Abnormaldiversity

Types of Giftedness

2009-12-14T07:42:00.001-08:00

A lot of people treat gifted kids as if their cognitive skills are equivalent to an older child. In other words, they'd think that a 10 year old with an IQ of 150 would do just fine being taught grade 10 work for a year. Some people understand that gifted kids learn faster, and so that kid should, by the end of the year, be halfway through grade 11 instead of just finishing grade 10.
But a lot of people don't understand that gifted kids don't really learn faster, instead, they learn more efficiently. Meaning, basically, their mental processes aren't the same thing sped up. They are actually learning in a qualitatively different way, a way that allows them to process more information in the same time period.
In my impression, there seem to be two common types of talents resulting in a kid being considered gifted: memorization and comprehension.
Imagine a kid, considered gifted, who has normal comprehension and better memorization. If you got this kid and a typical kid and gave them both some information that was completely new to them, they'd both understand it about equally well. But test them two days later, and the gifted kid might remember it while the typical kid's completely forgotten.
Furthermore, this memorization ability helps them learn new information, too. Imagine teaching those two kids a second lesson that builds on the first. The typical kid will probably need to be reminded of what xe learned in the first lesson, basically retaught the first lesson (though more quickly than the first time). The gifted kid will still remember everything in the first lesson and won't need the reminders, meaning you could spend that whole time on the second lesson.
Secondly, regarding comprehension, imagine a kid with improved comprehension but normal memory. When this kid and a typical kid are taught something new, they'll both remember what they learned about equally well. But in the first lesson, this kid will need less spelled out explicitly, and will be able to extrapolate more on xyr own. Therefore, it would take less time to explain the same concept to this kid.
And at the second lesson, both kids will need a recap of the first lesson. But when you're reexplaining something the kid has learned but forgotten, you can do it a lot more quickly, and chances are that the gifted kid will have figured out part of the second lesson on xyr own during the first lesson. This means that part of the second question will be recapping stuff the kid already knows, and could be done very quickly. The rest would still be quicker than for the typical kid, for the reasons described above.
Incidentally, the first type is more common among high-average and mildly gifted kids, while the second type is more common among highly gifted kids. In addition, some kids have above-average memorization and comprehension, and both of those skills feed into each other (you remember better if you understand the material, and you understand it better if you remember related material). Lastly, not all gifted kids can be described this way. In particular, some gifted kids seem to be just more motivated to learn, and this alone could possibly explain their giftedness (or high motivation could combine with improved memory and/or comprehension).
Anyway, the point is that if you understand how a child is gifted, you can teach them better. A kid with an excellent memory but poor comprehension needs a whole lot less review but only slightly less explanation, while a kid with excellent comprehension and a poor memory needs only slightly less review but a lot less explanation. In addition, you can use memory to build on comprehension and vice versa, by explaining how the material you're teaching relates to things the kid already knows. This will help the memorizer understand, because they remember their understanding of the previous material, and it'll help the comprehender remember, because they can fit this information into a web of linked concepts.

Self-Advocacy

2009-11-20T07:14:00.000-08:00

This post is at least partially a response to a blog entry by David Hingsburger, about a developmentally disabled guy named Duncan who was physically attacked by some people because of prejudice, and who reported it to the police, and his attackers went to jail. It's a tragedy that he was attacked, but a success that justice was done.
And it got me on a tangent about self-advocacy, and why that can be so hard for many developmentally disabled people. Why aren't more people who go through things like what Duncan went through doing what Duncan did? Why do so many people just deal with it and not fight back? (This post, I just realized, was also inspired by hearing in my women and gender studies class about Nu Shu, a female-only language and writing system in China. The Nu Shu women put up with so much, and their only rebellion was in secret communications to each other. Why?)
Of course, firstly, disability can have a direct impact. I know a boy whose only communicative speech is 'yes' or 'no'. So unless someone asked him, twenty-questions style, if he was the victim of something like this, he wouldn't be able to report it. And even if you did, would he have the receptive language necessary to understand your questions?
Then there's how reports by disabled people can be discounted and ignored, especially if their communication is atypical. That's one part that I found frustratingly accurate and well-demonstrated in the movie I Am Sam, where the people always seemed to assume that Sam's talk about the Beatles was nonsense even though he was clearly communicating through analogy. Even when someone gets the message across, it's often ignored if they didn't communicate it the right way.
But I think there's something more. It seems to me that many developmentally disabled people learn not to speak out for themselves. For example, my mother is a champion complainer. If she thinks that some business has treated her wrongly, she'll write a letter of complaint, or phone them up, and it's impressive to hear her rant. And she can often get an apology that way. But when I try to complain, and they start to explain how 'that's just the way they run things' or whatever, I get confused. I think: 'Maybe that's actually how it works, and everyone else just knows this and I don't. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation because I'm autistic.' And I'll often give in. It's only with disability issues that I don't tend to give in, because I know the system needs to be accessible to autistic people, and even if I don't get what I want in time to help me, it'll be a help to the next autistic who comes through.
And I think it would be even worse if I'd been diagnosed earlier, and had more typical 'autism parents'. I see the kids in the volunteering programs I work in, and how casually the workers override their interests, and they often don't complain, and when they do, it makes no difference. I see ABA programs training autistic kids, and while the kids may be learning to identify colors and put their clothes on and all that, what they're learning above all is to automatically obey what a nondisabled adult tells them to do. Imagine if a pedophile got at one of these ABA kids, they're already groomed to be easily abuseable! (And no doubt many pedophiles have gotten at these kids, given how high the rate of abuse of disabled people is said to be.)
Someone asked me recently if I write stuff on my blog to help parents of kids like me, so I'll go now into how parents can help their kids self-advocate. Well, firstly, advocate for your child, like my parents did. Don't accept something inferior, when you know your child needs X and the system has a duty to provide it. Even if you don't get it, your child will see you fighting on their behalf, and learn that their rights are worth fighting for.
Next, listen to your child. Even severely disabled kids can tell you exactly what they want and need. As much as possible, respect your child's wishes, and if doing so isn't practical or would infringe on other people's rights, explain this to them while acknowledging that they want it, and see if you can find a compromise. Some kids are actually very assertive already, and if your child's like this, don't see it as a problem! Sure, they're harder to look after, they can be really annoying, but remember that this trait can be a great strength. I've often gotten complaints on AllExperts.com from parents of kids who get into logical debates whenever you tell them to do something, and I always give them the same advice: explain to the child exactly why following that rule is important. If you can't explain that to them, then toss it out as unneccessary. That way, you're encouraging the child to think 'If I don't think something's right, I don't have to do it', which is exactly what people like Rosa Parks did.
Thirdly, learn about discrimination, and teach your child about it. Disability discrimination is the most applicable, but if you're more experienced with some other discrimination, teaching your child about that will make them better able to recognize disability discrimination as well. My parents knew absolutely nothing about disability discrimination, but my mother's an active feminist and anti-racist, and my father supports her in her activism. Of course, being the daughter of a feminist, I learnt a lot about discrimination early on. My Dad told me that when I was told that children weren't allowed at my mother's convocation ceremony, I said: "That's discrimination!" We didn't fight it, but my father affirmed my statement. Make sure that your child knows when they've been treated unfairly, even when it's not practical to fight back. For example, if you know your child will be bullied for doing a particular behavior, rather than just telling them not to do it, tell them that kids are likely to bully them, and it's not right to bully someone for that, but they have the choice of either toughing it out or stopping that behavior. And listen when your kid communicates that a particular injustice is a big enough deal to fight back, too. They need to learn to pick their battles, and that means picking which ones are worth fighting as well as which ones aren't.
Lastly, make sure that showing your love for your child is a high priority, higher than your embarrassment when they do something weird in public, or your fear that they won't be able to hold down a job in adulthood, or your frustration when they have yet another meltdown. All those problems are manageable, and won't stop your child from being happy. But even if you love your child deeply, if they don't know that you do, that can ruin their entire life. My parents were both abused as children, and even in their late 40s, I can see the suffering from that. It's a whole lot harder to heal those wounds once they've been made than to prevent them in the first place.
And remember: a self-advocate isn't someone who has managed to avoid suffering, but someone who has survived and fought back. If something terrible does happen to your child, help them to find their strength to fight for themselves. When my parents learnt that my cousins had sexually abused me, they took what actions they needed to protect me and teach me that I did not have to put up with that sort of thing! Which means that a) if something like that ever happens again, I will protect myself and I will seek justice, and b) I can defend others and try to prevent them from suffering like I have.

