Questions for autistic people

[Lobotomy]

Neurotypical people can contribute too I guess, but I am mostly interested in hearing from autistic comrades.

1. A lot of people in the autistic community are opposed to "people first" language (ie they prefer being called an "autistic person" instead of a "person with autism.") what are your feelings on this?

2. What is your opinion on ABA therapy?

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

What exactly is "ABA" therapy?

[Lobotomy]

It stands for "applied behavior analysis" and it's for children on the spectrum. Usually parents are told to get their kids in ABA as soon as they are diagnosed. Proponents argue that it gives autistic people the tools to be more independent whereas opponents of ABA argue that it is harmful normalization.

A lot of autistic adults are opposed to ABA, but not all. Temple grandin for example is pro-aba.

[olahsenor]

My autism is specifically labelled attention deficit disorder or the less severe type of autism. Yes, my mind wanders about when I am inside the classroom but I barely pass my exams. My grades are either too high or A+ or failing. Yes, there are in-betweens but rarely.

I am a convinced communist. I believe that consumer demand can be measured mathematically. I also believe that satiety or insatiety can also be measured algebraically. The point is why is there poverty in capitalist countries when business owners apply Operations Research in their business. Operations Research is a branch of mathematics where profits, savings and the like are measured algebraically and statistically. Given that all are provided for under socialism, Operations Research was ignored by state planners in the Soviet Gosplan maybe because they have not read it or no one dared invoke the book.

China has opened up her economy to foreign investments but still half of the countryside either needed to be totally socialistic because welfare programs are unattainable or they have to really really open up to provide employment. Nonetheless, my theory is that under Stalin's centrally planned economy, consumer demand can be met by applying mathematical principles, calculus, statistics and basic management principles. The Leninist centralist economy is the perfect type of economic plan. Just look how great the Soviet Union was under Brezhnev.

[The Intransigent Faction]

1. A lot of people in the autistic community are opposed to "people first" language (ie they prefer being called an "autistic person" instead of a "person with autism.") what are your feelings on this?

Semantics? All I know is, as much as being on the autistic spectrum has presented me with "unique" challenges in life, it does not encapsulate who I am. It's a label that was assigned to me, as it is for others, in order to ensure access to certain support for people so categorized.


2. What is your opinion on ABA therapy?

I don't remember ever hearing the term much...Honestly, KMFDM said it best, "If there is a problem it's a problem with the system. The system of home and family. Of school and community."

If what we're talking about is condescendingly trying to "address problem behaviour" by retraining people to just do what social norms prescribe because they are social norms, well, fuck that.

If we're talking about giving people on the autistic spectrum a chance to have a voice and to clear up where the disconnect is between what makes sense to them and what society expects in terms of behaviour, then sure. Just as long as that's done in a way that doesn't put neurotypicals on a pedestal.

Obviously my opinion and my experiences are just that, but for me, being put in a different environment where people were actually friendly and I wasn't constantly watching my back out of fear of being attacked did a hell of a lot more to "address" my own violent behaviour up to that point than any number of one-on-one hours in therapy. For others I've met who are on the autistic spectrum, it's been much the same. A change in environment to one where people "click" better with each other worked wonders.

Even where there are problems with relating to people regardless, their exacerbation by some neurotypicals is not further evidence that those on the autism spectrum are problematic.

Maybe that was relevant..."Autistic persons" or "people with autism" (whichever way you phrase it) have their struggles. That said, you can't solve things by just trying to "fix" people to make them more functional cogs in the machine irrespective of what could be done to improve the machine itself.

[Ricemilk]

Terminology note: I'm going to use "allistic" to mean the opposite of autistic, instead of "neurotypical" which has been appropriated by the disability community at large to describe neurovariances ranging from depression to psychosis and everything in between. I used to use the word neurotypical to mean non-autistic, but the evolving convention makes it potentially confusing.

Technically a neurotypical person by the general understanding today would be in the minority in the US, where a slight majority of people are said to suffer from clinical depression. This is a consequence of our extreme forms of capitalism, but I digress. Either way I have stopped using the word as opposed to autism because several people have expressed offense to me that they would be assumed neurotypical just because they're allistic. Though universally without knowing the word 'allistic', which adds up to a demeaning situation, I still felt required to change by social graces.


Neurotypical people can contribute too I guess, but I am mostly interested in hearing from autistic comrades.

