see, we told you so

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some reconition of the benifits of autism

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... utism.html

That's a great article. Thank you for posting it.

it is always rather annoying how everyone assumes that every person on the spectrum is the same. it is like saying that an aspie or someone with hfa is the same as someone with severe autism.

i also noticed too that although i actually scored relatively high on the weschler, my elementary school teachers never encouraged me to succeed and essentially told me i would amount to nothing. my parents, who thought that i was misunderstood by my teacher, told her that i had a 120 iq and her response was to make excuses for why someone who she saw as inferior would score high. she essentially said that any moron could score high on iq tests because they only measure rote knowledge, which is a really ignorant statement.

in general it does not matter how successful one is, since as long as one is on the spectrum, one will never be seenas an equal. that is why no one i know knows that i am on the spectrum, since then they would only see my weaknesses.

I guess it's nice that somebody is finally figuring these things out, but it really upsets me when I read statements like that and I know that they could have known this THIRTY YEARS AGO, if they had only ASKED AN AUTISTIC PERSON what they were experiencing.

The first time I saw a 20/20 news item on Autism in the early 1980s and the reporter asked the researcher being interviewed what caused the Autistic children to rock and sway the way they did (maybe the term 'stimming' hadn't been coined at that point, IDK). The researcher said "We really don't know that yet"

I was 22, undiagnosed and sitting at home in tears, screaming at my television set "I KNOW WHY THEY DO IT! They're overwhelmed by sensory stimuli"

The analogy that came to mind was what happens to mice when they eat poison containing strychnine - it causes the entire nervous system to become hypersensitive to any and all stimulus, setting off uncontrollable convulsions, until the rodent's body seizes up and it becomes unable to breathe and dies. Autism is like a constant, low-grade version of that, thus the anxiety and panic attacks, and the tendency to stim to fend off becoming overwhelmed by it. If I didn't sway side-to-side or rock back and forth on the balls of my feet almost constantly, I would go insane in no time at all. It's as though that movement helps burn off the heightened adrenaline created by a 'fight or flight' mechanism that (somewhat akin to a leaky faucet) never completely shuts off.

My point being, even before I knew for sure my condition was neurologically related to what those children were experiencing (and that's when I first began to suspect it was), I, and people like me could have saved somebody a hell of a lot of time and research, if they had only bothered to ask the questions to the people who had the damned disorder!

Now, we on WP talk about these things amongst ourselves all the time. Why don't they just sit down and read some of the threads here? They might find enough astonishing revelations to write themselves a Nobel prize-winning paper on Autism. I'm glad this woman who has the condition is doing what she's doing, it's about time - it's just frustrating to me that the Non-Autistic 'professionals' who ponificate so often on our sad condition never bother to ask US to explain what Autism is and what it's like - they already have all the answers. Not.

yeah, i know what you mean but they have to blunder blindly 'till they find the truth.. itsa pride thing

I'm glad that someone is finally assessing the spectrum with true accuracy. I can definitely relate to the spatial perception thing. When I had my hands on mechanical drafting software, I used it for anything but. I made things from stargate. I made a scale model of the earth gate, and animated it dialing abydos. I made Ori ships, and animated them exiting a supergate. The software was not designed for what I was doing, and I crashed the computer and assembly files multiple times. I even imagined a ship that could not be replicated in the program! The point is, there was only one other person in that class that did anything remotely as complicated and imaginative as me - he made a working car, starting from the engine. He was kind of a jerk though.

I don't doubt there are some selective benefits to some various individual's experiences with autism, but same could be said with sickle cell disease as well. On the whole, I still don't see the slight advantages that might come with mild autism or Aspergers being a net advantage, especially not for me or I imagine many others like me.

Well, before someone can ask an autistic person why they do something, they have to recognize there are people who can and do communicate their thoughts who are autistic. If the autism one has in mind is those who don't use any language, asking doesn't come to mind as an option. Not unless and until one truly considers that those uncommunicative autistics aren't the only autistics.

look at it this way: the series finale of St. Elsewhere ended with an Autistic boy staring at a snowglobe with the hospital inside of it, indicating the entire series--as well as all the NBC series that themselves had experienced crossovers with the show--were all inside this kid's mind.

The father comes in with a doctor, and explains to him that he only wish he knew what was going on in his head.

When I read about that ending, I kept thinking "I've totally been there".

I've even told my girlfriend what my thought process is like...thinking about a million different things at once, and how one thought suddenly leads to another, leading to another, leading to another, etc.

Boggles 'er mind.