Lucas

Ok, about a third of children diagnosed early have the diagnosis removed. But this is not done because they are no longer Autistic but because they never were. The diagnosis removal is retrospective because the differences between some Autistic and non-Autistic children at that age are not disparate enough. Diagnosis is only made this early as a kind of 'on the safe side' pre-emptive. This is why I'm very suspicious of the attempt by North American Autism organisations to shift so much emphasis toward early diagnosis: the more children diagnosed this early, the more diagnoses get removed and people claim that this is because X and Y therapies are working when it isn't the case at all. The US *does not* understand Autism or sensory issues any better; it's simply that their de-regulated health system allows quackery greater leeway. There is very little evidence about how Autism actually affects the senses and even less on therapies centred on assisting with those issues. Whilst happy to use this topic to push all kinds of therapies, US organisations couldn't possible show any less interest in research on the matter which would in all likelihood debunk most of the therapies. Articles about "I tried this and this and it worked" are infuriating because they advocate a complete abandonment of ethics and evidence in deciding how decisions should be made about Autism and Autistic people. Big pharma has enough problems even with the considerably higher regulation it gets compared to little pharma, so just imagine the amount of predatory fraud that goes on in the alt-med industry. Despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary, people still see snake-oil salesmen as 'heroes' or 'mavericks'. Even if it were all perfectly safe placebo there is still harm; the justifications for these therapies involve categorically misrepresenting what Autism is. If you took your information about Autism purely from them, you'd think bowel disorders, food intolerances, allergies, seizures, hair falling out, rashes and late onset were recognised symptoms. Of those features which are symptoms, there's a failure on the part of non-Autistics to empathise with Autistics and this failure is not recognised whilst the apparent lack of empathy from Autistics is exaggerated. The idea that a person might have a good reason for doing something if they are Autistic and what they are doing can be described as 'autistic behaviour' is hardly even entertained. When the alt-med movement targets Autistics and features of Autism, they act with utter prejudice, dismissing any possible reasonable explanation that reveals some action as actually being a reasonable one in the circumstances from the Autistic point of view. People do not know what they want most of the time. They do not know what they are even thinking or feeling most of the time. But they try anyway to create the impression that they are more confident and have more self-control than they really do, when actually they are ambivalent, indifferent and confused most of the time. Everyone is disabled, but their success in society apparently seems to depend on their ability to hide it. As an Autistic I always knew I was disabled in this way, but it's simply in my nature to not disguise something like this. People take advantage of it and this seems to happen on a massive scale in regards to Autism treatments. We're often convinced too that these confident and secure people can make us just like them. Harsh experiences have taught me that they can't make me like that because even they are not like that; it's an act they put on in the same way I put on a "I'm a typical person" act when ever I go out the house. They can just do it longer and it's less interesting. You can tell what kind of person someone thinks you are by the kind of person they try to be with you. I wonder if they know we're all just pretending? Autism treatments invariably focus on the inability or refusal of Autistics to be actors, or act a certain part, rather than their actual skills or development. When they finally make a proper commitment to evidence and ethics like any other medical intervention or educational method, I'll have no problem with them.

I'm still doing it. After having this GIF image for a long time, I've become convinced that Pandas drink like this, so I do it often.

The only problem I've had with the NAS Think Differently/I Exist adverts has been the lack of context given. It's no good saying support and understanding can make all the difference without suggesting an example. For me, when I have a period of hyper-sensitivity a town or city enviroment can be a problem. But in the countryside or car the experience is wonderful. I'm gonna write them an e-mail pointing out the lack of such an example in the adverts because they give the impression that each issue they talk about is caused by Autism in isolation to what's going on around a person.

It looks like Action For Children has filed a false copyright claim(under terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and it's UK counter-part, Fair Use covers parody AND criticism for use of copyrighted material). YouTube is obligated to remove the video without investigation pending a counter-notice being filed.

If I hear or read the "You have no experience of severe Autism" canard or any variation of it ever again I'm going to walk in front of a train.

I remember I went to a charity in my town called Carers Resource for help filling in my form and I was there for an hour and a half describing things I'd never told anyone about how I percieve things and why it causes difficulty. I was very happy with that until the Department for Work and Pensions decided they needed to send a doctor to interview me at home and I needed my mum as an appropriate adult. The doctor was just a normal doctor and knew nothing about ASD. So I had to repeat it all again in front of my mum, who never knew the extent of my issues or how long I had been having them. She always assumed I was so high-functioning that she didn't need to be involved in Autism matters. What I described also seemed to profoundly affect the doctor, who started being a lot less noisy and assertive and was virtually a red-faced mouse when he left. As horrible as the initial experience was, I spent the rest of the afternoon smiling and watching films on my PC because of the knowledge that for the first time I had got a professional to see the reality of 'mild' Autism.

