Residential Setting vs. Institutional Mindset

After posting my previous post, I thought some clarification of definitions is in order, before anyone jumps upon me saying that I advocate large-scale abuse of autistic individuals. I don’t. When I said some autistics may want to live in residential facilities, I meant that some autistics might prefer the living arrangement of a residential [...]

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Calling for Adult Autism Services

Harold L. Doherty of Facing Autism in New Brunswick has written an open letter to the NB government on behalf of caregivers of autistic children and adults, calling on the government to establsih more residential care facilities for autistic adults. Now I could start a rant on how it is community services that we need, [...]

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My Binarist Perception of Genderqueer People

Once again, an encounter in the blogosphere makes me aware of my own privilege and prejudice. This time, it involves gender. Specifically, I noticed how, despite my notion that I do not believe in the gender binary, I tend to perceive people as either male or female. I became aware of this when I stumbled [...]

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Autistic Teen Charged with Assault, Disorderly Conduct

Via Terri over at Barriers, Brigdes and Books comes news that an autistic teen was charged with assault and disorderly conduct a few weeks ago, after he became physically aggressive when there were four fire drills in one morning at his school. We do not know whether an appropriate behavior intervention plan was in place, [...]

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Asperger’s Syndrome and Serial Killers

Michael Fitzgerald, a scientist in the field of autism, has a new book published: Young, Violent, and Dangerous to Know. I haven’t read the book, but, according to the description, Fitzgerald proposes a new subdiagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome that is typical of serial killers. Now serial killers are a small group of criminals. It is [...]

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Many American Preschoolers Take Psychiatric Drugs

Clay over at Comet’s Corner, posted an interesting article on the psychiatric drugging of young children in the United States. According to a recent study that I, sadly, cannot access, in 2007, 1 on 70 privately insured children between the ages of two and five were on at least one psychiatric drug. This is concerning, [...]

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Autistics and Stigma: It Shoudln’t Be About Hidden Intelligence

Harold Doherty of Facing Autism in New Brunswick, in his most recent post, criticizes the assertion that the stigma associated with autism is fading. The reasoning behind Doherty’s view is that, while the stigma associated with Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioining autism may be fading – which, I might say, is not to say it doesn’t [...]

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Autism and Regression

In Research on Autism Spectrum Disorders quite an interesting article appeared on the concept of autistic regression. I am aware that, within the autistic community, “regression” is a controversial term, because we don’t grow backwards. The authors, however, use it to refer to the phenomenon by which some autistics lose skills in communication and/or social [...]

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Psychiatric Patients’ Experiences and Perceptions of Seclusion, Restraint and Sedation

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting paper in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. The study, carried out in South Africa, aimed to examine the experiences psychiatric patients had with seclusion, restraint and sedation, and the perceptions these service users had of these procedures. Mental health patients were recruited to interview 43 other mental patients [...]

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Force and the Informal Patient in the Mental Hospital

One of the more intriguing aspects of mental health law involves, to me, the position of the informal patient. In theory, in the Dutch situation, an informal mental patient has the same rights to informed consent as every other patient in healthcare. In practice, however, there are several reasons an informal patient may actually be [...]

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