Disabled Student Services

2009-11-18T12:43:00.000-08:00

OK, so I've found out that the midterm in my women and gender studies class requires that I write three essays during the course of the exam, and I know that it'll be really painful to write that much by hand in a short time, especially when I'm anxious. Well, since difficulty with writing can be a feature of autistic people, and I'm registered at the university as an autistic student, shouldn't I be able to use a computer to write my exam?
Not so fast! They can't just take my word for it! They need a doctor's note, which means I need to bug my Dad about making an appointment with the doctor, so that I can go and tell her what I need and she can write it down. Why is this necessary, again? My doctor doesn't actually know what accommodations I need, she's literally just writing down whatever I tell her, so why can't I just tell them directly?
But anyway, we get the doctor's appointment, a couple of weeks after I first figured out that I needed it. Then I miss it. We reschedule, and finally I've got a doctor's note saying I need to use a computer for essay exams.
I forget the note in the car for about a week. Then my friend with CP who's in the same class says something about the deadline for accommodations for the midterm coming up soon, so the very next day, just before closing time, I give my note to someone in Disability Student Services, who tells me that as soon as they process my note, that accommodation will be added to the list of accommodations I can register for on the website. Which I have to do for every single exam, for some reason, which requires that I actually know when an exam's coming up, so most exams I go without any accommodations. It's only for the major ones that I get accommodations.
A couple of weeks pass, and the website still says I get only room alone and double time, no mention of a computer. So I decided, today, to go bug DSS about this because my exam is coming up pretty soon.
Well, here's what happened:
I wandered in and saw a sign right in the doorway saying [incomprehensible]. I'm about to walk right past it when it occurs to me that it might be important, so I take a second look. It says something about going somewhere else, but I have no idea where. I do have some keywords, though: 'atrium' and 'triage desk'. So I go to the front desk and ask where the atrium is, and they point me upstairs. Then, upstairs, I ask someone at some other desk where the triage desk is, and they point me back downstairs - apparently what I've been calling the front desk is actually the triage desk. So I head back down there.
At the desk, the guy doesn't seem to have a clue what I'm asking for. Probably largely because I don't really have a clue why the sign in DSS said to go there. Finally, he gets someone to come over and lead me past the sign to the actual DSS desk, which I go along with because I have no idea where they're leading me.
I talk to the person at the DSS desk, who informs me that anyone who could help me is in a meeting until 3:30, but also says something about going to the DSS exam office. So I wander off to ask random people (including the guy behind the 'triage desk') where the DSS exam office is, and end up in a hallway looking at a door that says something about exams being in progress. I walk past that door, thinking the sign means I shouldn't go in, but take a second look when I realize the door number of that door matches what I was told about where the DSS exam office was. The sign actually says I should enter quietly because exams are in progress. So I enter quietly.
There's a person behind the desk, good sign because the person at DSS said there might not be anyone there. But it turns out that person can't actually do anything related to exam accommodations, just tell me once again that anyone who could help me is in a meeting until 3:30. By this time I'm overloaded, so I complain pointlessly about how inaccessible DSS is for me, and then leave.
As soon as 3:30 comes around, I'll go back. Hopefully, I'll be able to fumble into actually getting what I need. But it really makes me wonder, why services intended for people like me are so hard for people like me to actually access. And what's really frustrating is that I don't understand the system well enough to figure out what's so darn inaccessible about it for me, and every time I say so, I get a big long string of incomprehensible bureaucrat-speech that doesn't help me at all but is supposed to explain this to me. About the only accommodation I could think of is to have some sort of advocate or something go and manage the system for me, but the closest thing I have to that (one of the people who's in a meeting right now) is just as incomprehensible to me as the rest of them.

Autistic Signals

2009-09-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

It's well-known, in the medical literature, that autistic people have different mannerisms from neurotypical people (and other neuroatypical people, often). Diagnosticians can often tell a person is autistic from the way they move, particularly things like rocking, handflapping, etc. In fact, many diagnostic screening tools ask about differences in mannerisms and nonverbal cues to identify which kids might be autistic.
But it's not just the doctors who can tell if someone's autistic. Autistic people, and people who know autistic people (such as family members) can often spot autism - not necessarily with enough accuracy for an official diagnosis, but this still shapes their interactions with these people in various ways.
A similar thing happens among gay people. Gay people, and to a lesser extent straight allies, often have a finely attuned 'gaydar' - a sense of whether or not someone else is gay. This depends partly on unintentional cues, similar to the cues diagnosticians try to observe, but also partly on intentional signals that gay people use to find each other.
Autistic people aren't as common as gay people, and have a much less developed community, but we also use cues to tell each other from neurotypicals. Jim Sinclair, in his article Alien Contact, describes the use of both sorts of signals:

"The women [mother & daughter] were talking quietly to each other. I couldn't make out the younger one's words. But I could hear their rhythms and their tones, and I knew them, and I knew her for one of my people."
[he also describes specific behaviors, such as repetitive speech, that signal this to him]

"And so, standing there in the aisle, knowing they were looking at me, I let my body begin to rock, let my hands begin to flap. Not too much. Only a little. I'm sure the mother never noticed."

