Inconsistencies regarding Amanda Bagg’s Past History???

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Yes I know of the name of that woman who claimed to be Amanda's best friend in Primary School, and I already added her on Facebook. There are photos of her with her husband and her son, including her wedding, and she sometimes makes updates about clothing and knitting. I honestly thought that she was completely separate from John Best Jr, that's why I thought her anecdotes were more trustworthy, as opposed to John Best Jr who just spouts hatred towards ASD individuals.

Hmm, I didn't mean that the woman you contacted isn't real.

I've researched this in the past, and I find the whole thing to be rather skepticism-inducing.

For full disclosure, I did not realize that Amanda = anbuend. If you are unware of the fact, anbuend posted frequently here until recently.



Your logic is faulty. You are essentially arguing that because she was not LFA as a child, that she cannot be LFA now. This is specious because it assumes that nothing exists that exacerbates autism and that it is not possible to regress from HFA into LFA.

Amanda herself quite eloquently explains how much of her HFA appearance as a child was a false presentation of her true internal cognitive states. It was pattern matching of speech - not speech as a communicative medium of her inner self. This is eerily similar to my experience. I was/am hyperlexic and to all external appearances quite able to communicate. But this just glosses over the sometimes extreme difficulty I have in communicating what is ACTUALLY going on in my head. This was a huge problem in my school years because I was very good at regurgitating the expected responses, but TERRIBLE at communicating what was really in my mind. This disconnect between my true internal states and the conditioned responses of pattern matching was profound and debilitating. It is only perhaps in the last decade that I have actually been able to relate to people with enough effectiveness that I am actually making some headway in "real life". I am 53. That means 40+ years of "WTF is wrong with me why can't I make myself understood?"

The point is that it would not have been hard for me to have a few bad turns of health and circumstance and to just "fold up my tent and go home", so to speak. I could have easily abandoned any attempt to break out of my internal prison and just regressed to being mute or worse, completely given up and gone to semi-catatonia.

Amanda's descriptions of her difficulties freak me out because I too was a child genius, but regressed to 'average' by highschool and utterly unremarkable by age 20. She describes things in ways that so clearly mirror my cognitive states that is scares that crap out of me because all it took for her to go from HFA to LFA were exacerbating health setbacks and bad treatment experiences.

The real value of Amanda's life story is a cautionary one. Something was lost to her and to all of us as she moved from HFA to LFA. The lesson to be taken is that this could happen to any one of us. A few bad turns and you or I could be reduced to needing service animals and special needs housing.

Fixating on the precise definitions of Amanda's history and current status miss the point. She has a story to tell that brings value to the autistic community. Parsing precise definitions as part of some exercise in pedantry does not. And I am pedantic, if nothing else.

Here is a strange thing. Amanda has stated many times that she dislikes people talking 'in front of her" as if she isn't there. I hope that if she is reading this, she will kick me aside and speak for herself. I would never presume to speak for her and these are only my observations on the matter.

I am not speaking for her, but I admit it is difficult for me to see someone I like and respect have rumors like this spread about her and not say anything at all.

And yes, I related to how she described her speech as well. I still feel like I have a lot of trouble communicating what is actually going on in my head. Whenever I manage it, it's because I wrote it down first and then could recite the same concepts verbally later.

(Thread moved from Autism discussion to Politics, Activism and Media Representation)

Actually you misinterpreted what I said. I was referring to the current Medical practice, in which LFA cases (originating from birth and due to genetic causes) are virtually all diagnosed by the age of 6 in developed countries. By Western Medical practice, it is absolutely unheard of to diagnose someone with congenital LFA at age 14, coz it would've been far more obvious earlier. The current Medical Establishment assesses ASDs as being from birth, and not the result of other drugs and trauma that exacerbate certain symptoms, otherwise the %age of ASD individuals would be far higher, potentially reaching as high as 5% of the adult population!! ! And they already took into consideration regression, but that is for CDD which occurs in childhood, and not in teenager/young adult years. I think their terminology for a person who regresses from HFA to "LFA" state is different... It is a matter of interpretation, in which by the status quo, you're wrong, unless they change their definitions in the future, in which you'll be correct.



How do you explain her receiving antipsychotics in the first place? She admitted in this forum to consuming LSD and Psilocybin which actually made her feel more normal in doses which are standard for NTs. She also has Google Groups posts dating to the Mid-90's for Schizophrenia and DID that contain her name in it, and I don't think John Best Jr planted those posts coz he wouldn't have known about her at the time.

I just find the case of Amanda Baggs extremely isolated and remarkable by standard Western medical practice, given the current inconsistencies. Anyway as Janissy said, her medical history is mostly her business so I'll leave it at that. I have no wish to discuss about this topic anymore until I re-read more of her posts in the past...

Classic.

You drop a huge bomb on the forum and when you don't get the response you hoped for you pack up your toys and go home.

As the person in question in this thread is also a member of WP it does not seem appropriate to be discussing her mental health issues behind her back; so I'm locking this thread, pending consideration of removing it completely.