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.