Personally, in my volunteer work, I can often guess what disability the child I'm assigned to has been diagnosed with (or should be). Certainly, I can spot the autistic kids. When I work with an autistic kid, especially, I let myself act more autistic, hoping that they'll pick up on that and recognize me as one of their kind. And I get the sense that many of them do, particularly the more severely autistic kids (who, ironically, seem to be more in tune with nonverbal cues), because they often relate to me differently. It's subtle - somewhat greater interest in me, more initiation of interaction, more response to my own interaction. Sometimes I can't even see it until I watch them with someone else. Sometimes I don't see it at all, but someone else does. But the thing is that different mannerisms and nonverbal communication aren't just something that diagnosticians use to find us. We also use them to find each other.

My Parents

2009-08-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

A lot of people accuse autistic rights activists of being against parents. Often it's assumed that we had bad parenting and are projecting our experiences onto others, or something like that. Well, I can't speak for other autistics, but I know that's not the case with me. I had good parents. In fact, I had excellent parents.
Throughout my school years, my teachers kept saying there was something wrong with me. My first school kept saying I had ADHD and needed Ritalin. In a later school, the principal figured I had Asperger Syndrome. So why wasn't I diagnosed until I was 15 and sought out a diagnosis myself? Because my parents didn't think there was anything wrong with me.
Not that they didn't know I was different. They weren't in denial, they knew I wasn't like most kids. But as far as they were concerned, that was a good thing, or maybe indifferent. How could anyone think that it was a problem for a child to be as smart, creative and original as I was?
A big part of it was that they instinctively knew how to create an environment that suited me. So when the teachers said 'she's defiant, she's this, she's that' my parents honestly answered 'she's not like that at home, what are you doing wrong?' And they were right - I acted the way I did at school because my teachers didn't know how to handle me properly. What really shocked me, when I got involved in autistic rights, was realizing that it wasn't my teachers' methods that were unusual, but my parents. You see, the mistakes my teachers made that set off my meltdowns and made it nearly impossible for them to calm me down - most parents of autistic kids make the same mistakes.
I suffered a lot in school, but when I went home, I went home to an environment that suited my needs. If my teachers had been the ones raising me, it would have been so much worse. I'm not sure if I'd even be alive now, considering that despite my parents' support, I was thinking about suicide when I was 10 years old.
But I didn't kill myself. I never even considered it as a serious solution to my problems. That's because I always knew things would get better someday. And do you know why? Because of my parents.
Firstly, my parents always told me that college was way better than school, and that my kind of mind would be an asset in college. So I could put a time limit on how long I'd have to suffer, because I truly believed that once I graduated grade 12, I could be happy. (Fortunately, I got to be happy before then, because of homeschooling.) But that wasn't the most important reason I had hope.
More importantly, I knew that not everyone viewed my differences the way the school did. The people whose opinions mattered the most to me respected me, and that gave me hope that others would as well. And I never thought the problem was with me, because I was fine at home with my parents. I figured the problem was with my school. And you can leave school behind, but you bring yourself wherever you go.
So the reason I'm in activism isn't because I had bad parents and think that all parents of autistics are like that. No, I'm in activism because I had wonderful parents, and I know how unusual they were. Most parents of autistics want to be great parents to their children, but they're nowhere near as close to ideal as my parents. And I'd like to show them how to give their children what I got growing up, because I know just how essential that kind of parenting is to an autistic kid.

Rule of Perception

2009-08-21T13:36:00.001-07:00

In a lot of contexts, what's actually going on is considered to be more important than any particular individual's perception. However, in terms of the psychological impact on the individual, perception matters much more than reality.
So, for example, let's say we have two children. Child A's parents don't love him/her, and show this clearly. Child B's parents love him/her very much, but don't show this clearly. Both children are going to feel unloved and show the same set of psychological problems (all other things being equal) because they both perceive their families the same way. So, the fact that Child B's parents love him/her doesn't really matter that much to to the outcome*, what matters is how well they show their love.
For another example - imagine if a person is paranoid. He/she will be under the same sort of stress as someone who is really being plotted against, even though it's all in his/her head.
So if you want to understand why someone is acting a certain way, and what's going on in that person's head, knowing what situation they're in won't necessarily help. You need to know what situation they think they're in.

* It does matter in one way - parents who love their child but aren't showing it very well are more likely to improve over time. If a psychologist tells both sets of parents that their children feel unloved, Child B's parents are much more likely to see this as a problem, and it's a whole lot easier to choose to start showing your feelings better than it is to choose to start feeling something new.

Paranoid Parents

2009-08-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

A lot of people lately have been saying that our society has been diagnosing too many minor developmental quirks as disabilities, that we're overpathologizing children. For the most part, I've been disagreeing vocally - after all, I'm a person who would not have been diagnosed as autistic in the past, but who has been helped by being diagnosed autistic. In large part because I've found my people, and the reason I feel so different from most people. And then there's the meltdowns, the sensory overload and the organizational issues, which have been helped by trying to accomodate my autism.
But in working as a volunteer expert on AllExperts.com, I've seen another side of it. This question is a good example - a mother of a sociable 2 year old who uses a few single words, and she thinks he might be autistic. Autistic! He's not even language delayed, and his language is the only area she's really concerned about. I've gotten several questions like that - parents worried that their 15 month olds aren't talking yet or their 2 year old don't talk very much, and they immediately jump to worrying about autism. I even had someone ask me if her 2 month old was autistic!
I started out thinking that if parents think their children are different, they probably are. Now, I understand exactly why so many doctors dismiss parents' concerns - because they really are overreacting! What is going on here? Clearly, something is wrong about parents scrutinizing tiny children so intensely for signs of something wrong!
This doesn't happen with gifted children, by the way. I get plenty of parents asking me if their children are gifted, because I'm an expert in giftedness as well as autism. Most of these parents are more towards the extreme of being uncertain about obviously gifted kids, such as a kid who was reciting the alphabet at 18 months. It's only when they think it's something bad that they overinterpret minor variations - when it's something good, they need to be told about the most obvious examples. I bet there are far more gifted kids whose parents don't think they're gifted than the other way around. The exact opposite is true for autism.

Steps in Creating Something

2009-06-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

In my first-year psychology class today, my professor listed the following steps in doing something creative:

Orientation - defining the problem that needs to be solved
Preparation - gathering relevant information
Incubation - setting the thing aside and doing other stuff, meanwhile figuring out things in the background
Illumination - after awhile of incubation, a solution suddenly comes to you
Verification - you check out the insight you had and make use of it (or else go back to stages 2-3, I guess)

That's a pretty good description of how I write essays or other assignments. Stages 1 & 2 occur when I read the work I need to write about, find out my assignment and then reread what I'd most like to write my essay about. If I don't have an idea right away, I let it simmer a bit and then decide what exactly I want to write about (stages 3 & 4) and then I write it (stage 5). But I also write fantasy stories on my own time, a more creative act than writing an essay, and I don't follow these stages at all in writing fantasy.

