Autism- The Way Of The Future? - Page 2

On the other hand as creatures that have survived largely due to our social instincts and via group dynamics is it really a good thing for a condition that robs people of that group dynamic to be on the rise. Yes Autism can sometimes lead to certain aptitudes and talents, but it's also utterly dehumanising and makes a lot of its sufferers very vulnerable.

Approaching it the way he does is slightly dangerous. The disease model, at least, takes the view that the symptoms are a bad thing and their expression should be curbed as much as possible. If you have a "civil rights movement" for mental patients and autism sufferers, then you get people who think "I'm not disadvantaged, just different."

Unfortunately, they are disadvantaged. We do not live in a just society that takes care of the worst off, we live in a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves and charitable treatment of others is stigmatized. A significant number of the mentally diseased and autistic are not able to do that. Putting these kinds of ideas into the heads of these patients is basically encouraging them to go into that kind of world unprepared.

Maybe the dynamic being targeted (or weeded out, depending on your point of view) is the capacity for socialized violence? Just talking out my ass, of course, but the group dynamics (based on primate pack dominance) that have allowed us to survive to such an expansive and impressive degree are the same ones that drive us to fly planes into buildings and dig trenches to fight in: tribalism is a bitch.

I'm not trying to make light of the situation. It's just that we're so in the dark about everything involving this, there's no real way to tell where it's heading.

Speak for yourself. I use 150% of my brain and 75% of yours.

I don't think your feelings as to how society should or will react to a medical condition should have any bearing whatsoever on how something is medically classified. That strikes me as a particularly ugly form of political correctness. Autism might be a disease - most of what I've seen and read suggests overwhelmingly that it is not - but that has nothing to do with society. Tailoring the interpretation of data to a particular ideology is hugely destructive and self-defeating.

Look at the world around you and tell me how effective you think this kind of campaign will be in terms of improving the lives of these patients. We're fifty years past the start of the American Civil Rights Movement and we just elected our first black president and people want to kill him. Gay rights, by comparison, have progressed at a snail's pace. If you are looking to improve the actual lives of the actual patients, this is a monumentally bad approach.

Also, I have a cancerous genetic disorder that gave me a brain tumor, hydrocephalus, and epilepsy and predisposes me to developing cancer the rest of my life. Trust me, I know sick people have it hard and I'm not passing moral or other judgments on them. I'm passing judgment on society. To this day, when people ask me about cancer--the skin on the plams of my hands are made of cancer, so it comes up a lot--I have to assure them it's not contagious. The symptoms are a bad thing insofar as they prevent people from integrating into society and providing for themselves, which is why I think the disease model is the best route to take if you are looking to help these people, not just make them feel better.

That person has that idea because she's being told she's "different," not disadvantaged. That will be a common response. Look at how many people call the mentally disabled "special."

Oh man this is coming so delightfully close to the heyday of arguments like JuddL's "RETARDS AREN'T ACTUALLY PEOPLE".

Individuals can "do nuance" well, groups cannot. Look at all the people who hold rallies for the "adoption movement" and the like. Once you tell people that they should think of themselves more as different than disadvantaged, they turn it into an extreme version of political correctness. It's just what they do.

The disadvantaged are 'different.' So are the rich. It's a fairly neutral term.

I don't know why 'special' is any better or worse than 'mentally disabled,' like they're an inanimate gourd.

Unless there is some process wherein a person can be treated and attain 'normalcy,' insisting that they be labeled as 'disadvantaged' is a dick move. Society is the last actor that needs to tell a disadvantaged person that they are, in fact, disadvantaged - either the person is already well aware of this, or it's a non-issue. By approaching this as a disease, when it very well may not be a disease, medically and physiologically speaking, you are asserting that society (which is already fucked up, as you note) can better integrate these cases through terminology and social expectation. That's really kind of silly. You are also impeding the development of accurate and honest treatments and approaches, by insisting on the disease model approach, when it may not be a disease. If you want to help these people, you should worry less about society and more about the patient.

I'm not saying they shouldn't look at it another way in research, I'm saying that they shouldn't go around telling people that they are precious snowflakes that should be better understood. That's just going to get the patient nowhere. If the theory of the condition that is built around the "autistic brains are different, not diseased" hypothesis yeilds a better treatment, all the power to them. Just don't facilitate the notion that they can get a job and provide for themselves by openly and consistently rejecting how most people might percieve them. It's not going to help.

