Skip to main content

They're Gonna Take Away My Kid's Diagnosis!

This is like the third time I've heard some variant of this complaint:

"My kid turned X years old and now the Doc wants to take away their diagnosis because they are social!"

You don't just stop being autistic. It's a lifelong condition. If the kid was autistic during diagnosis, the kid is autistic now. But what does "social" mean, like, verbal? plenty of verbal autistics. Well-spoken, interests outside of their age group, Hans Asperger's "little professors" are very social - to adults. Not so much to their peers. These autistic people are the savants, the maskers, the people who get shit on for being too autistic to fit in with the neurotypicals and get shit on for not being autistic enough to match somebody's stereotype. (Hey, internalized bullshit is still bullshit.)

Anyway, bit tired, sorry, recommend reading this article on Augmentative and assistive Communication for verbal and semiverbal autistic adults; and my collection of articles on the common experiences of highly-masking and not-masking autistic adults; and the DSM-5 criteria for autism diagnosis. 

Hope it helps.





image used with permission, Gustavo Fring, Pexels.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

interdependence and apples

》　It really saddens me that it only takes one bad apple to ruin a bunch for most people. The reason the saying is, "one bad apple ruins the bushel/barrel" is that because of the way apples rot, they emit a gas that causes all the apples around them to rot as well. When talking about how people interact, a person did not develop their personality by accident or by chance; they were enabled by so many people that there's almost no way of picking out any particular influence. For instance, if you read the book about Trump by his niece, she points out that nearly every troubling behavior he has was initially caused by the extremely high desire he had to earn his own father's affection, and was subsequently reinforced by celebrity-dom and the trappings of wealth. Similarly MLK Jr., who was a reverend for some time before he became a celebrity, was strongly influenced by his own understanding of the Word of God and the unconditional support of his loved ones, ev...
Post a Comment
Read more

the value of exploitation

》　 Income of black slaves? You clearly don’t realize slavery almost abolished itself because of hoe **nonprofitable** it was until the cotton jin Growing cotton has never profited from slavery. In fact, paid laborers were more profitable than slave laborers even after the cotton gin was created; although the question of whether the paid laborers were not also being exploited is certainly apparent. The country was divided on the matter of slavery from the very start - northerners, influenced by Quaker ideals, tended to express the belief that all men are equal under God, whereas white southerners, for what reasons I cannot fathom, tended to express the belief that the color of someone's skin displayed the color of their soul, or something to that poetic effect. Letters from 1775 show that white southerners *believed* slavery to be more profitable, to be a biological necessity, even held some kind of religious concern about it and definitely had concerns that the kingdom ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Unintentional Abuse

Questioner: [what do you mean by] Unintentional grooming? Questioner: explain further pls cuz i’ve thought about that but never like- processed it fully >> I am doing my best to avoid getting really psychological here, but the basis of the concept is that the human mind avoids thinking about things that threaten your sense of self and reality. This is a well-documented and extremely strong instinct. So like, people don't automatically assume that they are doing something bad. Nearly every person will seek out and find justifications for everything they do. A 40 yo isn't going to suddenly get up and say, "I've never had an interest in younger people before, but I suddenly want to take advantage of someone's naivety." Becoming an asshole like that is a process shaped by exposure to the abuse of others (not usually direct abuse, surprisingly) and being enabled by social expectations and unfettered access. They do not believe that they are doing anythin...
Post a Comment
Read more