Ballastexistenz » Post Topic » "…knew the moment had arrived for killing the ... - 0 views
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How many of the emotional and social problems autistic people have are actually related to being autistic?
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And as I got into school, I became as subject to bullying by teachers as I was by other students.
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. I couldn’t understand why people hated me so much, I hadn’t done anything to them other than exist near them. And eventually I just went numb. Nothing the few people in my life who did treat me like a person could do, was enough to counteract the fact that in the majority of my life I was treated more like a target. The only way I could deal with it was to cut off the parts of me that knew what it was like to be treated like a person.
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m telling it because assorted variants on these experiences are so close to universal among the autistic people I’ve known. How can you get a good idea of the social abilities or emotional range of a set of people who are treated like this from the moment we encounter other children, sometimes from the moment we encounter other people at all?
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The myth of the refrigerator parent has been replaced with the myth of the refrigerator child, and many of our parents will believe the new refrigerator child myth.
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The interesting part to me was that the social behavior of the children was not only often invisible to their parents, but often invisible to the people who worked at the Media Lab as well. I had to point out to them things like one child speaking to her mother and inquiring about her mother’s emotional state, another child’s affection, another child looking up at his mother’s face to gauge her feelings. We concluded that somehow through the camera person focusing on the mothers, combined with the mothers focusing on the camera people, the viewer’s focus was not on the social overtures of the children, who were then possible to describe as not engaging in social overtures even when they were very clearly affectionate, social, and concerned with their parents’ feelings.
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Key point: People don't recognize social behaviors when they come from autistic children. Instead of observing what they see, they only see what they expect. There is ample evidence for how this could happen from distraction studies (tell someone to focus on members of the blue team, and they'll miss the gorilla dribbling the ball).
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Interesting blog post considering the emotional impacts of having autism. The author questions whether some of the social difficulties considered diagnostic of autism are actually the result of discrimination. Definitely worth reading for anyone interested in autism and hearing from someone with autism.
