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10:58pm January 15, 2012

extractionsfromawanderingmind:

Honestly this is something else.  People are and have been dismissing autistic children and always making assumptions based off of external observations.  This is honestly a break through to have actual observations, reasons, and explanations from a patient herself.  This honestly does change a lot of things in the field and who knows how far psychiatrists and psychologists can go with this type of information.  This video honestly had my attention the whole way through and i find it absolutely amazing as a med student.  Hope you guys have time to view the video and ponder its implications.  

Visit her website:  http://carlysvoice.com/  

Gowsh

I wrote another post in response to this so it wouldn’t get lost in the autism tag. Click here to get to it.

It actually appalls me that as a med student you haven’t been introduced, at minimum, to any of the zillions of interviews with and accounts by autistic people that have cropped up in medical journals since the seventies.  Or at the 100+ books autistic people have written since the eighties. Or the too-many-to-guess-a-number websites, videos, email lists, and blogs by autistic people since the nineties. (And that’s besides the huge number of newspaper, radio, and television reports about us that have featured us in our own words.)

Don’t get me wrong – I’m thrilled at each autistic person who gains any form of communication whether it involves words or not. But I’m appalled by the fact that each of us who becomes known to a wider group of society is treated like the first. And equally appalled that they haven’t mentioned any of this to you in med school.  

(I’m actually part of a research group currently researching autistic people’s experiences of medical care.  One reason I’m this appalled by it is that many autistic people to this day have to deal with such stereotypes as “You’re not autistic. You just communicated with me.”  By 2012 one would hope that the idea of autistic people as non communicative would be gone.  Especially since the (false even in those diagnosed back then) criteria involving total lack of communication were removed in 1987 with the publication of the DSM-III-R.)

If you’re interested in books written by autistic people, someone made a then-up-to-date list in 2010 of books by autistic people with significant autobiographical content here:  Autiebibliography.  And there are tons more both written since then, and not autobiographical.  

Since I collect such books, I can tell you that many of them contain cover blurbs or forewords to the effect that this is the first we’ve ever been able to hear about autism from the mind of an autistic person… and every book I’ve found that says that is wrong.  It’s kind of depressing that no matter how much we say, every time someone new comes along it’s as though none of us have been communicating at all. 

What’s going on in the video is a breakthrough for this individual person but it is not a breakthrough in the history of communication for all autistic people.  We’ve been saying things for a long time, people just haven’t been listening sufficiently enough to figure out that each new one of us who gets publicized is not the first.