Edited by author 03-24-2007 10:23 PM
Hi again Ms Althoff,

Re how to help autistics, I also highly recommend you read a peer-reviewed journal article called "Toward a Behavior of Reciprocity", by Morton Ann Gernsbacher. I'll leave it to you to find it.

Hi Ms Althoff,

You are not going to help an autistic person when you assume she "hasn't the first clue". That assumption has been made about me (including as an adult) and many other autistic people. We are frequently assumed to lack alertness, comprehension, and sentience. These prejudicial (and anti-scientific, and unethical) assumptions do not help us. They harm us.

The below is a comment I left on my blog http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2007/03/v...lmontes-hidden.html , which serves as a response to your assumptions.

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I'm old enough to remember being considered to be inferior and suffering because I was female. It was just assumed that if I had any choice in the matter, I would prefer to be male. Who wouldn't?

Similarly, as I've written elsewhere, "My Member of Parliament recently told me that people casually and automatically assume she would prefer to be white, and incorrectly believe this would be an improvement".

Likewise, it was but recently assumed that homosexuals were miserable, dysfunctional, suffering, isolated, etc., as well as diseased. Who wouldn't want such a life of abject misery averted at the earliest possible moment?

Fortunately, we have in many ways mostly gotten over assuming that being male, white, and straight is the optimal outcome that everyone would wish to have.

Unfortunately, there is the persistent notion that disabled lives are inferior, impoverished and consist largely of suffering, and that disabled people are drains on society. Here is Catherine Frazee http://www.ccdonline.ca/publications/latimer-watch/1299.htm , former chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission (she has spinal muscular atrophy):

"The nondisabled population...is most guilty of a colossal failure of the imagination.... The inability to imagine what the disability experience is all about is translated into a kind of collective mythology that a person with disability lives a tragic life, marked by deprivation and suffering. This is simply not so and we have a responsibility to communicate that more and more daringly. We have to find more and more creative ways to express the positive powerful features of the disability experience and then to communicate these in every way possible."

This "colossal failure of the imagination" on the part of non-disabled people encompasses the assumption that disabled (including autistic) lives are not worth living, and that anything is better than being like us, and that so long as we are disabled, we must only and always strive to attain or at least imitate that non-disabled optimal life.

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Also see "The staggering cost of the chair- and dark-impaired" here http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=118 , and "Is this really neutral, everday terminology" here http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=122

I don't envy you a life of wishing that you were "normal" (whatever you believe that is) and a life of believing that those optimal "normal" people never have difficulties. You've also made me feel fortunate that I don't daily have to deal with people who pity me and assume my life is impoverished.

For a discussion from multiple perspectives re helping autistics, see http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?id=15 Some of the information is out of date, in some areas I now know a lot more than I did then, and all of it requires critical thinking. Also see this http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2007/02/e...ent-due-to-aba.html re false assumptions routinely made about autistics, about what we perceive and attend to, and how we learn.

Hello again. :)

My sincere apologies for apparently posting a "hit-and-run" and disappearing. I have many personal difficulties which often keep me from doing things I mean to do... (And speaking of those, I want to say, in reference to what I talk about below, in so far as *I* have any disability/disorder of my own (I have ADD and also struggle with depression and anxiety, which I have done now for many years), I'd be very glad for all of my difficulties to disappear tomorrow (how about yesterday!) and to be quite "normal" with regard to them--I've had just about enough of the whole idea of learning and growing from struggles and challenges--I'd chuck all of my inabilities to cope with the simple tasks of everyday life right out the window in a second given the opportunity.)

I have not managed to return to this page until today, so I have not read the page you recommended, but I will and then reply further.

But I would like to respond to a couple of things now.

First, AM Baggs' response to my series of rhetorical questions ("Because what wheelchair-bound person does not want to walk? What blind person does not want to see? What dyslexic person does not want to be able to read and learn with ease? What person with Asperger's does not want to be able to understand other people and interact with ease?") indicates I'm wrong to believe that disabled people would prefer not to deal with the challenges posed by their disabilities. I'm sorry, but that's something I find very hard to believe.

Are you going to seriously attempt to argue that most blind people would not prefer to see, most people who cannot walk would not prefer to do so, etc.? Because that just flies in the face of common sense and certainly my own experience of life on this planet and I daresay most people's! Am I to believe that the dozens and hundreds of organizations dedicated to finding cures and treatments for diseases and disabling conditions are all some kind of grand conspiracy by the non-disabled to force "normality" on everyone? (And just who is non-disabled anyway? At least by the ends of their lives, the vast, vast majority of people are affected by some sort of disabling problem, condition, disease, etc., and I'm sorry but I just haven't noticed a whole lot of them advocating to maintain their disabilities/diseases and have them not be cured or treated!)

In addition to what I said above about myself, I can speak about people I know... The mother of the girl I work with (Trami) is legally blind due of a degenerative condition, retinitis pigmentosa, and would she hesitate for a minute to have her full sight back? No. As I know I talked about in my first post, my sister is a severely learning disabled, developmentally disabled, legally-blind quadraplegic. Would she hesitate a moment to walk, to see, to read, to learn, to scratch her own ear or head or foot--to do any of the thousands of things she can't do? I can assure you she would not. She laments her limitations daily, sometimes hourly. It's not someone else doing the complaining, and it's not for any lack of being supported, cared for, encouraged, loved, etc., it's because she HATES, and I mean seriously HATES not being able to do what others can do. And who in the world could blame her?

Let's see who else... My mother is increasingly losing her hearing... Would she like to have it back? Yes. My best friend has a congenital problem with her legs/hips/feet that has made it very difficult and painful for her to walk long distances and to exercise. Would she like to see this problem disappear? Yes. And then there's Trami of course... She can't really tell us what she wants, but do I have any doubt that she would prefer not to be autistic? No, I don't. She very clearly wants to have what she sees everyone else having (who doesn't?). She wants to have a boyfriend, drive a car, have friends and go out and do things, have independence, be able to understand things she doesn't understand, learn things she presently is unable to learn, go to college, have a career... Her parents have done everything they can to give her the richest life possible, and certainly compared to what it could be, her life is very full, but it nevertheless remains very limited, both in ways she is aware of and in ways she can't even understand. Would she like us to do whatever we can to help her be able to do more than she can at present? I'd certainly have to say yes!

Well, you've noticed my tendancy to be long-winded... Anyway, I also wanted to ask about what Michelle said:

"She also reminds me of the extent to which community prejudices about autistics, and about how to help autistics, prevail. I hope she knows that her assumptions about autistic people are a series of now-common prejudices."

To which prejudices exactly are you referring? And how do you think autistic people ought to be helped? And most importantly to me personally, how should we help Trami--who is, as far as I can see, so far from you as to be virtually incomparable? How should we help Trami, who can't compose a gramatical sentence to save her life, who hasn't the first clue about most of what is going on around her, who can't have ordinary interactions with strangers because half of what she says is incomprehensible, who can't go out alone because she can't be relied on to look before crossing the street or not to yell and scream in a library or not to pester unwitting strangers with incomprehensible ramblings or worse yet not to get led off to the slaughter by some predator? Should I just let her do all of the "abnormal" things she does without comment or correction? Should I let her go about in some fantasy world in her own head, blithely unaware of the reality around her? Is that in her best interest? I'd like to know, how can I and others who care about her possibly help her without trying to make her be "more normal"? How should we help Trami who--unlike you--could not begin to participate in this very conversation about herself?

OK, well, enough for now. I will read the page you've recommended and get back to you.

Thank you, and I really am interested to know what you have to say about these things, and while my questions may seem to be rhetorical, they're really not.

--Madeline