In 2006 I attended Finchale Training College in County Durham for disabled adults. It was a residential placement. I was very happy for the first three months. But after recieving news that the family dog died, I had a bad week. From then on, it gradually got worse. My work suffered and so did I. What I thought strange was that the psychologist, counsellor, section head, my tutor and the care staff thought I was improving the whole time. It was only in the later months that they cottoned on to the trouble I was really having and how hidden from them it was. I remain baffled, but the only conclusion I've been able to draw is that I was gradually diverting mental resources to being more presentable than I was to myself. In the Spring and Summer, I stimmed whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted. The college had recently been subject to arbitrary budget cuts and government directives which cancelled services and facilities such as driving lessons, internet access in the dorms and the licensed bar(meaning the people with alcohol problems got worse because they were drinking alone in their rooms rather than among people). I think I know why I was having problems: everyone else was. I was changing my behaviour in response to people who were stressed, irritable and likely to painfully raise their voices if they got impatient with me. I was suffering, but so were they. My natural adaptation was mistaken for improvement in my confidence when in fact it was being cracked. The state of Finchale as it suffered under government interference was reflected in all that were a part of it, including me.

The Daily Mail has yet to even say they'll consider my equally inaccurate and inflammatory article claiming that parents are in a massive-conspiracy against their disabled children, so we can be sure that the editor has already made up his mind. Thank you Mr Dacre.

I've read through the thread and still have absolutely no understanding of what is going on. If ignorance is bliss, Autistic 1 : Neurotypical 0

Simin Baron-Cohen has apparently been misrepresented in the media(again) and responds here: http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/20...not-cancer.html

To my knowledge the test also fails to recognise ambiverts, which I think many Aspies especially are.

Chuck Norris' Jungian Personality Type is, Furious Intimidating Silent Terrifying - FIST -300 300 300 300 This comes as no suprise to anyone, but Chuck came as a suprise to it. Not many people know of the Jungian Archetype 'Texas Ranger' because no one else has ever expressed it.

Yes it does happen very suddenly. I experience it most with drinks. When I'm thirsty I always get a small drink of water to see how it tastes first before then doing the same test with fruit squash, juice or milk. I have to do this just to make sure I'm not going to cough it back up or breath it into an airway accidently. When I drink, I drink quickly in case the taste and texture changes. I only have this problem with room-temperature drinks, hot or very cold drinks are no problem. I don't dehydrate as much when I remember to keep a tray of ice in the fridge.

Five years ago it was scotch eggs, now I have absolutely no idea why I liked them. I even think they're a bit disgusting, horribly mouth-drying and hard to swallow. Four years ago it was strawberrys, which whilst I still think are nice I seem to pick up the sour taste a lot more now. About once every 15 months this changes. Now eggs have suddenly become as tasty as mythical golden apples. I'm sure I remember after my scotch egg phase faded that eggs were messy, bitter and inconsistent. They now taste and feel NOTHING like that. I wish I knew how to control my sensory rotation totally; I could make the healthiest foods delicious and saturated, salt-infested, sugar-ridden rubbish seem as distusting as it really is. In no time I'd lose weight, improve my skin, sleep patterns and generally feel better.

I realised long ago the only thing I can protect myself with are the secrets I keep. I keep my diagnosis secret and if someone doesn't need to know or they are not so experienced with Autism that they can't spot an Autistic, they won't be told.

As a child even after learning about Autism, I didn't have an opinion on 'Autistic person' VS 'person with Autism'. They would have appeared to be superficial and semantic. I think most children would see it that way. This only changed when I learned that there are people that believe every internal aspect that makes me who I am is in fact a prison restraining an alternative-reality version of me that is not Autistic. They claim this distinction by making sure 'person' and 'Autism' are two entirely seperate things. You can not be successful and Autistic, unless you are successful in spite of Autism rather than because of it or because it isn't the wheel on which success and failure is determined in a lot of Autistics. For the great majority, the described 'level of functioning' has never been an accurate predictor of success, but how we are recieved by others is. Autism doesn't define everything that I am. I'm of Celtic-descent, British, libertarian, agnostic, working-class, heterosexual, don't like sports, do like dancing, favourite colour orange. But most of these things are not inheirent aspects of me; they are mostly ideas and social constructs. Some of them are even heavily influenced by Autism. I'm Autistic before I am most of them. I can change many of them by choice, but Autism is one of the very few that if it could be changed would challenge the very idea of what identity is. People sun-bath to darken their skin and in some Asian countries skin-creams that brighten the skin are quite popular. But the idea seems to horrify us in Britain; last year such a cream was released and an advert was run for it which attracted a lot of complaints for it's 'racism', despite many British people regularly using skin products to darken their skin. This is what happens when foundations of identity are laid so thickly on something as superficial as skin colour. Parents influence the descent of their children when they choose each other as partners, and that too hasn't been without controversy. Since then, ideas about identity have focused a lot less on descent. For me, Autism is the one immovable object. Most of the other problems I have with the article tend to be that it isn't specific enough. But that's a problem to be found in just about every informational leaflet about Autism.

