Have you ever been a danger to yourself?

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Niamh
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10 Jun 2011, 11:12 am

I once felt so reluctant to avoid a bus journey that I walked for three hours just to cut the bus journey down by half an hour! It was a dangerous road with little space to walk on. There were lots of bends, bushes and hedges to further block my view on the corners, and it was a wide, busy road with fast-moving traffic.

I hate bus trips because of my sensitivities. I get overloaded even on very short trips and I get travel sick very easily. That day I just could not bear the thought of getting on a bus for 40-45 minutes and almost definitely vomiting. It was very much a fight-or-flight response to a situation, and it was stupidly dangerous. I didn't think it through.

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Are there other little things you do sometimes that are potentially dangerous?



sgrannel
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10 Jun 2011, 12:46 pm

A danger to yourself? If someone harms you, regardless of circumstances, it's because they're a danger to you and not because you're a danger to yourself.

For the record, I have been judged not to be a danger to myself or to others, and thus not subject to involuntary restraint, institutionalization, etc.

I have been known to push the boundaries of adventure a bit, but nothing I couldn't handle. You have to be careful not to give others the impression that you're reckless. For the most part, the biggest problem in all this is that you have to be careful about what you say to whom about your adventures because you don't want people to misjudge you and think poorly of you for saying too much about it.


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Todesking
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10 Jun 2011, 1:37 pm

Does throwing lit M-80 firecrackers into mud puddles to see how wet I could get my friends and me or letting friends shoot potato cannon at me to see how bad it would hurt when I was around 13 count? :wink: :lol: It hurt like a son-of-a-b!tch! :oops: :lol:

I tried to hang myself when I was 11 but changed my mind the second I stepped off the toy box in my closet. Luckily the rod in the closet popped out. I hate to hear people talk about suicide because you can easily change your mind seconds into actually doing it. My reason for doing it was they would not let me out of special education classes because I knew I was not learning disabled. Turns out I am not. When I went for my Aspergers diagnosis the psychologist found no traces of a learning disability so I feel vindicated and glad I did not die.


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Bloodheart
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10 Jun 2011, 2:14 pm

I'm not the most sensible of people.

I don't have your sort of sensitivities to buses, but I do have poor judgement quite a lot - it gets worse during times of anxiety or stress - like when you've had sensory overload or come close to a meltdown and your mind just feels foggy, I call this 'aspie head'.

If I get upset I can't have people around me, if people try to take care of me my head gets confused and I make bad judgements, this has seen me attempting to walk home alone at 3am, the wrong way too so I get stuck/lost in an area where there is a park so high risk of assault, I panic and find it hard to figure my way out of that situation. In my old job I often found it hard to wait for my bus home, anxiety would build-up - normally anxiety about how to get home if the bus didn't arrive in x amount of time - so I'd walk 45 minutes into the city through the bad part of the city. I do worry about what would happen if I was at real risk, if I'd be able to keep my head.

I also can't be trusted to cook anything at night when I've got 'aspie head' - I often put things on to cook, then get hyper-focused on other things so totally forget that I'm cooking something - food then burns, once it did result in a kitchen fire. There has even been a time when I've been so out of it I've not only managed to burn something to a crisp, had the house filled with smoke and burned myself...but I've done all this without fully realising.


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styphon
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10 Jun 2011, 8:34 pm

I am willing to tell anyone the truth and what I think despite its consquences. This has caused me both physical and non-physical harm


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Sweetleaf
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10 Jun 2011, 8:44 pm

Well I have attempted suicide so yes.



IdahoRose
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10 Jun 2011, 9:42 pm

I am a danger to myself because I am completely oblivious to my surroundings, so it wouldn't be difficult for someone to stalk me or kidnap me. I also do little things that are dangerous, like leaving the stove on, using knives to cut food/packages towards me instead of away from me, sticking my hand too close to the garbage disposal, using a fork to get toast out of the toaster, throwing towels on top of the stove, forgetting to lock doors and windows at night... I could go on and on...

Oh yeah, and I have also self-harmed and attempted suicide in the past, so I'm dangerous to myself in that respect as well.



CockneyRebel
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10 Jun 2011, 10:12 pm

I've never really been a danger to myself.


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10 Jun 2011, 11:55 pm

I'm going to say no. I'm one of the most careful people I know. The only dangerous thing I do is my new hobby: flying small airplanes. It's only with an instructor for now, but I will be flying solo once I build up enough flight hours. I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a dangerous hobby. Small planes can and do crash. But it's also exciting; it's a combination of conquering nature, by doing something the human body was never meant to do, and adapting to it, by following weather patterns. So, it's an informed, calculated danger, so I don't consider it being a danger to myself.



Callista
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11 Jun 2011, 12:55 am

Technically... yes. I've been suicidal. I've also gotten to the point where the self-care broke down pretty badly and I suppose it might've had health effects eventually if I hadn't been young and physically healthy at the time.

The odd thing, though, was that the times they said I was "a danger to self or others", I actually wasn't. They had merely overreacted to simple superficial self-injury. I don't trust shrinks to tell me whether I am in danger now--I know myself best, I've been there before, and I can find ways to keep myself alive. There are red flags that I know are red flags that wouldn't be obvious to a shrink, and the things they look for that seem "dangerous" (like isolating myself or physically injuring myself in nonlethal ways) aren't a sign of serious problems for me at all.

I've learned to face the fact that I can't trust anybody else to keep me alive--I'm the only one I've got, and if I don't learn to know myself very well and learn to detect problems before they reach the danger zone, then nobody's going to rescue me.