Here's my impression of what steps I do follow:

I have an idea - like, for example, 'imagine if a half-vampire was going around biting people and then pretending to hunt himself down in order to get money?' These ideas can come from reading another story, pondering some problem, having a weird dream, whatever. I don't always know where the idea came from, but often I do.
I ponder the idea a bit, and maybe combine it with other ideas, let it simmer awhile, and eventually come up with a starting scene and (hopefully) a plot.
I write the starting scene, and keep on writing along the plot, stopping when I get stuck on something.
I talk over what I'm stuck on with someone else, or just let it simmer awhile. Then I get another idea, and either keep on writing from where I was before or rewrite part of the story and continue.
Eventually, I come to a point where I can say that it's done. Usually by then I've had ideas for a sequel, whether or not I write one depends on how good my ideas are.

Anyone else want to share?

Abused/Traumatized Characters in Fiction

2009-06-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

I see a lot of people portraying trauma and abuse poorly in fiction. Here are some of the common problems:

With Good Guys:

Very Little Effect - a prime example is Harry Potter. He's got a big advantage over Voldemort because he's 'full of love'. Where did he learn that love? From his parents? They died before he could remember him. From the Dursleys? They abused and neglected him and made it pretty clear that they hated him. From teachers or classmates? Until Hogwarts, none of those people cared about him either. For a boy with the unpleasant life history he had, Harry Potter was surprisingly healthy psychologically. A more common example is how little the story's events usually affect the characters. There are people they know dying all the time, they face their own death on several occasions, maybe experience torture, but they still act like a carefree kid a lot of the time. To get an idea of what living through those kinds of things is really like, talk to anyone who's lived in a war zone (soldier or civilian).
Instant Healing - this is where a character has some kind of trauma, and for 10 years or whatever, they've shown a certain dysfunctional pattern as a result. Yet one transformative experience cures it overnight. A few stories stretch it out awhile, but very often it's still too brief. Or maybe they've recently experienced something traumatic and are showing symptoms, but something helps them deal with that and they instantly go back to being who they were before the trauma. Well, guess what? Healing from trauma is long and hard. You'll go through a great deal of pain, you'll come back through the same stages over and over, and maybe, years later, you'll finally be able to consider yourself to have healed. Only to realize you've still got wounds. And when you finally are healed, you will not be like you were before the trauma, or would have been without the trauma. It's not possible to undo something that happened to you, all you can do is integrate it into your life experiences in a healthy way. A series that portrays this really well is The Hollows by Kim Harrison - one of the major characters is a vampire who's experienced some pretty serious abuse, and throughout the series, she is gradually healing. As of the latest book, she's still clearly got issues, but she's not nearly as prone to unexpectedly attacking people as she was at the start of the series.
'Good Guy' Trauma - This is another thing Kim Harrison managed to avoid. A lot of characters, if they actually seem affected by their traumatic experiences, show it by depressive episodes, bad dreams, acting scared of certain things, etc, but never in a way that could actually make them likely to harm someone else. Sure, there are some traumatized people like that, but there are also traumatized people - who have good intentions, and are basically good people - who have explosive rages, misinterpret situations in a dangerous way, and so on. My Dad said when he was growing up, everyone knew not to take certain veterans hunting, because they'd start thinking they were back in the war. It's easy to feel sympathetic for the person sobbing xyr heart out because xe never realized just how much xe wanted the motherly love xe never got. It's much harder to feel sympathetic for the person who has pinned you to a wall and is demanding that you prove that xe can trust you, but that's just as much a part of being traumatized.
Normal Standards - one of the most pervasive and damaging effects of trauma is how it changes your view of the world. But so many characters seem to be perfectly aware that what they went through is not OK or representative of what they can expect from life, even when they really had no way to find that out. An abused child who never got any sympathy from anyone for being abused, yet somehow knows that what they went through was abuse is a prime example. Real abuse survivors often blame themselves for not being able to cope, or being 'bad' and making their parents hurt them, or not being able to stop the abuse (my cousin seemed to think it was plausible for a 4 year old boy to be able to beat up his own father). Or they may think the abuse had no effect on them when it clearly did, or think the effect was positive. Then there's how they view the abuser. It's possible for an abused person to honestly care about their abuser (part of what makes it so agonizing). They may be able to see the good points in the abuser as well as the bad - if the abuser is a parent, for example, they probably did some things right in order for their child to even be alive. They may be aware that the abuser's life isn't easy either, and feel sorry for them. They may have been so dependent on the abuser that they had to care about the abuser or else they wouldn't have survived.

With Bad Guys:

Dark Lord Was Abused - this is where the bad guy is given a backstory of abuse as a replacement for actually trying to explain xyr behavior. There are two big problems with this. Firstly, it often carries the connotation that abused people automatically become bad, especially if there are no other abused characters. Secondly, the standard villain types often don't act like abuse survivors. The biggest thing is that they have too much fun. If you're going to make them an abuse survivor, make them unhappy. It seems obvious to me, but there's the gleeful cackling evil guys with histories of abuse to prove that people can miss this. Thirdly, it still doesn't explain why they act the way they do. Let's say a boy grows up with regular beatings and no one who really loves him. Why would that make him decide to create a doomsday device? You can't just say 'because he was abused' and leave it at that. You should work out the chains of logic there. Maybe he thinks every child suffers as much as he does, and feels that he's doing them a favour by killing them all because they won't have to suffer anymore. Or maybe he wants to destroy all the people who've wronged him, views the whole world as having wronged him because no one stepped in to help him, and thinks everyone deserves to die. Or maybe he isn't really trying to destroy the world, but hoping that making this device that could do that will get everyone to finally see how much pain he's in and force them to care about that. It has to make sense from his perspective, however warped that perspective is. Best if you can get people to empathize with him and really feel sorry for him, even as he's putting the whole world in danger.
Abusive parents - if you're going to have any development of the abuser whatsoever, you need to make them have more depth than just being bad guys. What they're doing to their victim makes sense to them. They have reasons for doing it. Maybe they snap under too much pressure or when their buttons are pushed certain ways, and then feel terrible about what they did. Or they honestly think they're doing the right thing (see 'Normal Standards' above for why an abuser might believe that). Or they might not care about the child or want to hurt the child - but I recommend limiting that, because it seems to me that most abusive parents actually do love their children.

