11:21am May 26, 2014

This is what your “treatments” do to us. [written circa 2000-2002]

“You know, it is not a fun thing to spend a couple of days giving comfort on the phone long distance with someone who thinks she’s suffocating tied to a table somewhere, when you yourself are fighting off cold sweats and panic. It’s even less fun when you realize that in a few years you might be on the same phone holding the same conversation, this time with the teen damaged by the parents and professionals my friend had tried to warn that day.” - Laura A. Tisoncik, Why I Am Angry

Spoiler: Discusses abusive “treatment” and some of its results.

They’re doing one more atrocious thing to autistic people in the name of helping us. I know someone’s got to do something, and I’ve got the experience and the (theoretical) communication ability, so I set to work trying to write about it.

I know I’m doing good work, because there’s a certain feel to it. Stuff is whirling around in my head, long-dormant words are slamming together, and I rush to get it out of my fingers fast enough. If I stop to think about it, I can tell my body’s getting worked up about all this – I’ve long been able to recognize adrenaline in my system. Maybe that’s helping me write.

I try to write about whatever the latest atrocious thing actually does to the person subjected to it. Because that’s what all the studies and claims by outsiders tend to be missing. They look at quantitative data; they don’t care about ethics or the internal state of their subjects. They just want people to behave in a certain way – be it less aggressive, less overtly autistic, more social, or whatever else they’re doing – at apparently any cost.

Then it sneaks up on me. I’ve been dreading it in the back of my mind, thinking maybe this time it won’t happen. This time I’ll get everything I’m writing out, to the right people, beforehand. Sometimes I get several full messages out, but often it’s only a line or a paragraph. Regardless, it always happens.

There’s no way out. The walls have changed shape, but I don’t remember them ever having been another shape. Sometimes there’s people around, usually telling me – often in various roundabout fashions – that nothing I experience actually exists. Sometimes I’m alone and can’t remember the last time I saw a person. I hear screaming. I try to shut my mind off. I know there’s no point in looking for a way out, because the last guy who tried to escape got dragged back and his clothes taken away from him. I curl up in a ball and start pounding my head on the nearest surface, or I run around and start kicking all the doors. And when I’m done kicking the doors, I dive into the kitchen cupboard or hide under the bed hoping nobody will find me.

Things get mixed. I call someone on the phone for help, but I think she’s Jim the Evil Night Nurse and beg her not to hurt me this time, or I just sit there terrified she’ll discover that I’m bad. I see my door, but I don’t see that it has a doorknob. I see my apartment, but I think there’s no way out. I lie down on my bed to get some rest but straps mysteriously appear and tie me to it. Terror is a constant, and my mind keeps panicking long after my body’s run out of adrenaline to fuel any kind of physical panic.

Voices I’d just as soon forget pop into my head, and that’s the worst part. “Nothing terrible ever happened to you. Trust me. If you’d cooperate with us, we wouldn’t have to do this to you. It’s your own fault for manipulating us with violence. Talking about what you feel about the situation is pure self-indulgence, you’re delusional anyway.”

These voices are echoed and amplified by a lot of feedback by non-autistic parents and a few sparse-but-magnified posts by autistic people, various places on the Internet. They all say roughly the same thing: Extreme behavior calls for extreme measures. It doesn’t matter what the measures are, and they change depending on the topic. I hear claims like “He had to be institutionalized.” (Oh yeah, and an institution just springs up out of nowhere?) “He requires forced medication.” (And exactly what abrogates someone’s right to a lack of assault on their central nervous system? I wouldn’t wish that on a mass murderer.) “I had to hit him.” (Now we’re getting to the real rationale behind all of the other crap…)

I hear story upon story of extreme behavior that strongly resembles mine (either in the past or in the present) used to justify any atrocity one human can commit against another, up to and including murder. I hear words like “severe self-injurious behavior” and “extreme aggression.” Yet if I try to tell what happened to me, I am told one of several things:

I am nothing like the person in question, because nobody who can type on a computer keyboard has possibly ever displayed such behavior or been subjected to such measures. (One word: BS.)
Things are better since the 1960s when I was institutionalized. Or, if they realize I was institutionalized in the 1990s, the places I was locked up were all anomalies. All six of them, in all four counties, all with purportedly different “treatment” approaches.
My experience of the institution, drug, segregated classroom, “treatment technique,” and so forth is terribly unique and most people like it. (Err… no. I wish it was, then I wouldn’t have to write things like this.)
People like me either deserve what we get or leave people with no other options.
Parents have an absolute right to govern the lives of their children, up to and including abuse, things that cause permanent brain damage, and sometimes even premeditated murder.
That rather than trying to highlight injustice, I am trying to make people feel sorry for me. (Seeing as I have no use for pity, no.)
That they do feel sorry for me, or more often for my parents, but that their child is different (they may even enumerate several traits their child has that I also have or had, to prove, oddly, that their child is different from me) so it’s justified to do these things to their child (even if it’s not really justified to do them to anyone).
That I am perseverating, throwing a tantrum, communicating in an inappropriate manner, bitter, rude, mean-spirited, disgusting, thinking in black and white, or some other twisted and demeaning way of saying that I am autistic so what I say doesn’t matter.
That people who love their children cannot also be abusive (and some of them call me a black-and-white thinker?)
That I’m being non-supportive.

And that all amplifies the effect. I start thinking that I deserved everything that ever happened to me, and that nobody will listen to what I have to say so I might as well not say it. In an ironic twist, my perceptions warp until I start believing that my perception of abuse as abuse is warped. But then I think: Would I condone this if it were done to someone else? Of course not. I’ve just got all these psych nurses and shrinks swirling around my head.

Eventually the feeling of trappedness pervades everything – there’s no way out of the institution, so there’s no way out of the apartment, no way out of hearing these scary people saying they want to cure us or drug us or kill us or lock us up whatever else they want to do with us, no way of changing anything because I’m stuck here until I die. I revert to how I was back then, when I wasn’t tied down somewhere – sitting in the living room (which goes back and forth from being a living room to a dayroom) too scared to move because if I move I’ll be the horrible manipulative evil person everyone says I am.

Eventually the terror wears me out and I’m too unfocused and exhausted to write, often after having been up several days because I’m afraid if I sleep something Really Nasty will happen. Words won’t happen, because that requires translating thoughts to words, and that ability’s been worn out by continual overload and exhaustion. Or sometimes I get a few words but I’m too scared if I write them someone will pop up from the lockups and tell everyone I’m delusional or a liar, like they did to me back then (and to the girl who was raped and wouldn’t keep quiet about it).

Then I berate myself for not doing anything, and go back to bashing my head on the nearest convenient surface until I either pass out or lose enough (so far, temporarily, somehow) motor or sensory functions that I can’t move that way anymore. Which is, ironically but not surprisingly, the precise sort of behavior that whatever the latest “treatment” is is supposed to get rid of. And they never, never get it that just the thought of their so-called “treatments” can induce the same behavior they’re constantly insisting they’re trying to eliminate, in the people they’re targeting – or that their “treatment” touches only our behavior, not our reasons for it.

And this is only a tiny fraction of a taste of what these “treatments”, and the constant and widespread approval and condoning of them, do to me, which is only a tiny fraction of a taste of what these things do to thousands of other autistic people around the world. That’s the kind of thought that keeps me from sleeping soundly.