Hoo boy.

Other than the precious snowflake bit (and I'm hard pressed to think of any medical professionals or public figures using that term), there's nothing wrong with saying they need to be better understood. It's better than saying 'Hey! These people are disadvantaged and diseased, and probably can't function in society, so uhhh, hey, if you happen to stumble across one in an alley way don't make any sudden movements.' I fail to see where your argument is addressed. To the parents and caretakers, who are going to think of them as 'precious snowflakes' no matter what?

And there are plenty of autistic people who do have jobs and provide for themselves. Their cases may not range into the extreme side of the spectrum, but just because society is largely ignorant of what isn't readily at hand doesn't mean we should go out of our way to respect that ignorance. Some patients won't be able to care for themselves. That will be largely apparent to anyone involved in such a situation. Others can and will. So who, exactly, benefits from this non-methodological blanket description?

To illustrate this problem, the Dallas school district recently decreed that special needs students be integrated into regular classrooms for a set period of the day. This has caused massive problems, huge headaches, and general disruption for everyone involved. This speaks to Cuc's point to a degree, in that we shouldn't act like everything is fine, it's just a matter of accepting that people are different, etc. Of course, a lot of these students are severely retarded, which speaks to the absolutely idiocy of throwing blanket terms like 'disadvantaged' around. Some of these students will thrive, some will fail horribly and drag others down with them. You need to be able to understand these cases on an individual basis, especially when our knowledge of what's at the root of these issues is so sparse. Which means avoiding blanket descriptions and ideologically motivated approaches (and idiotic bureaucratic maneuvers like the District's).

The patients benefit from it. The girl who is getting militantly political on the point that she's different, not disadvantaged is the clearest example of how instilling that view in them can be counterproductive. Sure, it makes them feel better about themselves, but it does it in a way that blinds them to what the reality is likely to be their entire lives.

What, were you raised a Calvinist? The fact that this girl is able to make her argument in a public forum strongly suggests she can function in society. Saying she's delusional and ignorant of what her 'reality' is going to be for her entire life is deterministic, paternalistic and disingenuous. What's true for her will not be true for everyone with a similar (or even peripherally related) condition, which only speaks further to the point that you can't claim to know what's going to benefit the patient from a removed vantage.

"Militantly political"? Holy shit, she's asking for some understanding of the condition, and not to be treated like a worthless freak, not for some bloody, protracted coup.

What is so threatening to you about the idea of people with Autism being treated like people?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea of positively reinforcing a patient's view of himself or herself. You just shouldn't give them the idea that there is a right and wrong way to view them and that people can be swayed to the right way through rational argument. That's setting them up for disappointment.

Taking myself as an example. I was armed with all the fact about my condition from early childhood on and was in a lot of support groups for kids who were dying of cancer or bereaved due to a case of cancer in the family. Positive reinforcement is wonderful. However, it's not what led me to succeed and I doubt it is what leads many people to succeed.

As much as I hated the other prejudiced, stupid fucks in my school, their treatment of my brother and me was instructive. It taught me that people are essentially bad and most of them are stupid and they aren't going to be charitable to people who they view as weaker or lesser. So, I worked harder than they did and took what I wanted. That's what led me to getting a scholarship to Berkeley and Cambridge and being a political organizer in my mid-twenties while they are all on their first or third marriage and have kids going to the grade school we went to. Self-esteem is vastly overrated.

Because Cuc. is blaming 'society,' not the patients. His considered remedy for this is an arbitrary socially defined expectation leveled indiscriminately against a diversity of patients for no better reason than that people will be mean to them.

Everyone is mean to everyone else. You should treat kids who are going into the world that this is the case, not 'since you're different, people are going to be mean just to you.'

Allow me, gentlemen.

Hoo boy.