Two Different Sorts of Minorities

2009-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of parallels between the experiences of different minority groups. This is widely referred to, even as people try to claim their group's experiences are unique. But there are also, clearly, differences. Often, these show up not so much as specific groups having unique experiences, but as broad categories encompassing several groups (and sometimes dividing within groups as well as across them).
One division, within the category of people who are born into a minority group, is whether the parents are also members of that group.
Examples of groups where minority-group children are raised by parents belonging to the same group include ethnicity, religion (in fact the child's religion is largely caused by the parent's religion), and some genetically-based disabilities. Examples of groups of minority children raised by majority parents include almost all gay kids, most disabled kids, and a few kids of ethnic minorities (either adopted or mixed-race with a single parent).
The big difference is in the experience of community. The minority child who grows up with minority parents typically lives in two different communities. One is the majority community, where the power lies but also the source of discrimination and exclusion. But as a counterpoint to the majority community, they have their own community, which often lacks resources but provides a place where they can truly feel that they belong.
This has good points and bad points. The good points are the sense of belonging, as well as the ready availability of role models whose experiences truly resonate with the child. However, often the child feels caught between the two worlds, between the greater acceptance found in their own community and the greater opportunities in the other community. This can be seen, for example, in the issue of school success for poor (and often ethnic minority) kids in many large cities in US. If they work hard and try to be successful in school, that can mean turning their backs on their community.
The minority child with majority parents doesn't have the same experience of community. For them, unless their parents make have minority contacts, they belong only to the majority community. But they don't really belong, because this community discriminates against and excludes them. Even their parents may be discriminatory. And the only role models they have are different from them in an important way.
The good points are that these kids often have more opportunities, because their parents are more successful. This type of minority group is also much more likely to have majority-group allies, who advocate with and for them - almost all parents want what's best for their child. In the early years of the fight for rights, these allies may be the only ones who can get people to listen to them. Majority-group parents may be less likely to take certain forms of discrimination for granted (especially when this discrimination extends to themselves), because someone who is accustomed to respect readily notices when they're suddenly being disrespected.
But the bad side is a lot of loneliness. The children may feel like they don't really belong, even when among people who accept them, because the difference is still there. Self-made communities are a big help (and extremely common for such minorities) but can't completely erase the loneliness of growing up different from most or all of the people you know. In addition, it can be harder for these kids to find support, because there are some aspects of discrimination you can only really understand if you've lived through it. Lastly, adult role models may be very hard to find, leading the child to either identify with someone from the majority group, or have pretty much no idea what the future holds.

Problems With Fantasy Analogies

2009-06-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

A lot of stories I've seen use fantastical situations as analogies for real-life ones. I can certainly see the value in that - it helps illustrate a problem in terms people may be more willing to accept, and can be a vehicle for fascinating thought experiments. But too often, they are too caught up in the real-life situation they're trying to make an analogy of to recognize that the fantasy scenario they've thought up really isn't the same thing.
In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it becomes clear that Buffy's friend Willow, a powerful witch, is using magic too much. It's clearly intended as an analogy for drug abuse, as she starts partying with a fellow witch and using magic all night long, and then going to a guy who does weird magical things to her that clearly create a 'high'. Finally, she ends up putting Buffy's sister Dawn in danger by accidentally summoning some sort of demon-thing that attacks them, and after that she declares to Buffy that she's going to stop doing magic - 'it's not worth it'.
Replace 'magic' with 'drugs', and that story works fine. Person uses drugs for fun, shirks responsibilities, then puts someone they care about in danger and decides that drugs aren't worth it. That's a story that often happens in real life. Now, that bit would have come across as poorly written with drugs, too, because of how much they sped the process up, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
But Willow's magic was not equivalent to drug use. Willow's magic actually did things, very valuable things. Towards the end of Season 5, Willow saved all of their lives several times with her magic, such as when she projected a magical shield around a building they were hiding in so the knights attacking them couldn't come in. At the beginning of Season 6, she brought Buffy back from the dead, a spell which was for the most part the right thing to do (not so much for Buffy, who was in Heaven, but Buffy's absence put her town and her loved ones in serious danger). Drug use doesn't save lives (unless you're talking about prescription drugs, but that's different). Given that Willow has actually saved many lives with her magic, it doesn't make sense for her to just give up doing magic all together because she overdid it a few times. It would make sense if the only benefit of her magic was to make her feel good.
I'm sure there are many other examples of people force-fitting a fantasy situation into an analogy for real life, and getting something that doesn't make sense as a result. It seems to me that writers like that should really make a choice. Either:
a) Design a situation that really does parallel what they're trying to make an analogy for, such as if Willow's magic was limited to making illusions only she could see (which would necessitate giving up on using magical solutions for plot problems).
b) Explore the situation your characters are actually in rather than trying to stick to things that fit the analogy you're making. For example, if Willow realized that magic was addictive but also extremely useful given the problems their team faces, and worked on figuring out how to control her use of magic so that she could still save people's lives. Or, if she couldn't control it somehow, made a choice between losing control of herself and saving lives (I'd like to see a story like that sometime, it would be an interesting dilemma).

When Extreme Measures Become Ordinary

2009-05-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man visiting his mother in Canada, was tasered by the RCMP several times and died. This has sparked major debate about whether or not police should be allowed to taser people.
In the neurodiversity community, there has been a great deal of outrage at the practices of the Judge Rotenberg Center, which treats children with serious behavior problems by various methods including contingent electric shocks as punishments.
Another issue for the neurodiversity community is the use of restraints to deal with behavioral crises in disabled children, highlighted recently by a news report and a GAO report on the dangers of restraints, including deaths from restraints.
Tasers, contingent electric shocks, and restraints are all risky procedures, with a high probability of causing physical and/or psychological trauma. At least two of those three are believed to have killed people or contributed to their deaths. They're not intended to kill or cause serious harm, and they don't necessarily have that effect on everyone, but the risk is there. That's why all three have people wanting to ban their use.
But their supporters all make the same argument: in extreme cases, when the stakes are really high, these measures may be better than the alternative. If it's a choice between shooting someone and tasering them, the taser is certainly safer. If it's a choice between a child self-injuring to the point of extensive scarring and using contingent electric shocks to train that child to stop that behavior, the electric shocks are probably better. If it's a choice between that same child killing themselves with self-injury or being in four-point restraints, the restraints are probably better. There are few, if any, people who oppose using these extreme measures in such extreme situations. In those cases, the risk of harm caused by those extreme measures is less severe than the alternative.
In theory, it's easy to say that these techniques should be used only in extreme cases. It's easy to say that you shouldn't taser a man multiple times because he picked up a stapler, or give contingent electric shocks whenever a student swears at you, or hold a child facedown on the floor to stop her from wiggling a loose tooth (all those are described in the above links). And it's also easy to draw a distinction between those cases and the extreme situations where those measures are justified. But in practice, what do we see? Time and time again, extreme measures are introduced for use in extreme situations, and they end up getting used for minor altercations.
I think what we really need to do is figure out why this keeps happening. What is it about giving someone an extreme tool that makes them start using it when it's not necessary, and how do we change that?
A big solution that comes to mind is better training. I worked one shift at a suite where two severely autistic kids were being cared for by three shifts of staff, and my training consisted entirely of getting advice from a more experienced staff member as I did the work. No formal training whatsoever, and I was dealing with these kids right away. I didn't know a thing about those two kids and how they communicated, and my prior experience had also consisted of hands-on work with no actual training. In that kind of situation, is it really surprising that people misuse the tools they're given?
Then there's job stress. Working with people showing extreme behavior - whether it's as a police officer, a medical professional, a caregiver, or whatever - is very stressful. Especially when you're doing this for eight hours. Hiring more workers, giving stress reduction services and such to the workers you do have, paying them better so they can afford to arrange their own stress reduction - there are ways employers can reduce stress, and those things should reduce abuses.
And empathy. It's hard to know how to build empathy, but if you have empathy for the people you're trying to manage, that makes a big difference. Note that if you don't have empathy for them, you're not necessarily a bad person. If you're dealing with someone you don't really understand, who is attacking you or doing horrifying things, it's very easy to lack empathy for them. Having people who are dealing well with the same sort of issues that are overwhelming their clients is a great way to ensure empathy, but those people can be hard to find. There really should be more research into training methods that help build empathy for the clients. (One little note: subjecting the employees to a controlled, consensual version of the same measure they should use in extreme situations doesn't work. That's like having sex to find out what it's like to be raped - the context is totally different.)

