Prohibiting Silent Protest: Is It the Method or the Issue?

Silent protests are a great way of making your opinion know – without screaming or arguing or fighting over it. Silence can say more than words. For this reason, there are silent protests for a variety of issues. Two in the U.S. are the Day of Silence for gay rights and the Day of Silent [...]

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Autism: Intellectual Disability or Psychiatric Illness or What?

Blindness and visual impairment make up their own disability category, with product and service providers catering specifically to that community. Autism spectrum disorders, at least in the Netherlands, do not. “Actually, you don’t belong here, you don’t have a psychiatric illness,” nurses in the hospital have been telling me repeatedly. Yet I was diagnosed for [...]

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Disability Identity, Culture, and Politics: Should They Be Connected?

I found out that the next Disability Blog Carnival will be about disability identity and disability culture, and I don’t know what to write about. Oh well, in fact, I could write many different posts, and I think I’m going to. Not just as a way of contributing to the carnival (after all, then there [...]

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Equal Expectations: Does It Need to Be Exactly the Same?

I just read an article in the most recent issue of Future Reflections (the magazine of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children). Of course, it was about equal expectations, as this organization aims towards the “good enough” standard for disability rights: blind children should be expected to achieve at least the same as [...]

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Anti-Psychotics Change Metabolism

Well, I’ve known this forever, but according to this news story, it’s fairly ground-breaking research suggesting this: atypical anti-psychotics change metabolism. In lab rats given olanzapine (Zyprexa), abdominal fat and blood glucose were significantly increased compared to rats given the classic anti-psychotic haloperidol (Haldol) and rats who did not receive either drug. These are both [...]

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Am I Good Enough for Patient Rights?

Today, I feel that I’m not good enough for neurodiversity. It’s Autism Awareness Month in the USA, and of course this means that the neurodiversity activists jump up to interrupt the thousands of autism recovery parents who claim their child was cured by some unapproved and unproven treatment. They always hint at how wonderful autistics [...]

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