I Can't Feel My Knees

"suicide prevention" is a phrase that means a lot of things. some of those things are inarguably good: providing effective crisis support, counseling, and material assistance (e.g. housing, food, DV shelters, financial help, childcare, caregiver support, healthcare access initiatives, job training/better unemployment support, free therapy, peer support spaces, addiction/harm reduction services, etc etc etc) to people in extreme distress tangibly reduces the likelihood that they will kill themselves. we should keep doing these types of things. they are not what I'm arguing against right now; they are voluntary and wanted by the people that utilize them.

but other times, the phrase is used to predicate the use of force and coercion toward particular outcomes, often by physically preventing access to means via confiscation of possessions and/or restricting movement and/or subjecting the person to 24/7 supervision and/or giving high doses of medications with severe long-term effects and/or the use of invasive and sometimes life-altering interventions such as ECT, all often without the patient's consent and many times despite explicit protestation.

The latter approach, in my view, is unethical and violent, full stop.

Forcing someone to undergo medical treatment against their explicit wishes is unethical. Restricting someone's movements even when they are not a threat to others is unethical. These are not universally held views, but they are common ones, especially among those on the left - these principles also undergird a lot of pro-choice, anti-carceral, and pro-immigration advocacy. But do you know why that is, what the underlying source of the ethical transgression is? Those actions subvert a person's control over their own body and life.

One of the most basic consequences of bodily autonomy, at its core, is that no one else owns your body except you. No one can ethically dictate what you do or don't do to your own body.

My contention is simply that this principle includes suicide and self-harm.

Now, to be clear, I believe it is deeply tragic when people kill themselves. If you're reading this and you feel even remotely suicidal, or if you ever do in the future, I hope very deeply and very sincerely that you decide to live. There are good parts about the world and you deserve to experience them. But that is not my choice to make for you. That shouldn't be anyone's choice but your own. I think it is ethically good to do everything possible to suggest and convince you that life is worth living, because I think life-affirmation in the form of promoting well-being, connection, and community is among the highest moral goods, but force and coercion shouldn't enter into it.

This is because I don't want to live in a society that has to force people to be alive when they don't want to be. Not in the sense of "I don't like how society operates so I don't want to live," to be clear; I am not suicidal and haven't been in a fairly long while (although I have struggled with thoughts to that effect in the past), but in the sense of "I feel it is imperative to create a society that people affirmatively want to live in." That's our most important social project; that is our most important work.

And this conclusion reveals something that fascist and capitalist societies are deeply invested in hiding: suicide, like other forms of social murder, is not a simple result of illness or mere unexplainable tragedy. High suicide rates are a statistical condemnation of a society which alienates us and erases our needs. Suicide as an act says far more about society than it says about an individual. It is a total rebuke of the world stated in such severe terms that the author signs it with their own life. This is why our sociopolitical system is so keen to not just prevent it by any means necessary but also to minimize discussion of it. It's an unavoidably bad look for those in power when suicide rates rise.

Cut to the next day and I was in the Students Union, when a friend came up to me and told me how funny that video was of me falling asleep in class was. What? I asked her about it, what did she mean, who made the video, and she realised I literally had no clue about it. Kindly, she told me who to talk to and I thanked her. I was already upset, but I knew it wasn't the messenger's fault. So, I took to Facebook and messaged the girl who made the video -- a girl on my table in the class from before. I asked her about it, and she admitted it right away -- she took the video on her phone during class and posted it to her snapchat. That's how the other girl saw it, not to mention countless others.

Sorting this out was an absolute toil. I felt betrayed and violated that someone would do that while I was obviously not in a position to have any say about it. I lost friendships with the people who took the girl's side, as if it was no big deal or "funny". I had to tell the lecturer about it, because let's face it, that's a shit thing to allow to happen during class itself, the department moved to be more alert and proactive about restricting phone use in class, and all that girl had to do was give a half-hearted apology. The next semester, she was still openly using her phone in another class we had.

For a long time, I couldn't trust anyone who held their phone up around me, as if to take photos or video. It would make me so anxious and put me on edge. I never did speak to the people who cosigned her behaviour, who acted like it wasn't their problem that their bff video-recorded a person in class over their health condition without their consent.

you film that homeless man laughing to himself and talking to an empty space? yeah he's probably psychotic. you film someone having a meltdown and screaming at nothing? probably also psychotic. you are taking advantage of someone's most vulnerable state and you think its funny and you want to get Internet clout for filming them. youre a piece of shit if you do that. I went from feeling safe around my old friend, feeling unjudged, feeling supported, to feeling used and unsafe and judged.

a nonverbal/nonspeaking autistic who struggles to express themself in "proper English" talks about an issue within the autistic community

-> almost no likes, no reblogs

I write about the same thing later; good wording and clear structure

-> many likes, lots of reblogs, people commenting "Oh, that's so important to know, thank you!"