Not Always Malicious

2009-05-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of parents who, directly or indirectly, end up causing great harm to their children. There are a lot of children who grow up feeling betrayed by the people who should have been most on their side.
A lot of people assume that parents who cause lasting psychological harm to their children are just simply bad parents. Either they, for some reason, want their children to suffer, or they just don't care. Either way, they're bad people.
But in reality, it's not nearly that simple. Maybe there are some parents who really, truly don't love their children, but they're much less common than you might think. Most parents who hurt their kids actually love those kids and want the best for them, just like the more successful parents - but somehow, something goes wrong.
Maybe they're faced with a problem they don't know how to deal with. It could be that they think their children need something when they really need something else, like a parent who honestly doesn't know that shaking a baby can cause brain damage, or that 5 year olds can't be left unsupervised all day. Or they hold certain stereotypes about a group of people, and then suddenly discover that their child is a member of that group. Maybe they think one thing is going on with their child, and then find out that they're wrong and the consequences of their mistakes are serious.
Maybe they put their children in a situation without understanding what was really going on there. Who would have guessed that it's not all right to leave the boy with Uncle Ernie? Parents don't know everything. And they might not recognize the signs, when their kid is trying to tell them that something's wrong. Or maybe the child isn't trying to tell them - xe thinks they know already, or can't/won't help, or something terrible will happen if xe doesn't just put up with it, or maybe the child doesn't realize what's happening to xe is wrong.
Or maybe the parents have their own problems, and these problems are so serious and hard to deal with, leaving them without the resources they need to be good parents. Maybe their emotions keep bubbling up out of control, and when the child does some minor little thing, they can't restrain themselves and they hurt the child even though they know it's wrong. And they're sorry afterwards and they resolve not to do it again, but as long as they don't deal with the underlying problem, it will happen again. And maybe they don't know how to seek help, or they think they can handle it, or they're too afraid to seek help, or there's just no help to be found. So they're caught in this vicious cycle, and they can't find the way out. And the more often it happens, the more ingrained it becomes, until only something drastic can stop it.

He's Not the Same

2009-04-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

[Note: After watching considerably more of this show, I've found out that I really misunderstood the vampires. Angel was not Spike's sire, Spike, as far as I can tell, didn't actually know Angel before he got his soul back, and Spike didn't really like Angel when he was soulless.]
I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer a lot lately. And I've noticed something interesting about that show.
In that series, when a person becomes a vampire, in addition to changing quite a lot physically, xe has a significant personality change. This is explained as losing xyr soul. One vampire, Angel, had the reverse happen to him as well, because a spell done on him restored his soul to his body. At that point, he had a major personality change as well.
How do loved ones react to that kind of change? There are two examples I've seen so far in the series:
Xander and Jesse:
In the very first episode, Buffy befriends two boys named Xander and Jesse. These two are described as having been good friends for a long time. During a vampire attack, Jesse gets kidnapped, and by the time Buffy, Xander and another friend come to rescue him, he's been turned into a vampire. He's not overly mean to Xander after that, but makes it quite clear that he's siding with the vampires against Xander and Buffy.
Buffy, who wasn't very close to Jesse, immediately turns against him at that point, telling Xander to 'look at him not as your friend, but as the creature who killed him'. Although Xander finds this very difficult, he accepts her advice and ends up killing Jesse*. (It is possible, however, that Xander wasn't actually very close to Jesse, because he is never mentioned again in later episodes.)
Spike and Angel:
Angel, before he regained his soul, turned Spike into a vampire. As Spike's 'sire', therefore, he is very important to Spike, basically the vampire version of a parent. Then a spell restores Angel's soul, and he turns against Spike, even helping Buffy when she tries to kill Spike.
Spike, unlike Xander, does not turn against Angel. Although he takes measures necessary to ensure his own safety when Angel is a danger to him (by hitting Angel and pushing Angel away from him), Spike makes it quite clear that, even quite awhile after Angel was affected by that spell, Spike still cares about him.
The idea that someone has fundamentally changed as a person, to the point that they're no longer the person they used to be, is not only seen in fantasy. Many real people are viewed this way, such as developmentally disabled people who experience regressions, people with certain 'mental illnesses' such as schizophrenia, and people with brain injuries. And loved ones often treat the person who's changed fairly badly, in ways that they'd never have treated that person before their change (in another Buffy episode, Xander gets possessed by a hyena and they end up locking him in a cage and refusing to let him out). From the perspective of the person's loved ones, this is 'for their own good', and the unpleasant things they do to the person who's changed are really being done to the illness or whatever that's changed them (just like how Buffy rationalizes killing Jesse in her discussions with Xander). But from the perspective of the person who's changed:

"'I want the real you back' prompts the questions, 'Do you know me? Would you love me if you found out this is the real me? Aren’t you supposed to love who I am, not who you imagine?'
...
By the way, this is even true of changes that are traditionally viewed as very negative. I have known of many people who, after brain damage, have all their friends say they want them to be the person they were before the brain damage. It doesn’t happen. It’s not real. It hurts them. It’s not that they wanted to get knocked on the head, it’s that who they are now happens to be a person who got knocked on the head, not the imaginary person that didn’t."

Ironically, in this particular way, the vampires in the Buffy series (except for Angel) come off as morally better than the humans. Spike and the other vampires who knew and cared about Angel before he got his soul mostly treat him fairly well. Darla, who I suspect was Angel's sire (I read a book about Angel before, but don't remember much of it), was trying to coax him to drink blood with her. Spike hits Angel when Angel tries to trick him in order to help Buffy, but makes it quite clear that if Angel wants to have a real relationship with Spike, he'll welcome that. They don't seem to be doing things to Angel that they'd have been unwilling to do to him when he didn't have his soul - unlike the humans in the story. Because the vampires in that universe are bad in many ways, but they are certainly capable of being loyal to a loved one.

* Not entirely intentionally, though. He was threatening Jesse with a stake, trying to kill Jesse but hesitating because it felt emotionally like killing his own friend, and then someone bumped Jesse from behind and pushed him onto the stake. However, it's likely that if he'd had more time to decide, he would have killed Jesse eventually.

How Can I Try?

