Individual perspectives on autism & disability
Individual perspectives on autism & disability
In this article, we share how some of us at Embrace Autism identify with and relate to the concept of disability.
cross-posted from: https://discuss.divergentparenting.space/post/29407
Take a moment and imagine that someone calls you disabled. Ask yourself, do you agree or disagree? What feelings come up for you? Based on your lived experiences, like your interactions with family, teachers, doctors, friends, and society more generally, how has your relationship with the concept of disability been shaped?\n > \n > Even though many governmental organizations officially recognize autism as a disability, this doesn’t mean that all autistic individuals identify as being disabled. Members of the autistic community have such varied lived experiences, which contributes to whether we each identify as being disabled or not. Moreover, how we relate to the concept of disability differs as well.
I thought you guys would find this article interesting. I think the answers are thought provoking for anyone who has any kind of invisible struggle.
very interesting to read everyone’s opinion. I’m adult diagnosed AuDHD. I think I’m ok with viewing it as a disability. This is mainly because honestly I thought I was just a terrible person and really bad at functioning in society despite holding down a full time job/getting good grades etc. I was absolutely horrible to myself in my head.
Learning that I’m AuDHD has allowed me to understand my difference and yes disability and to be far kinder to myself
I assumed something was fundamentally wrong with me that I needed to fix. I never considered it a disability. You can’t unblind somebody, or un-autism or un-ADHD someone.
To have considered it a disability would mean there was not something wrong with me. I don’t think that blind person has something wrong with them. They are just blind.
This really resonates with me. For decades I thought my problem depression, more recently I thought it was an anxiety disorder. Mental illnesses that need fixing and are therefore my fault for struggling with.
Then last month an autism professional suggested that the anxiety could be due to masking, not doing anything to manage sensory sensitivities, and having "neurotypical" expectations of myself. I then had a long holiday where I barely felt anxious at all, but it all came back the second I got home, and oh, maybe I'm not actually mentally ill...
I feel like what's wrong is that we think that even mental illnesses need fixing. There are some mental illnesses which can be fixed. They are temporary state in the same way that a cold is a temporary state. However, some mental illnesses are just how you are. You can take steps to mitigate it like the way that someone who can walk uses a wheelchair, but fundamentally it's all just life-aids, not a fix. If you have clinical depression, those pills are just life aids, they are not fixing anything. It's completely unlike when I fell into a depressive episode once. The pills fixed me because for me it was a temporary state. after a month I could just walk away. I think that's a difference that needs to be understood. A person who broke their legs using a wheelchair is completely different than an amputee using a wheelchair. One uses the wheel chair as a temporary aid until they are "fixed" and one has an eternal state that will always need the aid.
I think it's unfortunate that people feel shame about needing life-aids permanently or temporarily. I was born physically disabled and I lean on any crutch I can. I really think this is why I've been able to effortlessly support my child and she doesn't feel any kind of way about her condition with autism. I'm always saddened by parents who refuse to give their kid life-aids because they want them to be "normal". Even before I knew my kid had ASD I offered her anything that would aid her because who cares really. I want her to be happy and successful and if you complete the race in a wheelchair, you still completed the race which is more than some people can do even able and with a wheelchair.
I guess that's where I draw a line between "illness" and "disability", at least mentally (i.e. mental illness can get better, mental disability can't). I know some conditions have a very blurred boundary between "curable" and "incurable", depression being a notable example, but my gut feeling is that disabilities are permanent while illnesses either get better or worse (without treatment, I mean, for those that are kept in stasis by treatment).
I've not given this a huge amount of thought, though, so that game of semantics is probably full of holes.
I don’t see it as a disability for me. My successes in life have mostly been due to my autism, and while I have downsides, I see it as a worthwhile trade.
Sensory Processing Disorder on the other hand…
A bunch of different thoughts.
Eva: (...) Additionally, I always felt I excelled in other areas, so I am reasonably able to compensate or specialize to such a degree that I don’t feel less able than others on the whole. (...) What I just wrote remains true, but I function well with a lot of structure and guidance from others. Now that I am my own boss and no longer have a lot of structure and guidance, I actually feel a lot more disadvantaged than I used to (...) some people feel they are inherently disadvantaged, while others feel disadvantaged based on how society is structured
Remember that a mere change of 2 degrees in the global temperature is provoking a mass extinction of species. Requiring a particular environment to thrive is natural for animals. A lot of neurodivergent people just happen to come upon the issue that their environment has been built giving more importance to the wants of neurotypicals than to their own needs.
