Jack Dewey was one of the autistic adults who participated in a panel chaired by Margaret Dewey, his mother, at the San Diego conference of the National Society for Autistic Children in 1975. Among the things he said was the following:
Quote:
It is very important that an autistic person be able to talk to somebody when he is troubled, someone who doesn't immediately assume that all the trouble is in his head. We get pretty upset when we can't figure out what went wrong, when somebody misunderstood us and we don't know how to set it straight. That is a real problem whether we are misunderstood by a policeman or a friend. If the trouble is in our imagination, we have to be helped with that too.
Taken from
Emerging Language in Autistic Children, by Warren H. Fay and Adriana Luce Schuler. Baltimore: University Park Press (1980). Originally published in Dewey, M., and Everard, M. 1975.
The autistic adult in the community. Proceedings of the National Society for Autistic Children Annual Conference, June, San Diego, Cal. In
Emerging Language in Autistic Children, Jack Dewey is described as being age 29, self-supporting as a piano tuner and living in his own home. The same book mentions that he gave a recorded interview and "answered questions too extensive in number to include here." Part of what he said is summarized here:
Quote:
Although he has healthy awareness of his personal talents and verbal accomplishments, Jack realizes that he has problems in self-expression and, to an even greater extent, comprehension. He seemed almost to plead for an appreciation on the part of teachers and others that message-receipt difficulties be not interpreted as hearing, listening, or attentional failures. Such accusations, he recalled, "were more humiliating than anything else, because I was trying to undrestand....It was not wilful...I was anxious to please, but not pleasing."
Also the article
The near-normal autistic adolescent by M. Dewey and M. Everard was published in the
Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, 1974, #4, pp.348-355.
I had thought that the first autism conference adult at which an autistic person had spoken was in the late 1980s.
The dominant impression I receive from reading books and studies about autism published in the 1960s and 1970s is that almost all autistics were then classified as being mentally ret*d.
26 Aug 2008, 7:28 am
