On June 2, disability rights advocates rallied in Boston and Canton to protest the continued abusive practices at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC). This is an excellent write-up by my friend Lucy Berrington! I was in attendance at the Democratic State Convention at that time, so could not add my body as a JRC protester, …
Category: Autism
Apr 12
Boredom and Its Antidote: The Importance of Adults
Being autistic is a way of being in the world. Those who are blessed with the special perspective given to us by our autistic neurology are also cursed by the fissure that appears in our interactions with non-autistic (neurotypical) people. It is only natural for all people to assume that others think the same way …
Apr 11
Massachusetts Autism Awareness & Acceptance Month Proclamation
At the Massachusetts State House on April 9, 2012, I was given the distinct honor and privilege of making an award to our Governor. During the ceremony, His Excellency Deval Patrick presented a Proclamation to the sponsoring organization, AFAM. The 2012 Proclamation was the latest version of a document that has evolved over the years, …
Mar 19
Detached and Separate: For Me, Lifelong Feelings
“When did you first realize you were different?” I sometimes get asked this question. My answer invariably is, “I have always known.” Even the first time I was asked, I did not hesitate, so sure was I in this knowledge. Being apart from others is a fate that is thrust upon autistics by our neurology, …
Mar 18
Dilettantes Need Not Apply: Autistic Behaviors are Complex, but not Psychotic
One thing that struck me when I first began to grok what it means to be autistic was how very wrong were many of the “Freudian” explanations and bits of advice I had gotten over the years. I put the word in quotes to indicate I am using it in the vernacular sense of …
Mar 17
Autism is a Silver Car: The Story of Steve Jobs
Maybe, for me, learning that I am autistic was like buying a new car. A few years ago, I acquired a silver car. Suddenly, silver cars were everywhere! I never realized there were so many on the road until I tried to find mine in a parking lot. I have come to think of autism …
Mar 13
Article on Perspective Taking in the Workplace
Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke have written an excellent book called Social Thinking At Work. In this article on the North River Press website, they explain in summary form the essential elements of perspective taking. Although they never use the word “autism” it is well-known that autistic people have difficulty learning perspective-taking. For me, the …
Mar 10
Vaccine Scandal is in the News Again
According to a report on MedPage Today, the High Court of Justice in London has cleared the name of one of the authors of the fraudulent vaccine-autism-link paper published in 1998 by Lancet (and formally retracted by that journal only recently). One of the other authors, Andrew Wakefield, remains under a cloud. It is amazing how much …
Feb 28
Atypical white matter possible precursor to autism
Wow! This is “science”? Notice any bias in a statement like this? According to researchers, children with ASD had higher fractional anisotropy “followed by slower change over time relative to infants without ASDs.” Radial and axial diffusivity also seemed to be associated with ASD. These results appear to indicate that infants with aberrant white matter development go …