Natalie: I do not think of myself as disabled. I was diagnosed with PTSD by age 5 and attributed my challenges to that.
There are a lot of symptoms attributed to ASD on the DSM-5 that you could inflict on any neurotypical kid with enough trauma. I think we need to pay attention to the possibility that a lot of autistic kids are turning out disabled not because it is the natural development of their phenotype but because they get raised in an environment too disruptive to their needs even before they're capable of expressing them.
You can’t unblind somebody, or un-autism or un-ADHD someone.
Please do not do this shit. Not being able to see is objectively a disadvantage. You could find or create environments where the harm is reduced or even negated, but there's going to be virtually none where it's good without buts. It's great that some communities of blind people feel proud of their own culture, but many of those are cultivating this extremely toxic tendency to disavow the possibility to cure blindness even for those for whom it is possible because they dogmatically latch onto an identity.
Equating autism and blindness in this way gives a legitimacy to these attitudes that they do not deserve and is fairly disingenuous about what autism is.
There are a lot of symptoms attributed to ASD on the DSM-5 that you could inflict on any neurotypical kid with enough trauma. I think we need to pay attention to the possibility that a lot of autistic kids are turning out disabled not because it is the natural development of their phenotype but because they get raised in an environment too disruptive to their needs even before they’re capable of expressing them.
I think there is some merit to this, just from observing people parent NT children. Many parents don't seem to think of their children as people and aren't willing to be inconvenienced in any way for them. Trauma and neglect definitely don't do any child favors. I don't think that 100% catering to a child doesn't them any favors either, but compromise is necessary for living with literally anyone.
Please do not do this shit. Not being able to see is objectively a disadvantage. You could find or create environments where the harm is reduced or even negated, but there’s going to be virtually none where it’s good without buts. It’s great that some communities of blind people feel proud of their own culture, but many of those are cultivating this extremely toxic tendency to disavow the possibility to cure blindness even for those for whom it is possible because they dogmatically latch onto an identity.
Equating autism and blindness in this way gives a legitimacy to these attitudes that they do not deserve and is fairly disingenuous about what autism is.
I think there there is an inherit disadvantage in not being typical. I'm not ND, but I do have several invisible afflictions that doctors acknowledge, but don't have a label for because well premies should be glad to be alive. I can't change my many many afflictions due to having been born early. It definitely was and still is a disadvantage and there is no cure. It's just how I am. I won't say that there aren't toxic people in let's say the blind community who cling to their afflictions, but I think it's important to know that sometimes you don't get a cure. You're just how you are. Premies born after me don't suffer the same disabilities as the premies I know who are my age because they get better care in the hospital and outside it. Great, but that does nothing for me who has perfect vision technically, but can't see so many things. or a great many things I'm just stuck with as an adult.
I'd like my kid to be typical. I want to be typical even now. It's easier. She's left handed and that sucks. It's harder to be left-handed. If it were possible to give her a pill to make her magically right-handed I'd give it to her. As it stands, her chance of death is elevated for no other reason than she was born left handed. Accommodation is cool and all, but all of society has an assumption about handed-ness. This neurodiversity. I wish I could give her a pill to make her neurotypical. Shit I wish I could take a pill that could make my brain process things right like it would have if I was physically okay at the right times. But... I don't think that will happen for me or her and I think it's okay to accept that. It's okay to take a fix if it ever happens too.
Your claim about left-handedness sounded pretty weird to me, so I looked it up, and
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988352
Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it's around the same degree of bad science as the people who muddy the facts around transgender people to deny them healthcare.
You have assumed that being atypical is intrinsically negative to the point that you don't demand the right for you to have equal dignity, rather than demanding a bigoted society that pushes you down to stop mistreating you, you have assumed that the solution to your woes is to no longer being different, as if the solution to racism was people of color painting their skin white.
You are torturing yourself in your own pit of self pity, and I have no respect nor compassion for that.