bufferingscrambledegg

I can’t help but think of this

Having been forced to deal with them and organizations like them, I can safely say “No.”

It is obscenely worse.

You see, any idiot can look at things like “we need a cure” and their anti-vaccination advocacy and realize how ridiculously stupid that it. 

But that’s not what they sell to children’s hospitals. Instead, they push extremely unconventional medications to “help” autistic children (usually by sedating them into a catatonic state). I mentioned earlier that Risperidol eases overstimulation, but Autism Speaks doesn’t like Risperidol because it’s not controlling enough.

Autism Speaks absolutely loves “treatments” and “counselling” based around controlling everything autistic children do. Stimming, self-coping mechanisms, even strange and oddball quirks like kids who wear gloves everywhere, all of these are taken from them and doled out as privileges. It’s all about turning anything an autistic child likes into something they can control.

They treat these children like fucking animals and really enjoy forced isolation as a punishment. The IWK has several “Secure Isolation Rooms” that they will place autistic children in their care into for hours at a time unsupervised when they start acting out. And not “having a meltdown and might accidentally hurt someone” kind of acting out, even just mouthing off or getting lippy with a nurse.

I am personally convinced that the whole “cure” motto is a sham, because studies into Autism long ago disproved the theory that it was something that needed curing. Autism Speaks behaves more like a eugenics organization. And they are slippery bastards about it too. 

I’ve had the displeasure of having to interact with them directly because they have such a stranglehold on Nova Scotia’s youth mental health that any counseling group inevitably gets calls from them. Speaking to them and hearing the tone with which they spoke about these poor kids made my fucking skin crawl.

If you’re an autistic child and they’re talking to your parents or counselor about you, they won’t even use your name. The Child, The Patient, and The Boy/Girl are all common ways to refer to these kids. On several occasions they’ve referred to some kid as “it.”

I’ve said before that Tumblr especially doesn’t quit know what Autism Speaks is, and that’s because their public persona is very carefully crafted. Their reputation is so cartoonish that doctors who don’t know better won’t believe it, and so they swoop in with a lot of pretty language and faux-politeness. The skeezy, contemptuous way they behave when they think they’re doing business is enough to make you fucking vomit.

You quickly learn why so many hospitals willingly work with them. They are very good at getting their claws into health care organizations because they have this almost sinister “Friendliness” to them, and when you combine this with the fact that a lot of child psychologists have absolutely no concern for the actual well-being of children (just making the parents happy so they continue footing the bill) you have a recipe for a truly horrifying experience.

I can’t fully articulate just how sickening they are. Take however bad you THINK they are, multiply it by a hundred, and then think about how Quentin Tarantino would inflate that to make a movie out of it.

That’s how fucking gross and vile they really are when they think nobody is watching.

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.  And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all. 

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into. 

"'fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture"

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.  

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

Source ~ FB Lived Experience Educator

[Image ID: Ten images from Lived Experience Educator. Each are black with a rainbow squiggle running from the upper right corner down to the lower left corner in the background. White text boxes with black lettering.

Image 1: Autistic & ADHD burnout guide

including tips on supporting someone during burnout

@livedexperienceeducator

Image 2: signs of autistic/adhd burnout

exhaustion & fatigue

heightened sensory sensitivity

difficulty maintaining daily living skills like cooking, eating, hygiene

loss of spoken communication

changes are harder than usual

loss of interest in same foods

needing more alone time

Image 3: signs of autistic/adhd burnout

difficulty focusing more than usual

quicker to experience meltdowns

either feeling overwhelmed or underwhelmed

difficulty communicating with others

difficulty with memory

decisions are much harder

Image 4: causes of autistic/adhd burnout

sensory overload

intense levels of stress

sudden and lots of changes

barriers to support/lack of resources

masking

increased demands and expectations

suppressing stimming

Image 5: coping with autistic/adhd burnout

advocate for accommodations

reduce demands and expectations engage with your special interests stock up on your safe/same foods binge watch your same shows

use alternative communication

connect with community

set boundaries

Image 6: coping with autistic/adhd burnout

spend time stimming

attend to your sensory needs like creating a sensory safe space, reducing sensory input or increasing sensory input

ask for help and support at home

spend time with people who recharge you

take a break from social interactions

rest, rest and more rest

Image 7: reminders for autistic/adhd burnout

you are not a bad friend or partner if you need to withdraw and cancel plans.

there is nothing wrong with eating your same foods over and over again.

you're not lazy, demanding or too much if you need extra support during burnout

there is no time line on recovering from Autistic burnout, everyone needs a different amount of time to recover.

Image 8: It isn't the sole responsibility of Autistic and ADHD individuals to recover from burnout.

If burnout isn't caused by us but by our environment and society not accommodating our differences and needs, the responsibility of recovery shouldn't be on us alone either.

Image 9: supporting someone beforehand

create a burnout recovery plan together with tips on supporting us

learn to recognise our signs of burnout and offer support before we reach our limit

give us the space to recharge after coming home from work, school or other demands

support our special interests as they're a major part of our well-being; get involved, ask us questions or participate with our special interests too.

Image 10: supporting someone during

help us with our basic needs like food & hydration even if it's just reminders

make our environment more sensory friendly like reducing lighting

recognise that we may need alone time without from demands or expectations

don't ask too many questions, stick to yes/no questions

provide alternative forms of communications

A series of 8 tweets on the experience of being autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) by @pot8um on twitter, image descriptions below cut.