Passing for Less Disabled

Chally at Zero at the Bone has a post up about invisible identities and the effects of passing. Passing is the active or passive quality that gets people in minority groups to be perceived as part of the dominant group. Examples would be someone with an invisible disability being passed for abled, someone in a [...]

Read Full Post »

Michael Crisafulli’s Autism Doesn’t Turn His Trial Into an Autistic Rights Issue

Recently, an allegedly autistic, 13-year-old boy shot his father. I haven’t seen any neurodiversity coverage of it yet, but then again I don’t read the major neurodiversity blogs all that often. The boy’s alleged autism is really only a minor part of the story, in the sense that his grandmother’s statement is not verified anywhere [...]

Read Full Post »

The Social Model of Disability and Varying Experiences

Recently, there was a Question Time post / discussion thread at FWD/Forward about changing experiences of disability since birth or since whenever your disability popped up. I was not sure how to respond. “But,” I thought, “my disabilities have always been the same. How can I write about changing experiences?” This is as untrue as [...]

Read Full Post »

Simon Baron-Cohen Policing Aspies’ Reading Preference

Sarah of Cat in a Dog’s World had a commentary on Simon Baron-Cohen’s Asperger’s adult criteria recently. I did not know anything about them except that they require Asperger’s people to have difficulty in all areas of daily living, rather than just one, and that they consider depression a mandatory feature of Asperger’s. Given that [...]

Read Full Post »

Places I’ve Blogged at Before

Yesterday, I was reading Wikipedia’s list of social networking sites again. I am one of those people who has had an account with far more sites than she actually uses. The only reason I have never had a mySpace account, in fact, is the inaccessible CAPTCHA they at one point at least had. I recently [...]

Read Full Post »

Navigating the Dutch Health System

A few days ago, a discussion was started at Mental Nurse about the subject of clothing rules in mental hospitals, with some general notes on the care situation in various hospitals in different countries thrown in (among them, comments from me about the Dutch situation). DeeDee Ramona wrote a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Irish Health [...]

Read Full Post »

Why Won’t My Bank Install Talking ATMs?

I came across an ATM machine today. The machine, like most ATM machines in my city, had braille on its buttons. Each button was marked with a number from 1 to I don’t know how many; in fact, for some reason whoever put the braille on the ATM had been very careful to include the [...]

Read Full Post »

Labor Would Rather Collapse in 2011 Than 2010

So they didn’t let the government collapse. In yesterday’s Lower House debate, Balkenende refused to retract anything he’d said on Tuesday, but he did send the House an “additional” declaration, which did take the Davids report more or less seriously. Basically, it contradicts Balkenende’s “opinion” speech entirely. Nonetheless, both, completely contradictory responses were presumed to [...]

Read Full Post »

Dutch Iraq War Report Finally Out

I rarely write about politics these days. First of all, I don’t think my opinions make enough sense to want to broadcast them to whoever is reading my blog. Not that anything I wrote in 2002 or 2006 makes more sense, but I had more arrogance and an illusion of Dutch privilege back then. That [...]

Read Full Post »

Americans Define Mental Illness All Over the World

Several bloggers have commented on Ethan Watters’ New York Times magazine article about the Americanization of mental illness. In this article, Watters discusses how presentations of mental illness that used to be specific to certain non-western cultures, are being rapidly overturned by classic presentations of DSM-IV psychiatric diagnoses. One such example is a specific form [...]

Read Full Post »