Offensive Autism Books

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My mom has a lot of books on raising autistic children. One of them is entitled Overcoming Autism by Lynn Kern Koegel, Ph.D., and Claire LaZebnik. One look at both the title of the book and the titles of the chapters and you can see that the book would be offensive to autistic people. For example, the first chapter's title implies that receiving your child's autism diagnosis is comparable to a natural disaster and even uses language that suggests this. The beginning of the fourth chapter uses language that implies that stimming is meaningless, while the seventh chapter's title implies that autistic people are not normal. I am currently reading this book to analyze the authors' opinions about autistic children. Like in English class, I could literally write an argumentative essay on this book on why I disagree with the general message of it.

Does/Did your parents have any books on autism that are/were as offensive as the one I described?

Some trigger words include burden, hopelessness, isolation, scary, etc. I myself have a strong sense of justice when it comes to causes that matter to me such as how autistic people should be treated. I'm not afraid to stand up for myself when I have been treated unfairly. So this book definitely seems fun to read. It also looks like something Autism Speaks would gladly promote.

First chapter's title:

The Empty Fortrass by Bruno Bettelheim 1967

Stop Autism Now! A Parents Guide to Preventing and Reversing Autism Spectrum Disorders by Dr. Bruce Fife 2012

Healing The Symptoms Known as Autism by Kerri Rivera 2013 book advocating bleach enemas

How to End The Autism Epidemic by J.B. Handley. September 2018 Brought to you by the founder of the anti vaxx organization Generation Rescue

A question to you OP - If you were to write a letter to the author (c/- their publisher), what would you say?

Would you describe how this negatively impacted on you? The potential damage it does by spreading stigma and dehumanisation? Or?

What would you choose to say? How would you organise your points?

A neurotypical parent learning of their childs developmental disorder is hardly going to be an enjoyable or pleasant experience, especially when parents like to build up an image of how their childs life is going to pan out. To have this future image drastically changed or destroyed in a doctors office is going to feel like a natural disaster. Naturally, this can lead to feelings of hopelessness for the parent. Perhaps later on, the book will talk about how it's not all doom and gloom and after the initial shock you can relearn to interpret the diagnosis as merely an alteration to an austistic childs planned or desired future.

As for talking about how autism isn't normal, I have to agree. What is normal first of all? Normal is what people NORMALLY and most frequently experience and autism is still an infrequent occurrence amongst the general population. I don't know why people get offended when they're perceived as abnormal or unusual when they actually are infact abnormal or unusual. If someone were to call me unusual or not normal, I'd just nod and tell them that they're right and that my lack of normality isn't necessarily a bad thing. Non-autistics are called neurotypicals, emphasis on the TYPICAL, typical meaning most common and expected. This makes us folks on the spectrum Neuro-atypical, or "not normal". Why is this something to be offended by? I've never understood it.

Ugh. Way too much of this, you can even tell when they're paraphrasing something occasionally.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

At the end of Overcoming Autism was a chapter on what to do when a child is grown and hasn't "overcome" autism. It amounted to giving up.

Malice intent or not, the unconscious bias inherent in these stigmatising representations reinforce and encourage the "othering" and hence the dehumanisation process. It is AS people who pay the ultimate human price for the personal profits the NT writers accrue from these books.

There's a bigger picture than the author's motives, there is the impact and the harm that such books do. We know the harm, because we see it, we live it, we feel it, we read of it, and see it impacting on our beloved family members.

AS women like myself are mothers and grandmothers of AS children and grandchildren, we see the impacts all too closely and clearly for comfort.

let me tell you guys a joke, sure you haven't heard it yet:

There was this guy, sitting in a park, on a bench. He had a bag with lots of bananas. and a salt shaker.
So this guy would take one of the many bananas, peel it, put lots of salt on it, take one bite and go UGH!! !! ! and would discard the salted banana in the trashcan, which was, conviniently, installed right beside the bench. And he kept doing it again, and again, and again,....

An old man passing by observed this behavior and asked him: "What on earth are you exactly doing?"
and the guy said, "the thing is I do not like salted bananas."
The old man said: "don't put salt on your banana then!"
and the guy was enlightened and knew from that point that if he doesn't like salted bananas, he shouldn't put salt on them.

Why am I telling you this joke? 1. because I'm crazy 2. If the titles and content of those books written by idiots make you triggered or agitated, don't read them (don't salt your banana, right?). Reading stupid comments on autism, in books or on reddit or anywhere, makes you more miserable than you probably already are. And books are written by people, most of which are idiots. Nobody is forcing you to read this BS books and get triggered by them, except yourself.

cheerz
omid