Seems fairly clear that you were motivated largely by the idea that you were/are morally superior to your 'stupid fuck' classmates. Which is fine. We're talking about people who largely aren't going to be making that sort of distinction because they are, at a fundamental level, different from most everybody else. They weren't struck down by an unfortunate event or an act of God - they were born that way. If a kid is born without legs, it's fairly obvious society is going have trouble integrating him. It's not going to benefit him to make this a defining characteristic of their condition, though. It will be made pretty clear very quickly. If a kid loses his legs in an accident, and decides to persevere, then good for him, cheers all around. And if a kid is paralyzed from the neck down and decides to take his own life (as happened recently in the UK), I'm not trying to pass a judgement there. This is all fairly reasonable stuff; where your argument becomes unreasonable, I think, is where you say that children need to be explicitly taught, through a specific approach to this condition, that society will not accept them and that they will not be able to functionally integrate without specific accommodation. Whether it's true or not varies greatly on a case by case basis, and in any case isn't going to serve someone facing this sort of struggle on a day-to-day basis anyway.

If someone had come to you and said 'because you have this disease, society will not accept you and your ability to function in society will be greatly diminished,' well, I struggle to see what good that would have done. Everyone struggles to function in society, to varying degrees, and it seems more effective to focus on ways in which someone can function (i.e. 'I am different) than on the ways in which society will prevent you from functioning (i.e. 'I am disabled/disadvantaged'). Which may be psycho-analytical gobbledegook between two people with no immediate understanding of what it's like to be in this particular state, but the young 'militant' lady, who does have an immediate knowledge of this, argues otherwise. You say self-esteem is vastly overrated, shortly after regaling us with a list of your esteemed successes in contrast with your bad schoolmates. There is a bit of a contradiction there, just as there is a bit of contradiction in your overall argument.

No, that's why I presented it as an example, not as a model for my dialectical view of history.

The view that I was exposed to day in and day out in school, that I was a freak or "lesser," is what drove me to work harder than they did and prove that I was better than they were. If you listen to most successful people from shitty backgrounds, they say roughly the same thing. People who are told to resist that kind of self-image seem to be content with the deck they're dealt and don't amount to much or take on a counterproductive approach to life.

I'm not saying you need to tell them they can't integrate into society and need to be accommodated, I'm saying that they need to be made aware of the facts that people won't go out of their way to help them integrate and--unless they are severely and demonstrably disabled--no accommodations will be made for them. If they want to survive and thrive, they need people to help them develop the tools they need to succeed on society's terms as best they can, not coddle them and tell them that they're "special" or "different."

But you do use it as an example of how treating autistic people with decency and positivity sets them up for failure and disappointment. You may not think you're using it as a model, but you really are.
Jesus. So treating someone with decency is "coddling" them? Unreal.

Helen Keller disagrees with you.

Did you actually pay attention to the story about Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller? It makes the exact same point I make.

No, it doesn't. Annie Sullivan wouldn't allow Helen to be spoiled or coddled (i.e., acting like a wild animal when she simply wanted to grab food off of other peoples' plates with her hands, which the Keller family allowed, because they didn't know what else to do), which is not what we're talking about here. You seem to think treating autistic people with dignity amounts to spoiling and coddling them, which is not the same thing. Plus, Annie gave Helen the tools to understand and function in society. You seem to be dangerously close to saying, "Fuck 'em if they can't manage on their own, we're not giving them any extra help."

My position is that the ones that aren't demonstrably disabled need to be taught to expect that they'll be held to the standard of a normal person, which is both unfair and true. Telling them that they're "different" and people need to meet them halfway is, to me, setting them up to be like the pre-Sullivan Helen Keller.

Says the guy who actually views technology's tendency to increase our isolation as a boon for these people.

So any kind of tools that could help them gain some sort of foothold with respect to communication and forming their thoughts should just be taken away?

No, again, that's not my point. He made the point that the way technology makes the community more illusory could remove the autistic person's weaknesses for reading facial and body language cues from the equation. To me, that seems to be championing the idea of using these things not as tools to help them develop the skills to better integrate but as means to alternative lifestyles.

Fine, you can teach these sort of distinctions without resorting to the disease-methodology approach. This is where I strongly disagree with you. This is a matter of socialization and interpersonal relationships, not medical categorization.

EDIT: misread Cuc's quote

Physical isolation is a harmful approach to life, not a beneficial one. Physical isolation does things like foster depression. It seems like a weird thing to champion.

This thread makes me wish I was Helen Keller.

Your inability to follow what I write leads me to believe you're either disabled yourself or engaging in troll-like behavior.