12:19am March 4, 2012

➸ I am. I am. I am.: iamthethunder: pixieblonde: autism referring to my previous post!!...

missshell:

iamthethunder:

pixieblonde: autism referring to my previous post!!

locobohemian:

So I guess i shouldn’t say autism sucks cause a lot of children with autism can talk and live a somewhat normal childhood, and I Do believe every child is beautiful, even if they are “challenged” in…

I agree with @iamthethunder and @pixieblonde. I’m sorry that your brother having Autism is frustrating for you + communicating with your brother does NOT mean for one minute that “Autism sucks”. You want to try and communicate your brother? Do something about it and quit complaining about Autism. 

I mostly agree with you guys regarding autism itself not being horrible. But dealing with a severe communication impairment isn’t as simple as “do something about it”. If it were that simple, it probably would have been done already. (Aside from the stuff that’s only obvious if you’re autistic too.)

I hope that he can one day get out of the institution and into some kind of community support program. There’s nothing that can be done in an institution that can’t be done outside of it – and usually better. From the very beginning of autism’s recognition, Kanner noted that autistic people who are institutionalized end up doing much worse in terms of communication and the like. The problem is that in many areas there are no community support programs or only bad ones.

Where I live, there are pretty good programs. Basically anybody can live in their own apartment with either staff as roommates or other arrangements depending on how much support we need and what kind. I can do very little to take care of myself and I am in my own apartment. In my home state I knew a guy with extremely severe self-injury and no word-based communication who owned his own house and lived with two roommates. These things are out there but not everywhere. And highly vulnerable to budget cuts.

But I’m very grateful to the parents and self-advocates who fought for these rights because without that I would be in an institution and probably not writing this. I really really hope that this guy eventually gets some kind of good living arrangement because even the best institutions have really sucky qualities.

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