2009-04-22T09:40:00.001-07:00

In response to my recent post that Willpower is Not Enough, one commenter said that she'd thought from the title that it would be about executive dysfunction, since so often people tell a person with executive dysfunction to try harder, or assume their lack of output is deliberate.
But I don't think I'd put it that way. It seems to me that rather than willpower being something separate, that can or can't affect one's executive functions, it's actually something that is determined, at least partially, by executive functioning. Executive functions affect how hard you can try, how much willpower you have, instead of being affected by those things.
So, instead of the phrase 'if you tried hard enough, you could overcome executive dysfunction' being similar in meaning to telling a blind person 'if you tried hard enough, you could stop being blind', it's more like telling a them 'if you could see well enough, you could stop being blind'. In my view, willpower or trying hard isn't something that is always under conscious control. Not for neurotypicals, and especially not for the people described as having executive dysfunction. You can influence it to varying degrees (and this differs from person to person) but you can't fully control it.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadyay, in his book The Mind Tree, has a poem in which he asks someone to teach him how to try. That's what executive dysfunction is - difficulty trying, not because you choose not to try or you have some kind of emotional block, but because your frontal lobes can't marshall the rest of your brain in the right way at that time. Amanda Baggs has a good analogy for it: she compares herself to a stork, because storks mostly fly using thermals instead of flying on their own power. As a result, if the thermals aren't going the right way, they will have a hard time reaching certain destinations. What makes it more confusing for someone on the outside is that thermals shift around, so while one day it's much easier to go from points A to B than A to C, it may be the exact opposite the next day.
Other people who have more control over their own output are like geese - power flyers, who mostly flap instead of gliding. They're more consistent. They're slower than a stork using the thermals (and they tire out more easily), but much faster than a stork trying to fly somewhere without the right thermals.
And willpower, or motivation, is a part of that. When properly motivated, we can be pretty close to unstoppable. But we might not be able to become motivated (even if you threaten us) if the circumstances aren't right.

It's Only Us

2009-04-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

One thing I really hate is when some minority group acts as if the particular kind of discrimination their group experiences is unique, and no other group experiences that particular kind of dynamic. Recently, I found a pretty extreme example of this at a website called TVTropes, which describes patterns found in TV and other media (such as the bad guy turning good). The particular page that I'm talking about is called Have You Tried Not Being A Monster, and since it's a wiki and therefore subject to change at any moment, I will quote the bit I'm referring to here:

"There's a certain group of people. They have a normal childhood, to an extent, but somewhere along they way, they discover they're different. Not like the other children. Not like their parents. They're something unusual. Something that means they can never fit in. They hide their differences deep away from themselves, but it eats away at them.
Then they find others like them - also living in secret and ostracized from society. A subculture, upholding a masquerade of being normal by day, but living out a secret lifestyle in seedy bars and locations. They might ask their family if they would still love them, chances are if they ever tell their parents, acceptance will be hard, and they'll inevitably be asked, 'Have you tried... not being a monster?'
You thought we were talking about gay people? Don't be silly! We're talking about mutants! Er, no. Wait, we're talking about vampires. And werewolves. And fairies . . .
There's a subculture of supernatural beings who basically have the same exact culture and society as gay people, and go through the same experiences. Basically, this culture appears to be normal, lives in human society, but is in some way supernatural. They have to participate in The Masquerade, but if they come out as monsters or wizards or vampires or aliens, they face prejudice. To drive the point home even more, they may have Muggle parents who reject their freakish children.
Much like Fantastic Racism allows writers to feel like they dealt with themes of racism and discrimination without actually including characters of colour into their work, this trope allow writers to introduce gay themes into a plot when they're too cowardly to introduce actual gay characters or when they feel that allegory or metaphor will be less likely to be censored. Some writers go farther and do have gay characters, sometimes making the metaphor explicit in the text."

Whoever wrote this seems to be suggesting that the typical life experiences of gay people are so unique that even fantasy minority groups who have the same kind of life experiences are clearly a reference to gay people. (Never mind that anyone who writes good fantasy will echo real life in many different ways, especially in the emotional experiences of the characters.) As many autistics know, it's not just gays who gradually realize they're different from everyone they know, hide their differences for fear of being rejected, and finally find a subculture that accepts them. If you read pretty much any autobiography of an autistic person first diagnosed (or told about their diagnosis) in adulthood or late adolescence, you'll find the same basic story.
Pretty much anyone who is raised by typical people but has some kind of difference that isn't readily apparent and is taught that difference (or their difference in particular) is a bad thing will have this experience - and that's a large and very diverse group of people. People with a wide variety of cognitive differences, including gifted people, autistic people, ADHD people, highly creative people, etc etc. Gay people and other sexual minorities. Many transgender people. The list goes on and on.
People seem especially prone to saying this about gay people, because among the groups most widely viewed as discriminated against, gays are somewhat unique. Women and ethnic minorities both typically grow up with adult role models and are readily recognized as belonging in the discriminated-against category. (Although there are interracial adoptees and mixed-race people who can pass, both of those people have some experiences in common with gay people.) But I've seen the same thing said by other minorities. For example, one Deaf woman whose blog I read (unfortunately I can't find the link, it was in one of the disability blog carnivals) said that while most disabled people are pitied, they don't experience the same kind of intense push to eliminate the disability that deaf people experience. I commented on her blog saying that, in fact, that was pretty much the classic reaction to autism and many other disabilities.
What all those people don't seem to realize is that although there are differences in experiences of discrimination, there is no form of discrimination that is exclusively applied to one group. It seems to me that instead, there are broad categories of discrimination, such as the 'you and your ancesters are discriminated against' pattern seen in racism, classism and so on, or the 'you're different from everyone you know and they don't realize it' pattern experienced by gays, invisibly disabled people, and so on. (Or the one where someone who obviously belongs to a certain minority group grows up with no contact with that minority group, such as many visibly disabled people.)
And when you see the parallels, it's much easier to figure out exactly what causes a certain experience. For example, from talking with a lesbian who thought crushes on girls were simple liking and simple liking of boys was actually crushes helped clarify exactly why I so often misperceive my own way of thinking and feeling - because the possibility of being different was never presented to me, since I a) lacked any role models of people like me, and b) did not get any feedback from others that suggested that they thought I would be different from them. (I did get punishment for being different, but the punishment implied that I really could be the same as them.)

