Identifying, Educating, and Empowering Allies

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Identifying, Educating, and Empowering Allies.

The above is an article by Phil Schwarz that was originally presented at Autreat 2004.

My friend is somewhat like an 'ally'. She knows about my AS and tells me when I'm doing something not 'socially acceptable' (nicely), leads me when I get overloaded in school, and gives me a secret hand signal for 'stop' when I'm talking too much in a conversation. (I tend to go on and on, not giving others a chance)

That's somewhat different than an ally as defined in the article. She helps you adapt to society (which is fine to a certain degree); the allies in the article seem to be more about helping society adapt to autistic people.

Anbuend


Great article!! !

Are you pro-cure or anti-cure? and if so why? I would like to get to know you better


joe

Anti-cure. The most fundamental reason is not what abilities some entity called autism gives me or takes away from me, but rather that autism is a word used to describe certain non-trivial aspects of the kind of brain I was born with. My brain processes information, thinks, and responds to information in certain ways, and that is what gets called autism. If you took these things away from me, I would not be the person I am and would in fact probably not have much of a brain left at all. The things that get attributed to autism are not all of who I am, but autism is a large, important, and inseparable part of who I am.

That to me is the most fundamental reason. There are of course aspects of having the sort of brain I have that I enjoy, but in the end it all comes back to this is who I am and who I was meant to be.

If you can handle long metaphors, The Oak Manifesto is something I wrote about this in more detail. Roughly, "plants" are people in general, and "trees" are autistics. (My avatar is part of an oak tree.)

Are there even any pro-cure people on this forum? I keep running into the notion that calling autism a disability, or saying you'd like some help, means being pro-cure... It's so odd...

I've run across that, and I've also run across its mirror image: The one that says that if you're anti-cure you're against helping people and/or want to prolong suffering and/or must only have certain autistic traits and not others. It's rather bewildering.

It would be like thinking that if you say it's fine that someone can't walk, that means he shouldn't be allowed to have a wheelchair; or conversely, that giving someone a wheelchair constitutes demanding that he start walking. (Why am I using wheelchair examples all the time?)

Sometimes I wonder if it's a lack of empathy in me that prevents me from understanding these notions . No, seriously; it's very hard for me to grasp that someone doesn't understand something that's so obvious as the ridiculousness of the above as soon as it's about autism. I suspect behaviourism has something to do with it - the idea that you are the way you act.

Returning to allies, I think my mom is one. And I have one in training. It's hard to get some concepts across; she does get the anti-cure thing, though.

(Oh, of course; it's running across, not running into; I'm talking like I physically bump into opinions... into is for objects and people...)

It would help if we all had the same understanding of "autism"? I've posted enough about it originally being nothing more nor less than a facet of temperament, but in this context, it's more meaningful to draw attention to the wonderful analysis anbuend did in a her thread on Aspergia Island (which regrettably got trolled out before it could go anywhere useful; perhaps you could reproduce it here anbuend?) on her own mental outlook.

We have interacted a lot on various sites, and by most measures, we have little in common, especially in physical terms, and, I suspect, according to most clinicians today, cerebral measures, yet, when we get down to fundamental outlook, we are largely in agreement in our view of how things should be, how things should work, and our inherent sense of what is important. In short, though we may be chalk and cheese in most peoples eyes, we share, to a large extent, a fundamental autistic mind-set!

It doesn't mean we agree on all things, we have different experiences after all; temperament is what we are born with, personality is modified by events. Still, when we get down to the basics, we have an extraordinary amount in common (which didn't surprise me unduly).

A basic problem with the DSM definition of AS is that it doesn't actually measure this understanding of "autism" as such (though it can easily be done, as those who try the Chandler & Mcleod test will find out) and so we end up with Aspies who have two distinct types of world views (which is quite easy to spot once one knows what to look for, given sufficient input). Given that any trained clinician should surely be familiar with the roots of the definition for autism, this smacks of deliberate obfuscation.