How come there are so many books about Asperger's and Girls?

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The reason I asked is because state funded does not mean free in the US. Here there can be a sliding scale for people. Meaning you pay a percentage of your income.

If that school was here in my state and state funded it, would not be free unless your parents are almost homeless with no job.

Is how free is free when funded by the UK government?

Example:

My cousin was in a state funded residential treatment facility for mental illness issues. My aunt was responsible for what her insurance did not cover, which was $20K after all was said and done. The only truly "free" kids were those in the foster care system.

Continuing a tangent:

I think it's a bit more complicated than that, in a way that makes the system hard to navigate for those who find bureaucratic complexity inherently challenging.

For autistic people under 18, the key terms are FAPE and IDEA. FAPE is a "Free and Appropriate Public Education," a concept around which a confusing tangle of law and precedent has emerged, but that means, in principal, that the states are obliged to provide all students with a free and appropriate public education. IDEA is "The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" which compels school districts to comply with FAPE standards.

For autistic kids whose educational needs cannot be met by their local school district, the law means that their school district must pay for their education in an alternative setting, but it's up to the parents to force the school board to do that.

You can find good information on how that works at wrightslaw

Where we live, it seems that some parents are lawyered up and have the time, finances and neurology to easily negotiate this very complex system and force it to pay for private education for their SPED kids. Families less able to work the system are left to fight with child study teams about how to write and use the IEP to make the school deal appropriately with their child's needs.

My understanding is that how this works in practice varies greatly from state to state and district to district.

We found it that just having a professional advocate attend the IEP meeting changes the whole interaction. It cost us $600 that wasn't in the budget, but it helped get proper IEPs. When we naively went along with whatever the CST recommended, the results were not adequate.

It's sad that the system compels the parents and those charged with providing individualized care for their children in an adversarial situation, but that's the way it is.

I agree with the comments that have already been made: the books about autism in females are being published now because all the other books are focused on autism in males.

Aside from being written in third person they are likely to omit a lot of things relevant to adults.

This is a rather more important question, IMHO

The same is likely to be the case with people who are either trans or non-binary gendered.
Both of these being far more common amongst ND than NT people.

There are basic economic forces and a biological imperative behind this, I think.

The biological imperative is the reproductive one: parents want to try to ensure that their children will have the best possible lives.

The economic forces stem from that biological imperative and the social consensus that society should play a role in childcare and education. This means that there is money available directly from parents, through schools or through parent or school funded therapeutic professions, to care for ASD children. This money for pediatric ASD care and intervention also means that there is money for pediatric ASD research.

Adults with ASD are not covered by the social consensus that provides for school age children, and so they or their aging parents are on their own. This means the pool of money directed toward adults with ASD and related research is smaller.

Only the intervention of wealthy parents of adult children or ASD people with independent income will change that situation.

Gender is a spectrum rather than a binary to start with.
Thinking of it as a binary is especially unhelpful with children since they are less likely than adults to be able to indicate if they are not cis-gendered.

I suspect that psychotherapy can also be harmful in such a situation.

Actually I've received different types of talk therapy throughout the years from different therapists and I found pretty much all of it to be beneficial (I think I was lucky in that I always ended up with quality therapists)--but then again I did have issues other than autism, like an unhappy home life growing up with an emotionally abusive parent, bullying siblings, and some alcoholism in my family. I think the anxiety and PTSD diagnoses did end up being accurate, but those issues either developed from or were contributed to by my unrecognised autism.

Who's Kate Upton?

I think she's some sort of supermodel or something.

I found the book "Neurotribes" educational in that respect. Leo Kannner's original cases were effectively pre-screened, so that he was only seeing autism in the upper-middle-class white boys his friends and associates referred to him. So for decades afterwards, this has been the group most likely to get the diagnosis. Non-white, female or working class: in the mid-20th century if they got a diagnosis at all it was "eh, some kind of incurable imbecile. Strap 'em to a bed and wait for 'em to die." I'm not exaggerating. I wish I was.

Leo Kanner saw for his orignal paper 8 boys and 3 girls. Only the upper classes could afford to go to his Baltimore clinic during the great depression and WWII.

It was Hans Asperger who saw only boys. From Neurotribes

bolding mine

Huh. Right you are! So my neat little narrative about why things were so awful doesn't quite hold water....