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Niamh
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11 Jun 2011, 6:46 am

I have also been suicidal myself and recently enough went through such a severe bout of panic attacks that I got severely depressed and started getting powerful urges to self-harm, which I was only able to resist because I called for help - called Samaritans, called my boyfriend, called my best friend... Callista has a good point, we need to know our own warning signs preferably before they reach danger point, or else we can't expect anyone to help us.

I also do other stupid things like that long walk on the road, like sometimes I'll forget to look crossing the road or I just keep forgetting what I saw on one side when I look to the other side, and I've occasionally walked right out in front of traffic. I tend to avoid buses also by going on long safe walks but getting badly dehydrated and weak because I didn't think ahead and consider the length of the journey and whether I knew the route to have any shops along the way. I also tend to wander off sometimes when I feel overloaded and then get lost in strange parts of town, or even parts I'm somewhat familiar with - I just don't have an internal map or sense of direction/distance.

I don't understand when someone's behaving inappropriately around me, like trying to get a chance to touch me inappropriately or trying to get information out of me that they could use against me in some way, like when I was at the pool last month and some middle-aged guy was talking to me, and he just seemed to be friendly and talkative and was just making what seemed to me like small talk, not that I'm sure what that is usually... but he was just asking about what county I was from, what I'm studying in college etc. and telling me some similar stuff about himself, so I didn't suspect anything, but to cut a long story short, he turned the conversation to the topic of physical appearance and I still didn't get suspicious, and it resulted in him following me up and down the pool until I tired out and he got a chance to feel my ass. I now don't trust a single person at the swimming pool because I don't have the social skills to understand when someone's trying to mess with me. I've been sexually harassed and abused before then because people pick up on my extreme naivety very quickly. I also didn't understand at the time that I had the rights to report this and protect myself and I didn't understand that I should have done everything in my power to get out of that situation, e.g. one time it was a chef in a kitchen where I was working in washup for the summer. I was 17 and this guy kept touching me and crossed the line more than once. But I spent the whole summer going through the terror of facing that every day I went to work, because all I knew was that if I didn't keep my job my parents would be extremely angry with me all summer and make me suffer. Now, looking back at the situation, I should have quit the job and reported the pervert. No teenage summer job is more important than getting out of danger! This guy lived in the establishment and kept talking about bringing me to his room...

So ya, I tend to be a danger to myself because of extreme naivety, lack of social understanding, strong desire to avoid sensory overload, poor ability to plan ahead and lack of sense of direction and distance.



kx250rider
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11 Jun 2011, 11:13 am

I would say not, based on the theory that "being a danger to oneself" would indicate deliberate carelessness or intent or desire to harm/kill self. And I have never felt that way, and I don't think I've ever been any more careless than any "normal" boy or man. I do ride motorcycles, and I know of the dangers there, and I also am an electrician among other occupational skills, and I like to play with big, dangerous toys, LOL... In other words, anything can be dangerous, and we can't live sheltered from it forever. I've gotten in cars with strangers (as an adult), and I've walked at night in renowned gang-infested parts of Central Los Angeles. But ironically, the only times I've come close to getting badly hurt or killed, had nothing to do with those things. I've survived an explosion and fire, and I actually ran back into the burning house to slam as many doors as I could, to stop the spread of the fire (DUMB, I KNOW!! !!). I was also riding my bicycle on the sidewalk when I was about 14, and got hit by a car coming out of a driveway and pushed out into a busy street in front of a bus, which was able to screech to a halt. I was banged up a bit, but never went for any medical care... not that bad. Thanfully, I've never received any life-threatening injuries, and in fact nothing more than a broken finger, and a few nasty flesh wounds needing stitches, etc. God willing, I hope to keep that as the record!

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11 Jun 2011, 11:23 am

At work the bosses won't hire autistic people because he says they are a danger to themselves and others. The boss said if he had to hire autistics too many of his good men would quit.



Niamh
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11 Jun 2011, 11:37 am

androbot2084 wrote:
At work the bosses won't hire autistic people because he says they are a danger to themselves and others. The boss said if he had to hire autistics too many of his good men would quit.


That's incredibly ignorant! :( Do you keep it all secret then?



Niamh
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11 Jun 2011, 11:46 am

kx250rider wrote:
I would say not, based on the theory that "being a danger to oneself" would indicate deliberate carelessness or intent or desire to harm/kill self.


No, deliberate self-harm and accidental self-harm are different. We can accidentally be careless out of naivety and confusion in social situations, or we can be in complete fight-or-flight response mode and not able to think things through, resulting in careless behaviour. For example, a kid with autism might get so overwhelmed at school he might run away, but in his state of stress he might not be able to think ahead and he may run across a road without looking. The kid doesn't want to get hit by a car and hurt himself, he actually wants to just get as far away from the school as possible and into a place that feels safe. Then there are clumsiness issues, and it's obvious how very bad coordination could cause a person to accidentally harm themselves. That's the kinda stuff I'm thinking about here :)



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11 Jun 2011, 12:14 pm

Yes I keep my autism a secret because even the Union officials who are supposed to represent me think that an employer has every right to fire and blackball autistic workers who because of their unawareness are too dangerous to belong at the jobsite. However I run into problems at work because crane operators deliberately swing dangerous loads over my head. The crane operator will not stop his dangerous practice because production cannot stop but I am expected to have eyes in the back of my head to get out of his way everytime he tries to run me over.