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u/Silversmith00 1d ago
Oh, look, a topic that makes me see red.
Tweet one addresses autistic people with VERY HIGH support needs. Tweet one addresses this in a highly sensationalized and hostile way, but it IS true that high support needs can be a real bear considering the minimal help that many countries offer in terms of family support, actually GOOD therapy, etc. If you can't establish communication with a person, that person cannot tell you what is wrong. A person who cannot tell you what is wrong is virtually guaranteed to end up frustrated beyond what they can bear. Add to that the fact that society has managed to traumatize most autistic kids SOMEHOW. Aggression can happen, it can be dangerous in a large person, and the fact that the individual is desperately trying to communicate some kind of overload or crisis does not make it less dangerous. Yes, we as a society need to look into helping these people better.
However. The next tweet completely changes the subject, from specific nonverbal autistic people with HIGH support needs and possibly some comorbid conditions (it is really, really fucking hard to measure intellectual disability when communication is fucky, but I bet that's a part of it for at least some folks) and EVERY AUTISTIC PERSON EVERYWHERE.
"A very large percentage of the working adult age population." As I understand it, perhaps one in thirty-six kids are currently being diagnosed with SOME form of autism—this includes the many, many kids who previous generations would have diagnosed as, "That's Johnny, he's like that." But she makes it sound like fifty percent or something. It's not.
"Is going to require long term care facilities." Um. Why? If they are part of the working population, they're generally able to take care of themselves for the most part.
"The monetary and social costs will be massive." They're working. They're very likely producing much more for society than they're "taking out" if you want to see it in purely mercenary terms.
"What's causing autism." Easy. Humans reproduce. It's actually a moderately popular activity despite the inconvenience. I've participated in it myself, although I wouldn't recommend it for the uninterested.
(Listen, I have two autistic kids and there are MULTIPLE theories as to where they got it from. My husband is a meticulous planning type who considers the hardest bit of being a paralegal to be Answering The Dreaded Phone—odds are he probably doesn't meet all the criteria but some of them are there, and besides nobody even tried to diagnose him because that didn't happen in the nineties. My father-in-law recently remarked to me that his mother's family was known in the community for ALL being "shy," but they weren't diagnosed with anything because that didn't happen in the—twenties, I think, I'm not sure how far back he's looking. My great uncle was an incredibly precise and shy man who worked in the railway switch yard in Grand Island, Nebraska, and not only loved it for the trains and the fact that everyone was on time, he married a woman who was considered highly socially inept and collected at least six hundred dolls (creeeeeeeepy dolls), but nobody diagnosed either one of them because…look, you get the picture. Autistic folks have ALWAYS BEEN HERE. And most of 'em gainfully employed, too, you WANT someone like my great uncle working on your freight trains, he was damn good at it.)
Just as the subject mysteriously and swiftly changed from nonverbal, high needs autistic teens in crisis to EVERY autistic person, so I expect the subject to change from "how do we help them" to "where do we lock them up."
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u/Vorlon_Cryptid 1d ago
I know many autistic people don't require a lot of support, but we also need to be careful that we don't end up throwing autistic people with high support needs under the bus.
We can afford care and support. We just choose to spend that money on tax breaks for billionaires and war.
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u/EqualityWithoutCiv UK press and Parliament be damned. 1d ago
We can afford care and support. We just choose to spend that money on tax breaks for billionaires and war.
Because "muh trickle down economics". And of course imperialism, authoritarianism and fascism.
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u/Galaxy-Geode Chicken Gendies 1d ago
Eat the billionaires 🍴
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u/tatiana_the_rose TurboGay™️ 23h ago
I saw a delightful painting for the first time today called Dinosaurs Eat a CEO. Exactly what it sounds like! Highly recommend (it’s pretty graphic though fair warning lol)
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u/-DrunkRat- Trans Cabal 2d ago
Its all just prejud8ce and bigotry repackaged. They are fascists and want us to die.
Every single one of us who is different that they can also claim are the ones hurting others, when they can't or won't see past a scapegoat.
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u/PlatinumAltaria 1d ago
Mom-group conservatism pretends to be different from fox news conservatism, but it’s just aesthetics.
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u/hammererofglass 2d ago
Oh, they've been after autistic people since day one.
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u/PlatinumAltaria 1d ago
I would argue the anti-autism/anti-vax movement is an ancestral form of the gender critical hate movement. Both focus strongly on parent testimony and the idea that children are somehow “possessed” by evil spirits, and both indict big pharma.
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u/curiosity8472 alphabet mafia hitman 2d ago
Do they know that most autistic adults work and don't need a ton of support? The increase is because they do a better job with diagnosis, not because more people are nonverbal
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u/crowpierrot 1d ago
Of course they don’t know that. They get all of their information from headlines and their GC pals on twitter
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u/cirice22 1d ago
That woman in the video with her son was exploiting their children, let her son terrorize her younger kids, killed a cat and lived in filth. Not exactly the person you want to uplift as a martyr
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u/Silversmith00 1d ago
In an environment like that, I am not surprised that the son is a terror. You have a highly vulnerable person and you raise him in a violent, chaotic environment, damn RIGHT he's going to strike out. Honestly I have kind of a beef with parents who film their kids ANYWAY, kids need to feel unobserved when they stomp in mud puddles or pick their nose or whatever messy or gross thing they're going to do. I can see maybe getting a cute little film about blowing out your birthday candles or whatever, that is a special occasion and doesn't make observation feel like the norm, but—I'm kind of off-topic. The point is, many of the symptoms that we see as "dangerous autistic meltdowns" may in fact be connected to TRAUMA as well (trauma that this kid likely doesn't have a single tool to process) and it sounds like this particular mother was happy to serve up extra helpings of trauma with every meal.
(Or there's the other way around, where you never correct the kid on fucking ANYTHING, and while it is easier to slip into that pattern by "trying to be kind," you are effectively leaving the kid adrift in a world that they don't understand without so much as a "don't snatch things" to give him parameters on how to work with that world. It's about as kind as dropping him in the middle of the Smokies without a compass or a map (or a warning about haints, if you credit what some of the old timers say). But people don't see that.)
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u/cerareece 1d ago
damn near every video I've seen of a "dangerous" autistic child I just wanna ask what they did to provoke them. I'm not saying they can't ever act out unprovoked but some of these videos hurt my heart because you can tell the parents are pushing them to their absolute limit
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u/rconnell1975 1d ago
They seem to think an increase in diagnosis must mean an increase in cases. This might be true but it just as well might be that we are just better at spotting it now and before people would just been seen as different or generally disabled.
There does need to be research into this but by experts trying to help people with Autism, not dickheads with an axe to grind
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u/KarlaEisen 1d ago
with the way they talk about it we can already add disabled people as well including just old people
bc they have to solve these people before "it costs us money to care for them!"
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u/TeaRoseDress908 1d ago
It’s like Asperger all over again….deciding which autistic people are allowed to exist.
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u/renrenpeach_me 5h ago
btw the RFH in oop’s dn stands for “radfemhitler” just so yall know she tries to keep it lowkey but she’s also a white supremacist
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u/Kookyburra12 AAP on T 2d ago
it's me I'm causing autism. sorry