This has been in circulation for years and was written by a Neurotypical. I've always disagreed with a lot of it as have others. A spoof version has also been written where every Autistic child wishes you knew they really want to watch Smokey and The Bandit 3 right now.

For a quick lesson on it: the theory about langauge shaping patterns of thought is a very old one, but practical use for it was an idea that came out of the Frankfurt school, attented by Sigmund Freud among others, as a means of covertly establishing a dominant ideology(Marxism in their case). Langauge does change over time, but it does so as the result of the marketplace of ideas driving the neccessity to come up with new ways of describing ideas. It's undirected and uncontrolled. The idea behind the theory is that instead of langauge being allowed to change as the result of circulated ideas, langauge should be directly controlled and the effect will be vice-versa: it will control the circulation of ideas. Orwell called it Newspeak in his books and articles, but it wasn't long before the term Newspeak was corrupted by the same influence it's meant to describe and instead became a label for "something we don't like" rather than 'a method of controlling ideas'. Facism(how often is that word misused?), socialism and patriotism too had their meanings intentionally altered so barely anyone knew what the ideas they described were. In different cultures, they ended up having very different commonly thought meanings. In the 80s some bright spark managed to renew the original meaning by coining the term Political Correctness and fixing the original Newspeak definition to it, but now yet again it's been changed. Depending on who you ask it means "an exaggerated politeness", "the 'normal' political view" or "the centre ground of politics" and "facism". The most simple example of it comes from 1984; instead of a Ministry of Defence we have a Ministry of Peace and it's their job to wage endless war. The message is 'War is Peace'. It's ridiculous but to achieve such an end the instances leading up to it would be incremental. I suppose anyone that read 1984 would have thought George Bush's arguement about why broken pariah states must be invaded was disturbing "We have to fight the enemy over there so we don't have to fight them here at home". It's a War = Peace arguement. Bush is trying to make the idea of war acceptable by suggesting that what it means is different to what it actually does mean. It argues that black is white, up is down and that absolutely everything has a 'middle ground' that is the only place a reasonable person would hold. Sorry for going totally off-topic.

To summarise my point for Mossgrove, because it's not so much a pointy sword as much as it is a pitch-fork: two rusty prongs. The first is the evidence regarding 'degrees of Autism'. I don't dispute that it might exist, just that no one ever points it out; they don't point it out because I don't think they've actually ever seen any. It's purely because of the 'hierarchy spectrum' myth which originated ironically as one of those 'myth-dispelling facts' about all Autistics being the same and has itself become one of the myths which desperately needs another myth-dispelling fact to come along and tackle it, hopefully without propagating itself into yet another self-sustaining myth. I don't believe that such evidence does exist however because I think it requires us to first understand what Autism is(as opposed to what causes it), which we frankly don't. Please don't misuse the term 'political correctness' like so many trash tabloids do because they can't sell their rubbish by honest dispassionate fact-reporting; it has a very specific meaning and origin. Political correctness is about the expression of ideas through langauge and altering perception through means of langauge: so when people think political correctness is something other than what it really is; it means political correctness is working. Orwell knew it was only a matter of time before his 'Newspeak' term for it would also be subject to the effects of the theory. You have the right to express an opinion, but it can be criticised and sometimes people will agree to disagree. This is not the case on matters of science, which is what the question 'are there degrees of Autism?' is. When it's science, there has to be definitive conclusion. It's so important because decisions are made about people that rarely get a say because of facts that are wrong or merely the opinion of a talking head. The second issue is harm or no harm? As I said, even if I and those that share my views on Autism are wrong: have they caused harm and if so, is it more than the views we so angrily oppose? If that is also the case, is it by a lot or by a little? I think the exact opposite answers would be true: the ideas about Autism held by myself have not caused any harm, will not cause any harm and the views about Autism I angrily oppose have caused FAR greater harm to myself and other Autistics than I ever could have dreamed to cause just by holding the position "I don't want to be cured and I don't think anyone else should be either because of X and Z".

