought to look at the potential shallowness of their conception of happiness. This also reminds me of the scene in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" where the girl tries to write about the joy her father brings to her family, and her teacher, because the girl is writing about a life in poverty, tells her her work is sordid and depressing and she ought not to write it. It was the teacher who failed to see the potential for happiness in the girl's life, not the girl who was miserable just because the teacher imagined that such a life must be miserable. People who assume I am a miserable person are much like the teacher in that story. And... yeah, read the quote in my signature.