Parallel play

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Non verbal autistic people's worlds are impossible even to imagine, they are, by definition, impossible to know. Karl Greenfeld has written a book (Boy Alone) which describes his growing up with a non verbal autistic brother (Noah). The boy alone of the title is not Noah, but Karl himself, who feels to be kept apart by his family because of Noah. What can be done for non verbal autistic subjects? I must answer that I don't know. At some point most of them end up in institutions. But what to do here? There seems to be, in the US at least, a large use of so called "aversives", that is punishments, to control their behavior. "Facilitated communication" is unreliable and lends itself to abuses. I don't know really what is being done in institutions and I leave the matter here.

When there is the use of language and access to cultural material you may have autistic people who manage to gain some degree of self sufficiency. Their disability may be ignored during their whole life any are labeled as "loners", neurotic, bizarre, eccentric etc. Here some understanding of the nature of the problem may help. Parallel Play another recent book (by Tim Page) introduces an useful and intelligent metaphore ("parallel play") for people affected by "milder" forms of autism. These subject are obliged all the time to live in a parallel world, not so happily as some people imagine. Tim Page is an acclaimed musical critic, a Pulitzer Prize, as Glenn Gould was a famous pianist, but they live in niches, sometimes comfortable sometimes not (probably this is the case of David Foster Wallace, who described very effectively in "Dear Old Neon" his own life as an intolerable "fraud", and both in the story and in reality took his life ).

Hi Paolo, it is good to see you posting

I can't imagine what life is like for people with non verbal autism. I imagine life in institutions is not much stimulation for people living in them but I don't know anything about them really. Yes, I would think that siblings are the most 'left out' in a family with the children with problems needing so much care and attention and work (hopefully they get that from their parents)

I think the trouble for people with non-obvious disabilities is just that; that they aren't obvious...people in general may have some sympathy for those with obvious disabilities but not so much for non-obvious ones, and it is hard to have sympathy for something one can't understand, let alone imagine oneself experiencing.

It's Sunday a bad day in itself, and out raining a lot, I lye in my bed with my little dog snoring aside in the bed. The warm in the bed, the silence around are erasing anguishing dreams. I still have some drawback from a person I met yesterday. A campaign of education should be founded on the knowledge that autistics, even when they are "verbal", are fragile people, handle with care, don't pretend you love them, if you don't really know them, and it is a very hard job to know them, they live in a bubble made of cobweb and you easily damage the cobweb. They long for love but rarely they can get it and rarely they
can reciprocate.

That reciprocation thing is a real bastard. It's only reciprocated if the other perceives it as being so. Lock-in for NT, complete exclusion for AS.

A problem/frustration I've had all my life is the way people make such dreadful assumptions...that other people are just like them (they share the same social abilities, more or less, pick up the same social clues etc, understand the real meaning of what they say isn't what they actually say... Oh, it is hard sometimes to live the life of a 'Stranger in a Strange Land'. But there are many other 'strangers' all wandering around in their own 'bubbles' hoping not to get too damaged by the day.

Another problem I have is how much to adapt my (weird) self to be able to go into the world of the 'normals' - the collective, just for a little while and is it worth it, the contortions, the huge effort? I'm not even sure my best efforts are very convincing I think that's why I like the odd people in society, the ones who are not so 'normal' - I was watching a street artist the other day, painting on the pavement. He was talking aloud but only to himself, in his own world, sharing just his wonderful paintings, maybe that is all he ever shares with other people. I wonder if he was happy? Perhaps he was.

Do you feel people you meet have more 'impact' than they should and it is damaging? My husband is like that sometimes, he will think about something odd someone has said to him for a long time, when it is not worth the time it takes to figure it out. Maybe it was just a thoughtless remark. I do that too, trying to find the meaning behind something, when maybe there is none to find. Struggling for meaning all the time...the life of an Aspie!

I hope Sunday is not too hard on you Paolo. Sundays are easier in the summer, I think. And there is something very comforting about a snoring dog (or cat)

The man who plunged in a shooting spray in the military base in Texas did not seem weird before what he did. As, for those who have seen “Lebanon”, the soldiers in the tank who were ordered by some commander via a wireless phone, to shoot at civilian women and children, were not weird. They even pissed in their pants for the disturbing orders they had to execute. So it is the “machine”, military or administrative, which is totally weird.
Probably people painting on the pavement in the streets are not very different, in the quality of their life, from Michelangelo painting in a very uncomfortable position the Sistine Chapel.
Many of us are uncomfortable. And sometime we take comfort only from a snoring animal on our side.

I am a little disturbed by "fatty stomachs".

Fatty stomachs? People with fat stomachs? I don't mind fat so long as it's kept in a confined space, lol. Unlike 'muffin tops' -

Maybe they are named for some other cake in Italy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muffin_top