First Post...Re: Son Rise

[Guest guest]

"This is my first post. I'm self-diagnosed and just totally accepted it about a week ago...I'm in my late 50's."

Welcome to the forum.

"So, I agree, that entering into the autistic child's world, mirroring and creating a safe place is the gentlest way to create a bridge. But the child has to want it, it can't be forced, and it can't be faked."

Your story speaks of many that I have heard. People who intentionally or accidentally learn how spectrumites think and act build bridges to them and make progress with them. Yes, the other person has to want to let you in. I believe they should be afforded the right to make the decision for themselves.

"I don't know much about the autistic community yet, and I've stepped into the middle of an intense discussion."

This discussion is intense because we are talking about a core issue of autism. There is a debate in medical circles about whether or not the more severely affected autistics need medical treatment "for their own good" and the people who hold the position that forced treatment is acceptable tend to discount the opinions of autistics who are more functional or self-sufficient. What they fail to acknowledge is that autistics who are functional have insight into BOTH worlds -autistic and non-autistic- and are better able to understand both sides of the issue. This makes them good moderators, translators, and peace-makers. Yet professionals tend to assume that simply because a person is autistic and therefore "abnormal" NOTHING that they have to say can be taken seriously until the abnormal is made normal. Normality by the definition of these individuals means seeing that of course autistics need to be cured and that autistics are too abnormal to know better.

I disagree with that viewpoint and believe in upholding the rights of the autistic individual.

There are not clearcut "sides" in this debate either. But now that autism is being diagnosed more, researchers are devoting more time to studying autism, its cause, and its incidence, and we are now seeing that people who continue to make the argument for questionable and quack therapies MUST for the good of medical science as well as autistics, be taught the facts and urged to jettison questionable and quack practices.

This happens with any kind of diagnosis. People like to think that the days in which people sold quack cure-alls off the back of wagons are gone. Because the cause of autism used to be a mystery quacks could still stay in business. But the days are coming when they will simply have no foot to stand on any way you look at it.

Some stubbornly hang on, and it is these people and these purveyors which stand alone as the biggest danger to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of autistics. There is enough testimony in the archives of this and other forums from autistics who have sufferred under these programs to know that quackery must end.

Profiting off of abuse is detestable.

"But gosh, how I wish someone had made the effort to enter my world, tocreate a bridge for me...."

Likewise.

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