1. A lot of people in the autistic community are opposed to "people first" language (ie they prefer being called an "autistic person" instead of a "person with autism.") what are your feelings on this?

I agree strongly with those people. PWD aka person first language is potentially appropriate for disorders and diseases; for example, "people with PTSD" is more appropriate than "PTSD people" because it's a disorder, a bad harmful thing - thus referring to it as a person's most salient characteristic would sound absurd and verge on victim-blaming - that started at a certain point in life long after birth and can potentially be treated to the point of being negligent. Autism is an irrevocable part of who I am and how I relate to the world; the "treatment" and potential "cure" bandied about by certain fascistic elements in psychology, psychiatry and utopian liberalism are euphemisms for cultural and physical eugenics, respectively. Specifically, as the notion is scaled up to the social level, a ham-fisted behavioralist regime with decades-outdated science that would be as ludicrously expensive to operate as it would be painful, harmful and restrictive.


2. What is your opinion on ABA therapy?
The term ABA is about as meaningful as "democracy": wherever it is invoked, you know there's a hidden agenda, even if a theoretically benevolent one. The absolute finest positive examples of ABA come from a complete rejection of all its founding principles and are almost completely unrelated to the theory or historical practice of ABA; they are simply called a new kind of ABA because ABA is an insurance buzzword that means "the right thing to do to autistic people". By and large, this means:


ignorance of 21st century science, which has begun to occasionally view autistic people as subjects of our own lives and in so doing, has discovered that we actually have dozens of unique positive tendencies with clear economic implications;
institutional abuse to a degree that encourages mental and physical brutality and sadism in practitioners;
see the original studies at UCLA that established the techniques, based on the same theoretical and experimental work that provided the foundation for gay conversion camps (by the same author), namely that the existence of autistic/gay boys and trans girls is inherently repulsive, causing normal people to suffer anxiety that can only be relieved by brutalizing the weirdos into compliance;
though many states do not allow supposed healthcare practitioners to use the basic ABA techniques of pinching, slapping and shocking young children, see for a present-day and state-sanctioned example the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, where autistic children already ripped from their families are forced to carry around their own electroshock equipment, which is regularly applied to them in gruesome, humiliating fashion as punishment for existing;
inciting hate speech to the point of frothing up a potential legislative storm of fascistic crackdowns on autism; i.e.
the state of Maryland (last I looked this stuff up) will literally steal your child if they are diagnosed as autistic and you're not forcing them into ABA, and then of course the state will force them into ABA.
Canada almost allowed some provinces with frothed-up parent groups to declare a total crackdown in the early 00s, forcing all autistics to register with the government, forfeit basic constitutional rights, and submit to state-run ABA. Judges at all levels below the Supreme Court were willing to dismiss autistic self-advocates on the flimsiest grounds and privilege eugenics groups as the authorities on all matters autism; it took a lengthy, impassioned and extensively cited plea to the thankfully slightly more fair-mined Canadian Supreme Court to force the government to continue equal protection of autistic citizens.

etc. ABA's link to gay conversion 'therapy' (which comes from a time when there was no social distinction made between gay cis men and trans women, shockingly still true of US health statistics) is not coincidental; queer and trans autistic youth coercively identified for UCLA's purposes as male were specifically studied and subjected to constant brutality in the studies, as a special threat to ordered society. It should go without saying that, to the contrary, an ordered society- especially an ordered free society- is impossible without giant nerds who can remember massive sequences of numbers or take up an interest in charting all the train routes without being forced to by market conditions. (And that those of us without such gifts or interests have just as much right to live and apply ourselves as best we fit into society ofc.)



It will take a more dedicated student of German medical history than I to say for sure, but it's entirely possible that even the official Nazi Party line was arguably more gentle and liberal toward autistic children specifically. Essentially, ABA is what you would expect a completely power-mad busybody fascist government to do to autistic children, except (like many fascistic excesses) its worst perpetrators and advocates today are the liberals.


