UN says end cure culture and Listen to Autistics about Autism

jumpingjacktrash:

nothingisalliknowisnothing:

From the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

“The autism spectrum should be understood from a broader perspective, including in research. We call for caution about enthusiastic attempts to find the causes of autism and ways to ‘cure’ autism through sophisticated but not necessarily ethical research. Autism as a condition is a critical challenge for modern health systems, in which we
need to ensure that the practice and science of medicine is never again
used to cause the suffering of people.

More investment is needed
in services and research into removing societal barriers and
misconceptions about autism. Autistic persons should be recognized as
the main experts on autism and on their own needs, and funding should be
allocated to peer-support projects run by and for autistic persons.”

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15787&LangID=E

I discovered this because it was posted by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network facebook page.

holy crap this is so important

adhd spring cleaning gothic

adhdpie:

adhdpie:

you have 12 socks left. none of them match.

you dust the lid of a box and open it for the first time in years. when you gaze upon the objects inside, a soft golden glow reflects upon your face.
Everything in the box is absolutely vital to your existence. You do not know how you went on without them nor how you could part with them now. You smile gently, your eyes smoldering. No; you could not throw away a single thing in this box. You close the box again with a sense of satisfaction and return it to its place. The smolder in your eyes dies away.

according to your mobile phone, 3 days have passed.you have no idea what is in the box you just put back.

there is a book on every hard surface in your home. Each book is different. Each book has a bookmark at page 271. when you look directly at the book on your coffee table, it disappears.

you start to organize your desk. you start to organize your nightstand. you start to organize your dresser. you start to organize your kitchen cabinets. you start to organize your bathroom sink. you start to organize.

you are playing a cell phone game on your couch. nothing is organized.

your room is finally clean – all surfaces are dusted, all clutter is gone, all clothes out of sight, all books off the tables. Everything is gone. (You think you can hear the faint sound of chewing from the dresser drawers.)

you have 27 socks spread out on your clean floor. none of them match.

i edited it and now it’s somehow creepier

Also, you say spring cleaning when this is just me trying every day to do something. Is every day spring? Am I cleaning? Everything is important, especially that random box stuff and all those halfread books. Oooh, Candy Crush.

ollibean:

I tell my story because society forces me to reclaim my voice. Amy Sequenzia Ollibean Logo – a circle made up of equal signs in different shapes and sizes. ollibean.com/living-my-disabled-life

jabberwockypie:

fittingoutjane:

adhdteacherthings:

I used to do things pre-diagnosis and think to myself, “adults don’t do that.” Adults don’t scooter on the backs of shopping carts or lay upside down on the couch or jump up and down while watching TV. But after I got diagnosed with ADHD I realized that adults DO all those things, cuz here I am doing all these things and I’m an adult.

So basically what I’m trying to say is, don’t shame yourself into not doing harmless things that make you happy just cuz you think people your age shouldn’t do it.

It’s not just the harmless happy things, it can also be things you need. I used to think about ways that I could manage my ADHD better, or ways that other people could help me, and I’d draw a blank.

I’ve recently realized that this is because I had a lot of ideas when I was younger, and people told me I was wrong. No, I couldn’t write my homework down on my hand, I should use a notebook that could get lost at any moment. No, I couldn’t have my school assignments reduced to a more manageable length as long as my test scores stayed up. No, that’s not the way, that’s too weird, fix the problem, but NOT LIKE THAT.

Sometimes, those things you aren’t supposed to do are exactly what you need to do.

Also, lying upside-down activates your parasympathetic nervous system.

Which is REALLY USEFUL if you’re ramping up to a panic attack, because it’ll help stop it!

… I never realised my lifelong habit of lying on sofas and chairs almost upside down was unconscious anxiety management. Noted.

geekysciencemom:

Credit to Beth Wilson.