Part of the reason why Aspies tend to be targets not only for casual bullying but extremely hostile bullys is because of the common non-reaction to it. Bullys want to see a reaction in their victims and when Aspie teens don't give them it, it's very frustrating for them so they try even harder sometimes. This can get to a 'tip-over' point where there is an incident and unfortunately the Aspie involved takes all the rap for it. Bullying must be stopped as soon as it comes to light and schools should get out of this ridiculous mentality where they refuse to accept bullying happens on their turf or they insist it's so insignificant or 'just kids being kids'. Unfortunately my own experience of going from teens to adulthood isn't positive. The biggest inhibitor to learning how to use the bus was my mother very myopically saying untrue things about 'idiots that hang around the bus station' and causing me alarm that was never neccessary. The second would be that no one taught me how the system works: in some cities you have to signal for the bus at the bus stop to tell the driver not to drive past, but this was never the case in Harrogate, so I once spent a very distressed three hours in Leeds failing to get a bus to stop and take me home. No one told me I had to press the red button when my stop is coming up, I assumed that because the buttons were red that they were for emergencies like on trains. Basically, the two big barriers for an Autistic person learning something is the same for Neurotypicals: lack of information and inaccurate information. It's just that how Autistics interprete information is different and has a wider impact on how we function.

A recent study(as usual, over-simplified and misreported in the Daily Mail) finds that men cannot pick up on flirting signals from women and often misinterprete them. They either never realise a lady fancies them or they ALWAYS think every lady fancies them. The study elaborates on social signals in general and how men fail to detect them. This sounds though like something that has been generally known for a long time, but it's implications never seem to be considered in the field of Autism. Most diagnosed Autistics are male, how would this impact on the assumption that Autism causes social deficits when there is a gender bias? A lot of the studies I read don't appear to control for gender, only age. It's one of the many little niggles I have about the deficits talked about in association with Autism.

Bid, even if it isn't flagrantly obvious now you'd prefer to argue with something I explicitly didn't say or imply, your diagnosis and opinion is beside the point I was making. Everyone has an opinion, it is not without value but it certainly isn't worth as much as what is *known* about Autism. In the great mish-mash of opinions on Autism, the 'romantic' views held by Autistics(which you continue erroneously to place into a hierarchy tier system without justifying why) have never been something that can be described as harmful or leading to harm. The 'opposing' view on the other hand is what enabled a health crisis in the UK and will continue to do so here and elsewhere. It doesn't matter what you or I think, only the end results produced by those ideas. That there are Autistics who are extremely challenged isn't in doubt, the reasons why they are extremely challenged IS doubted and what is generally thought of them has caused harm and needs challenging even if it's from idealistic people who will turn out later to be wrong: at least they will have done LESS harm if not none.

To elaborate a bit; I have a certain view about Autism and others have different views. Avoid the fallacy of 'seeing all sides' because usually these are views which are mutually exclusive: if certain views about Autism are true, than mine is absolutely false and the reverse applies also. It isn't a matter of opinion. Ancedotes are not evidence, whilst they are important, they are not of equal value to evidence unless they are tested in the same way. The deficit in Autism is unknown, but everyone has an opinion on it anyway. Like if we didn't know blindness was a vision impairment and we instead defined blindness based on how blind people behave, which would ironically share some simularities with Autism on paper. The deficit is unknown and yet we still have a perniculous distinction between those who must so obviously have more of this unknown deficit whilst there are others that have less and these are easy to tell apart because those that have less of it are more able. Science isn't perfect but under neutral and controlled conditions the supposed deficit appears to be considerably less than what ancedotes often describe. Based on this I don't think anyone has ever observed an Autistic, nor has an Autistic that we know of ever had the chance to develop in a completely neutral enviroment where all the factors by coincidence(because no one is sure what those factors exactly are) favour Autistic-style development. But no, Autism research direction and decisions for the best part five decades in the UK has been driven entirely by those that think their sad sick stories count for everything and that the big gaps in what little we know can be adequately filled by emoting. It's only AFTER Autistics actually start getting heard that research into what Autism is, rather than what causes it(for the purpose of getting rid of it without knowing what it is) actually got moving. Don't take that the wrong way Bid: it's not specifically because Autistics themselves got heard, it's just that only when they did was there anyone to speak out against the status quo. It was all being directed by parents and parents are pretty much unchallengable in this regard. The only people with greater right to talk about Autism were Autistics themselves. Anyone at anytime before Autistics started writing on the internet could have challenged the whole 'cure at all costs' ideal; it's just that they would have to be arguing with shrill and angry parents that according to society's values are beyond reproach, even to the point that some still get away with dangerous experiments on their Autistic children. There are few things I can say that someone won't find anything to argue with, and I think most of above generally would even if it's come out of bottled up anger. But another one would that there is nothing an anti-cure individual can say whilst espousing their view that would cause or in any way contribute to a public health crisis. The same can not be said of the views on Autism I strongly disagree with, because they rely on making claims about a deficit they know next to nothing about.

Bid, I'll put it as simply as possible. The plural of ancedote, is not data.

Bid's own comments are pretty obvious. Bid knows I have not said anything even suggesting I work with/care for other Autistics, Bid knows I consider the mild/severe ergo 'profound' nonsense to be disingenous tripe(as does Elun) and Bid knows I simply can't answer unless I discuss it in the terms Bid has framed it or I repeatedly and earnestly point out what is wrong with the question.