Honestly....... It may be confusing at first, but once you know the pattern it's actually pretty easy to understand ungrammatical sentences on AAC.

You know that many autistics struggle with "I" and pronouns, right? Assume they'll simply drop it and refer to themselves in third person (their name).

Many AAC devices make punctuation difficult. There will be a period after a word because the device just . does . this . thing . here. And often no commas because that's complicated too.

Maybe "I am", "This is", "There is" or "It's" are difficult to find - assume it's "is", or sometimes "I am" is just "Am".

Future and past tense can be difficult too. The context helps here.

"Is not [name] . Say. Is . Say . Green." - "That's not what I said. I said it's green."

Plus, sometimes words are hard to find so it's easier to describe them.

"Red water" or "waterfall eyes" could be easier/faster to find and write than "blood" or "I am crying/sad", depending on the device or the language skills.

And if you really don't understand something because the preposition is unclear and you don't know if the thing in question is in the bathroom, in front of the bathroom, on the sink, under the sink, etc..... Just ask for clarification.

words not relate to each other can be accidentally switch because buttons look similar or very close together , and take extra work understand if not know how person set up AAC . ( duckie layout for example is all custom )

not use very much verb tense because have hard time even figure out which one right unless feel like spend even longer to write , and even have brain energy for that . which not always do .

especially when brain overwhelm , meltdown or frustrate or seizure , even AAC words become very simple and repetitive .

do have ability type in extra words , words that not have in AAC , but that can also really frustrate and take time because need think about if this new word make sense . so sometimes say same easy words lots , rather than say more complicate words , even if know those words .

People watch my screen a lot. When someone watches my screen without my permission, it not only violates my privacy but also makes me feel uncomfortable and exposed. Imagine if someone was watching your thought process for a sentence before you say it out loud, that sounds violating, right? My device is a personal and intimate form of communication, and it's not fair for people to intrude on that.

Secondly, it's incredibly distracting. When someone is watching my screen, I feel like I'm performing. I become self-conscious about every word I type, and it can slow down my communication speed. This can be especially frustrating in situations where I need to communicate quickly, like in an emergency.

- The picture test: If you can’t tell if something is a hallucination or not, take a photo! If it shows up in the picture then you have a keepsake of that crazy creepy Halloween decoration. If not it’s a hallucination (or a vampire. No, i’m kidding it’s a hallucination.)

- Is some kid in mask causing paranoia? Ask them where they got their costume. Did they make it? How did they get the idea? Focusing on the person inside of the costume will help you remember that it’s just a person!

- Avoid haunted houses, haunted hayrides, ect. Actors will not stop scaring unless it’s an emergency, and I’ve yet to find a place that teaches actors how to deal with anything other than physical injuries. (I once met a haunted house actor who said causing a panic attack meant he was “doing his job right.”)

- There’s no shame in asking friends and relatives to avoid sending jump scare videos or anything else that could cause paranoia.

- Here are some tips on how to tell if a video is a screamer.

- (from freeasthepaperburns) Boggart it! If something is making you upset, make it silly. dance with the shadows, sing to the creepies, I bet if make a fish face at the scary face it’ll be a little less scary. I know this is harder than it sounds, but I’ve gotten better at it over the time, and find it helps!

And that’s so wrong. That’s just as wrong as assuming non-intersex, cishet middle-class white guys are the Perfectly Normal Human of which everyone else is an imperfect copy.

We’re not made from a mould. We have endless variations and they aren’t divergence from some Perfectly Normal Copy, they’re literally the way life functions. There is no perfect copy. There are only variations, some of which have the privilege of being normalized.

But privileged people see themselves as the default, and “too many differences” can seem “made up” to them, because they’re not used to relating to people who are different. Unfortunately we mentally ill/disabled people absorb this idea too and it’s really hard to unlearn it when we’re stuck in a society that’s constantly reinforcing it.

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

but if you can work just fine and your disability is destroying your ability to have a life outside of work (because work takes all your energy and more)