Autism, False Positives and DSM-V: Is It about Intellectual Disability Again?

Over at Opposing Views, Val writes an interesting article about the DSM-V and the potential overdiagnosis of autism. In her opinion, the criteria for autism are once again broadened to include more able persons, and those with intellectual disabilities are overlooked. I agree in part with her. There is a risk that normal variation and [...]

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CNN: Stress Excuses Murdering of Autistics

CNN last Friday tried to raise awareness of the high stress experienced by parents of autistic children. Unfortunately, they chose a bad reason for their awareness raising: in Texas, a mother had just killed her two autistic children a few days earlier, telling the 911 operator that she’d strangled them because they were autistic. “I [...]

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Lay Perception of Autism Studied

Within the autism community, there is often a lot of debate about how autistics aare being perceived by society at large. Aspies fear that everyone associates autism with someone who is totally incapable of anything, and the parents of “low-functioning” autisticis fear that, with increased awareness, Asperger’s comes to dominate the perception of autism. Now, [...]

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Autistic Student Denied Education, Loses Court Battle

Recently, an autistic man in the UK lost a court case over his lack of education when he was rtwelve. During that time, his former school could not deal with his behavior problems. They expelled him, and left him without education for eighteen months before another school was found that would take him. Now, A., [...]

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Psychiatric Intensive Care Significantly Reduces Seclusion, Study Finds

In the Netherlands, seclusion is the main form of coercive management of dangerous people with mental illness. I have always opposed this, and argued that more individualiz\ed treatment could significantly reduce the need for seclusion. Now, in the current issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Intensive Care, this hypothesis was tested in one newly-built unit [...]

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Highly Intelligent vs. High-Functioning

The fact that I refuse to buy into “functioning levels” with regard to autism, says nothing about my recognition that some people have more abilities than others. In fact, every autistic is different, but there are some more obvious ways in which autistics can have better or worse abilities. Intelligence is one such thing. I [...]

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Multiple Perspectives on Institutionalization

Back in February of 2008, my treatment team had decided that I should go to a training home for autistics in Deventer. They were somewhat confusing, so at first I thought they meant they wanted me in the so-called workhome there. A workhome is a combined living and working environment in an institutional setting. It [...]

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Autism, Celibacy, and Christian Weston Chandler

Via a post over at Autism’s Gadfly, I got to hear of someone called Christian Weston Chandler. Chandler is an autistic person who apparently is frustrated by his being a virgin at age 28. Apparently for this reason, he goes around harassing women, dressing offensively, and making homophobic, racist and sexist comments. Over at It’s [...]

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The Limits of Acceptability

If we as a neurodiversity movement say that we should accept autistics as they are, what do we mean? It is possible, after all, to accept a person, but not certain behaviors that person exhibits. For example, MJ of Autism Jabberwocky gives the example of Kim Stagliano’s fifteen-year-old daughter perserverating on infant toys. It is [...]

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Against the Autism Dichotomy

MJ of Autism Jabberwokcky yesterday wrote about the autism spectrum dichotomy. As is apparent from the title, MJ aims to distinguish different subtypes of autism, and he once again chooses to draw the line based on “functioning level”. He illustrates his point with two examples, one of a textbook case Aspie and their difficulty finding [...]

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