12:04pm May 26, 2014

➸ Why I Am Angry (Laura Tisoncik, 2000) tw: abuse

How do I put the pattern of things into words? About a year ago I founded a small fund for high functioning autistic adults (international, based in London, at least for the moment) with initial financing out of ad revenues from a website (thereby accomplishing as an autistic SSI recipient what no government, corporate philanthropist, autism society, or anything else has ever found themselves capable of or interested in…).

That means our tiny little project gets to field all sorts of crises… the HFA woman in Montreal whose mother (her only source of care) just died and who has nothing in the house left to eat except coffee grounds, the steady stream of abandoned aspie teens on the streets (we do a land office business trying to rescue at a distance aspie and HFA teens who’ve been thrown out by their parents, often after years of physical, psychological, and and sexual abuse– I have at this point precisely no patience with the line of crap that goes “parents have a right to decide what’s best for their child”. Nobody achieves sainthood by having an autistic kid, and plenty of parents have anything but the best interests of their kids at heart), the jobless adults that end up on the streets, etc.

It means our little project gets to do things like dial halfway around the world to an autism society in a small city in Australia to see if we could get an advocate– mind you, not money, not housing, not treatment, just one scrawny little advocate to help her fill out some forms– for a badly abused and abandoned teen, and getting back a reply, after a long delay, that they couldn’t provide an advocate (they’re in the business of serving parents, not autistics, after all) but if our homeless and hungry teen who can’t even use a bus could just travel 1000 miles to the nearest big city, they knew of a psychiatrist who might be able to see her, at $100/appointment.

As an IRC channel manager I get to see other things, too. I get to see the carnage wrought by years of “help”– not just in people my age, who were supposedly misdiagnosed and mistreated, but even in young teens. Ever want to clear out a room full of autistics? Start discussing restraints. But don’t do it unless you enjoy watching a lot of people have PTSD flashbacks. If you think this was all done for our own good, think again. I still have scars on my body, 30 years on, from having been beaten by hospital staff while restrained and drugged to the point where I was unable to sit up for three days. A friend of mine– a 19 year old, so this was not back in the Bad Old Days– tells stories of being restrained face-down, and the staff watching and laughing as she began to suffocate. And if you go peruse the Oasis web board online right now, you can read about a mother upset because her 16 year old aspie son was locked 4 days in a hospital “quiet room” for refusing medication. No, she wasn’t upset at the hospital, staff or doctors– she was upset at her son!