I think I would like this better if the ‘group picture’ contained the first two figures. Yes, there are autism stereotypes, but the implication by their exclusion is that these two do not exist in our multifaceted community, when the reality is, they are just as much a part of us as any other. So yes, portray diversely, but don’t leave those autistics who fit the stereotypes out in the cold. I’ve seen this kind of gatekeeping in queer communities, too, often to exclude people who fit the stereotypes about queer people too closely. The moment we tell people they’re letting us down just for existing and living as their true selves, the more we define a rigid idea as to what it means to be autistic, and become hypocrites. We should never make an autistic feel they have to change their movements, their dress, their special interests, stimming behaviours, or speech because they are overrepresented. Don’t make that autistic person feel shame because of who they are. That’s what neurotypicals do to us every day.

So, for the autistics who wear headphones, who love trains, who are ‘little professors’ with encyclopaedic knowledge of baseball stats or vacuum cleaners or planes, who are maths prodigies or synaethetes or have eidetic memories or are savants – YOU ARE WELCOME. YOU BELONG. YOU ARE JUST AS AUTISTIC AS ANY OF US. WE LOVE YOU.

Hooking my way into 2018. Going to the yarn store yesterday 20 mins before closing was a GOOD IDEA because I’m no longer destroying my hands and I’m 22 rows into Mini Rings of Change (which may turn into the massive paid version if my yarn stocks and patience hold out). So yeah, starting 2018 by redirecting self-harming stims and crocheting a massive fuck-off rainbow doily that may in the end cover our whole double bed.

*devil horns* I know how to ring the changes, peeps. Rock on.

candidlyautistic:

Hi friends!

My name is Samantha, and I am
asking for your help. I’m facing student loan repayments that could halt my
academic work studying the social psychology of autistic culture. If you’d like
to help or learn what it’s like to be disabled, autistic, and in college, keep
reading!

About Me

I’m an autistic woman double
majoring in psychology and sociology. Advocacy work for the autistic community
is my greatest passion. My hope is that as an autistic myself, I can introduce
the broader perspective of the autistic community into the study of autism. I
want to fill the holes left by other researchers. I want to ask the hard
questions and study overlooked topics from a sociology perspective.

But now I need our
community’s help.

Here’s what happened

Last semester my autoimmune
disease flared, my chemotherapy failed, and that left me unable to leave the
house for classes. At the worst point of the semester I could not leave my bed.
I failed every course for the semester. Not because my work was bad, not
because I couldn’t study, but because my health held me prisoner. My student
advisor is helping me retroactively medically withdraw from my classes, but
academia moves slowly when it comes to fixes and very quickly when it comes to
payment deadlines.

The school returned $1600 to
the loan company and added that sum as a $1600 debt on my student account. This
means that I cannot return to school until the debt is fully paid.

I learned about this by an
automatic email sent after the school closed for the holidays. Not exactly the
present I asked Santa for this year.

A medical withdraw fixes the
debt, but it takes months to process.

In the meantime, I have until January 14^th to pay the hold or I will not be able to attend school. I
just don’t have $1600.

And that’s why I’m reaching
out to you now.

How You Can Help

I have no idea if I can raise
this money in two weeks. I’m terrified of not being able to.

But now that we have a working treatment for my disorder, I have to try. Will you
try with me?

PayPal donations can be made
to candidlyautistic@gmail.com. At this point, donation websites will take
to long to transfer funds.

Here’s my promise to you: I
will be transparent with donations, replying in the comments of this post with
a running tally of donations. Any help is appreciated.

Sincerely and Gratefully,

Samantha

So I’m on chapter 8 of Into the Drowning Deep, and I have a question: did you mean to code Olivia as autistic? I’m autistic and I see so many of my own little ticks and quirks in her it’s astounding.

seananmcguire:

acanofwyrmz:

seananmcguire:

I didn’t mean to code Olivia as autistic, no: Olivia is autistic, full stop. She says as much a little later in the book, when she’s talking about her relationship with her parents (mostly her father) and some assumptions they made about her future before she was old enough to shut that shit down.

This was so important to me reading this book. As someone with Asperger’s, it happens so often that a character is speculated within a book/show/movie to be on the spectrum but the character denies it/other characters deny it/or later the writers/actors deny it. And it hurts. Like when people speculated Cumberbatch’s Sherlock was on the spectrum and Benedict said no, because he’s met people with autism and they can’t hope to be that advanced. Or how Will Graham literally says on the NBC show Hannibal that he is on the spectrum but actors/writers later say he isn’t and other characters say he isn’t because he has empathy, playing into the myth that people on the spectrum lack empathy. It hurts to think you have representation and then have that jerked violently out of your hands with the erroneous claim ‘people on the spectrum can’t do this/be like this.’

having a character explicitly and uncontestedly being on the spectrum was so important to me.