Anyone who tells you that you have to present as non-autistic to be worthy of employment or protection from violence is living in a dream world at best, and is possibly also a eugenics apologist or worse. Unfortunately, eugenicists are not categorically banned from practicing medicine or psychotherapy, and even if they were, the allistic medical establishment and state boards honed through institutional abuse, nepotism and capitalist self-protection would be completely incompetent at identifying them. Autistic people cannot generally achieve indistinguishability from allistic people, it is damaging and painful to try, and it inherently involves suppressing autistic strengths so as not to incur the wrath of the allistic establishment. Where this criticism applies to ABA is wherever it is most true to its own principles, methods, goals and history. Extreme deviations from ABA are still labeled with that acronym, but we can imagine a society where it is not so.



The selectively mined "successes" of ABA generally involve: inducing pain in the victim through forceful repression; treating the resultant anguished state as a baseline because they assume anguish is the natural outcome of autism; forcing the victim to struggle harder than ever to achieve dubious goals like accepting all adults' touch without expressing discomfort (the obvious disastrous outcome has been written about elsewhere); then attributing any unmistakeably positive performance to their own skilled intervention; and finally assuring themself that it's alright to fall in love with striking and abusing the victim because it's all a part of making them well.


I'm answering a complicated 3rd question that you didn't ask, while I'm here. This will be unavoidably partisan, but I don't mean any offense or authoritarian impulse toward readers who disagree: Yes, the existence of autistic people implies that leftists and egalitarians should seek anarchy as the ideal society, but no, that doesn't mean that all autistics are anarchists, nor that anarchists of the existing movement are generally any more friendly or welcoming to autistic people than the culture they come from. So here in the US, for example, that means that normal contingencies of being autistic- like an aversion to forced eye contact, for one small but constant example- are treated with suspicion by movement anarchists and hardcore revolutionaries who take them as signs of a nervous infiltrator or agent provocateur.



So to any autistic comrade reading, I advise you become a knowledgeable and affiliated self-advocate before getting active in your local left scene. AUTCOM is going to be preferable for many leftists because ASAN is run by a proud Zionist who uses his autism blog to stump for genocide in Palestine, and has more generally reformist positions to the extent that it has actually addressed Congress and was included (then almost completely ignored) as advisors in a notorious eugenics organization's eliminationist ads in recent Sesame Street materials.

[UnapologeticPsychopath]

Neurotypical people can contribute too I guess, but I am mostly interested in hearing from autistic comrades.

1. A lot of people in the autistic community are opposed to "people first" language (ie they prefer being called an "autistic person" instead of a "person with autism.") what are your feelings on this?

2. What is your opinion on ABA therapy?

I have high functioning Autism but I am also a genuine Psychopath.

I think in general I don't like being put in a box and told what I am and where I should go. This is typical bigot behavior and it mainly comes from people who have a superior complex.

There is one group in Liverpool I absoultely can't stand and they are called National Action. They are basically Neo Nazis. They really enjoy flexing their superiority complex over anyone they can intimidate but they seem to enjoy mocking people with Autism the most labeling disabled brothers and sisters as Spergs.

When it comes to therapy its just non-disabled peoples way of making those of us with mental handicaps conform to the rest of society. They don't care about listening to our ways of bridging the gap and are more interested in making us do all the heavy lifting. When you hear some Psychologist talk about all the good benefits of the therapy just think of a whip master making slaves bend to the whip masters will.

[Comrade #138672]

Personally, as an autistic person, I don't care that much when people say "people with autism" rather than "autistic people". Most of the time people don't think about it that much and aren't intentionally being offensive.

But out of respect for fellow autistic people, I won't use people first language.

I do mind it when people refuse to listen to autistic people and stubbornly call them "people with autism" because they think that is best for them.

[Red Red Chile]

I have high functioning Autism but I am also a genuine Psychopath.

I think in general I don't like being put in a box and told what I am and where I should go. This is typical bigot behavior and it mainly comes from people who have a superior complex.

There is one group in Liverpool I absoultely can't stand and they are called National Action. They are basically Neo Nazis. They really enjoy flexing their superiority complex over anyone they can intimidate but they seem to enjoy mocking people with Autism the most labeling disabled brothers and sisters as Spergs.

When it comes to therapy its just non-disabled peoples way of making those of us with mental handicaps conform to the rest of society. They don't care about listening to our ways of bridging the gap and are more interested in making us do all the heavy lifting. When you hear some Psychologist talk about all the good benefits of the therapy just think of a whip master making slaves bend to the whip masters will.

lol. Are you serious? I'm not judging you. But it was funny the way you said that. What are the symptoms of a "genuine psychopath"?