Opinions on autism?

Autism and other attention, learning, and social disabilities are absolutely often misdiagnosed, but there is also this prevalent mindset in society where we allow our misconceived notions to create this unrealistic expectation of what these people should look and act like. This mindset is most often expressed with comments along the lines of:

"Well, they seem normal to me so I don't think that they are truly ______."

In reality, the real issue is that we allowed our knowledge of someone's disability to create assumptions about the type of person that we believed that they would be. Cognition, which is the way that our minds interpret and process information, is extremely complex. Someone can suffer from a disability and still be most intelligent person that you have ever met. They don't have to stand out in a crowd. They don't have to speak or behavior and weird ways.

We have to teach ourselves to stop hearing that someone deals with a disability and immediately start searching for what is missing from their personality or ability because simply because someone started their intellectual or emotional growth from an abnormal or disadvantaged position does not mean that they couldn't have grown to be just as capable, brilliant, or impressive as someone who hadn't.

 

What irritates me most is parents who have badly behaved children and are desperate for a diagnosis, almost as an excuse. There's this show on Channel 4 over here just now and every week there's the parent "he's so badly behaved that he must have ADHD" and 60% of the children who are featured have no diagnosis as it's just bad parenting.

While I absolutely accept that behaviour of autistic children can be challenging, parents cannot blame their laziness and poor parenting on "he's autistic", there's a lot more so many parents can do instead of blaming everything on a label.

 

I agree that it's hard to voice an opinion without a question at hand.

I'd just like to point out that not all people with autism are amazing Wunderkinder; that ignores quite a few whose lives lack autonomy, who are likely to lead shorter lives, are unable to clearly communicate etc. For them, I'd very much like to see a cure developed, if such a thing is possible.

I also find Foz's point really interesting and something worth keeping in mind.

 

My 10 year old son is diagnosed autistic. As a result I've spent a lot of time teaching him myself. He used to have a lot of issues with empathy, creative thinking and writing, social problems and dealing with changes, to name but a few things. He also has the ticks and hand flapping and sometimes loses focus, fleeting in and out of reality somewhat. He also used to take everything literally and at face value. On the flip side though, he has been measured with an exceptionally high IQ, and is good at math, even going so far as to correct his teachers work and devise better ways of reaching answers.

I've therefore spent a lot of time helping him turn these gifts to his advantage. I've taught him logical discourse and how to construct arguments and correctly reach conclusions flowing lines of evidence and reason. Thanks to him also having an amazing teacher at school he has also my improved where he was academically weaker.

My main motivation for this, was so people couldn't take advantage of his willingness to take things at face value and thus take advantage of him and use him for their own ends. That and I want to make sure he has every opportunity he can get despite his condition, as he is at heart, a very caring and loving boy.

I dint think autism necessarily has to limit what someone can do with their life and I believe that there are sometimes consequences of the condition that can be turned to their advantage which I personally believe is a valuable life lesson for all.

Happy days

 

Lazy parents are something that can completely get on board with shaming. People often talk about professionals misdiagnosing when most professions don't even actually benefit from doing so. Most professionals are not eager to slap labels on children, but when parents bring their children to psychologist and insist that something is wrong because they have not taken the time to instill order in their own home, then professionals often suggest possibilities and the parents take it as a diagnosis and run with it.

So there are definitely two sides to this issue.

 

I have a cousin with asperger's. I'm not sure if I have autism or not. I know a good deal about it.

 

I've got Aspergers, myself, and I'd sooner die than have anybody in real life (outside my family) find out. I can admit it here, because none of you know me, but I hate having it. When they told me, I didn't even want to show my face outside the house, because that's all I needed was one more thing to make my life hell.