That is honestly why I try not to code people unless they’re at a place where diagnosis is not available to them, and then to be upfront about their neurological state when asked. (Example: Jack Wolcott, from the Wayward Children series, has the same kind of OCD I do. But she’s never been diagnosed. She was too young when she left for the Moors, and when she got back, she had better things to worry about. So she’s technically coded OCD rather than explicitly OCD, but I talk a lot about translating my own experiences onto her.)

Olivia is autistic. Everything about her was written with that in mind, including the fact that she’s a very successful media personality who dresses as Emma Frost for conventions, and these are absolutely 100% things that autistic people can do, because I have met real, live, non-fictional autistic people who do them.

So I’m on chapter 8 of Into the Drowning Deep, and I have a question: did you mean to code Olivia as autistic? I’m autistic and I see so many of my own little ticks and quirks in her it’s astounding.

seananmcguire:

ladyrpgr:

seananmcguire:

I didn’t mean to code Olivia as autistic, no: Olivia is autistic, full stop. She says as much a little later in the book, when she’s talking about her relationship with her parents (mostly her father) and some assumptions they made about her future before she was old enough to shut that shit down.

Excuse my ignorance – what’s the difference between somebody being “coded” and actually being it? I was under the apparently erroneous impression that they were basically the same thing, only coded being used exclusively for fictional characters showing real life disorders/sexualities/whatever.

Frequently when a character is “coded” one way or another, it’s to get the schema of a group of people without actually having to commit to the realities of fictional diversity.

Example: Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory is coded autistic. He does things that are stereotypical “autistic behaviors,” as interpreted by the mainstream media; he talks in the “ha ha funny” way that is often used for neuroatypical characters.

But.

The creators will not say that Sheldon is autistic, because then the fact that much of the show’s humor (”humor”) is at his expense would be visibly and blatantly cruel. Look at us, mocking an autistic person for being themselves, aren’t we swell people ha ha ha oh wait. So they basically say “no, he could be just like everyone else, he could be ‘normal,’ so when everyone is awful to Sheldon, he’s bringing it on himself,” while still writing the character using a set of schema and narrative shorthands that makes it very, very clear that we’re supposed to laugh at people mocking an autistic man.

(Sheldon is also an asshole. You can be autistic and still be an asshole. But consider how hard it is to have conversations like “knowing what dinner will be at 9am is important for my mental health because I have food insecurity” if you’re not allowed to say the words “mental health” or “food insecurity.”)

I saw something earlier today that pointed out that mocking people for behaviors we code as autistic–special interests, stimming, etc.–is an asshole move whether they have a diagnosis or not, and that is absolutely true. But mocking the “weirdo” is still considered socially acceptable in so many circles, and that means that characters get coded as autistic, or OCD, or queer, or Jewish, and then never actually given that identity, all to make them “other.”

It’s the acceptable face of bigotry. It’s also why you have a lot of really intense same-gender relationships in mainsteam tv shows (Rizzoli & Isles, White Collar, etc.) that never turn romantic or sexual, because they want the numbers queer viewers bring, but they don’t want to lose conservative viewers. Before you think, ‘oh, but they’re just really good friends!’ remember that any relationship on tv betwen opposite-gender people is all about ‘will they/won’t they’ from day one (The X-Files, Castle, Bones, etc.) If you think this is an exaggeration, consider the amount of shit Elementary has gotten from trying to keep Sherlock/Joan platonic. It’s only okay to have queer-coded dynamics if you never intend to pay them off with actual representation. Some shows try to do this right, but are actively stopped by the network (Leverage) and others give representation, but then invoke the Bury Your Gays trope as the endgame (Buffy). Things are slowly improving. Both the Librarians and Brooklyn 99 have given us bi representation in the last year. But there’s a long way to go.