Willpower is Not Enough

2009-04-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

My brother and I are really into the Pokemon series. For me, it's all about the Pokemon - I really don't care much for the human characters, although some are interesting or funny or whatever. For example, there's a gifted child in the story named Max, who is the younger brother of a Pokemon trainer. But if it weren't for their Pokemon, I wouldn't have any interest in the series.
Anyway, I've watched enough of the series to notice a cliche. It's the same cliche seen in a lot of anime - the ones that are more 'adventure' than 'introspection' type stories. (I love introspective type anime, like Spirited Away or the Mokke series.) The cliche is this: if you have enough willpower, you can achieve your dreams.
This isn't just present in Japanese culture. It's quite obviously present in Western culture as well. The classic idea of the hard-working, clever person making it rich is an example of this. It's also obvious in how people view weight - if you're fat, you must not have dieted enough, or stuck with the diets long ebnough. If you had more willpower, you could be thin.
The big problem with this idea: it's not true.
No matter how hard you try, you may never achieve your dream. And what if you don't, and you're looking back on a life spent chasing something you never actually found? A life spent postponing your life for after, and after never came?
And sometimes, there's no happy ending. You're beaten by overwhelming strength, and even if you fight in the seas, on the beaches, in the fields and streets, you might still be beaten. It might be that you are helpless to stop them from winning, no matter how hard you try. And what do you do then? How do you survive? How do you get others to recognize that it could happen to them, no matter how much willpower they have?
Now, this doesn't mean you should give up before you try. It might be that you have a decent chance, or you don't know how good your chances are. It might be that if even though you can't achieve your dream, trying to can make things better than they'd have been otherwise (we still don't have sexual equality, but look where chasing that dream got us).
But there comes a time that you must face reality, and know that you're not going to reach your dream. And what you have to do is live your life, and settle for something that's good enough for you. I want to make everyone accept autistic and other atypical people and truly consider them just as valuable as neurotypical people, but I can't make that happen. What I can do, if I try hard enough, is make it easier for the ones who come after me, so that eventually, generations from now, that dream can be reached by someone.

Autistic Prosopagnosic

2009-04-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition in which there is a specific difficulty recognizing faces. It can be acquired (due to brain damage) or congenital. The congenital form, researchers have been discovering lately, seems to be quite common among autistic people (to the point where some guys, apparently unaware that non-autistic congenital prosopagnosics exist, have suggested that it's the root of the social differences in autism).
I am pretty sure I'm prosopagnosic. It's a mild form - I can actually recognize people by their faces, if I know them well, they look weird, or I've concentrated on trying to learn their face. But I can't recognize people as easily as most people do. For example, I had a counselor for several months, and never learnt to recognize her face - I recognized her as 'the person who comes up to me in the waiting room and leads me into her office. She was young, and I think she had long blond hair, but that's all I remember.
I'm not sure if being autistic makes it easier or harder to cope with prosopagnosia. On the one hand, autism interferes with a lot of the work-arounds for prosopagnosia. I can't keep track of a lot of personal details about different people, so if someone mentions their husband Bill that usually isn't much help. I don't know how to get people to say something that gives away someone's identity, without revealing that I haven't recognized them. I also don't pay much attention to how people look, so hairstyle, accessories, clothing are not as much of a help for me as for non-autistic prosopagnosics.
But I have absolutely no interest in gossip, so when chatting with people I talk instead about ideas, and the person's identity is not as important for that. I don't make friends easily, and don't mind being alone, so I don't need to keep track of as many people. In crowds, I'm usually not looking at other people, so my lack of recognition of someone could be attributed to not having seen them. I'm more often in the company of my parents, because I have trouble with things like traveling alone by bus, so my parents can help me remember who a person is.
And more importantly, I don't seem totally normal like many prosopagnosics do. I can pass for normal, to a certain extent, but anyone who knows me more than superficially knows that I'm pretty weird. And I'm one of those 'extremely out' autistics who tends to tell everyone I have a decent-length conversation with about my diagnosis. The fact that I fail to recognize people on occasion, therefore, gets seen in the same light as not knowing what time of day it is, not realizing two people I know very well are in a relationship together, or not understanding a bit of slang. The fact that I have so many more quirks than a simple prosopagnosic means that people are less likely to forget that I'm different or not believe me when I tell them I have a disability.
In that sense, then, it's easier to deal with prosopagnosia if you're autistic. Although high functioning autism is called an 'invisible disability', it's more visible than prosopagnosia is, which means people are more likely to understand and set aside normal expectations.

Significant Impairment

2009-03-06T09:46:00.000-08:00

Imagine the following scenario:

Student A has the typical motor features of mild cerebral palsy. He walks, but does so awkwardly, and can't climb stairs. At School A, this means he must be carried up the stairs in order to attend his second-floor classes. As a result, he is diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

After awhile, Student A is transferred to School B. His motor skills have not significantly changed, but in School B he can use the elevator to get to his second-floor classes, and he does not have trouble getting around independently. As a result, in School B, he is not considered to have cerebral palsy anymore.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Obviously, cerebral palsy can't be cured simply by removing environmental barriers. Student A may function better in School B, but he still has cerebral palsy.

But apparently the same is not true of autism. Baron-Cohen et al tested a number of people on a new self-report measure of high-functioning autism, including diagnosed autistics, members of the general public, and university students. He found that a cutoff score of 32 points best distinguished autistic from non-autistic subjects. However, some controls scored above that cutoff. While he couldn't interview the members of the general public (because they were anonymous), he did interview 11 university students with scores above 32. Seven of them met criteria for AS/HFA, but:

"No diagnoses were actually made for two reasons: No parent was present to provide independent developmental data, and because none of those meeting criteria complained of any current unhappiness. Indeed, many of them reported that within a University setting their desire not to be sociable, together with their desire to pursue their narrow or repetitive interests (typically mathematics and computing) was not considered odd, and was even valued. ... In all 11 cases however, there was evidence from self-report of significant impairment in functioning during the school years (social isolation, being bullied, and difficulty in making friendships)."

(I could also complain about requiring parents to give data, as this makes adult diagnosis really difficult sometimes, but that's another issue.) So, basically, they were not impaired enough to be diagnosed, but they had been in childhood*. Note, importantly, that this wasn't because they'd gotten any less weird - they'd just found a setting where weirdness was tolerated.
Is it just me, or is the requirement of 'significant impairment', a criteria for all or almost all conditions in the DSM-IV, really screwy? Hey, we found the cure for autism! Stick them in an environment where being autistic doesn't cause them any problems!

* The four who didn't meet criteria could have been diagnosed with PDD NOS.

Perhaps, Most Likely

2009-02-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if I mentioned on this blog that I've started university. Anyway, I have. I'm taking a linguistics class and an English class.
In my English class, my instructer just criticized me for saying 'most likely' the author of one piece intended it to be interpreted a certain way. He said to state it as a fact, so it will be more convincing.
I'm not going to do that. I think it's wrong to pretend your opinions are facts. I can't read the author's mind, and say what he thought, and to act like I can seems to me to be a violation of that person. I am not Coleridge, Alice Munro, Ursula K LeGuin, etc. I can't know for certain what was in their minds when they wrote the pieces I've read. And I won't pretend that I do.
My professor says that everyone writing academically does this, and that if they didn't, no one would listen to anyone else and the fabric of society would be torn apart. (Yeah, right.) Well, I've read a lot of academic writing, and he's right in saying writing this way is common. So is, I think, the fallacy behind it, where your construction of reality becomes more real to you than reality itself, and you forget that you really don't know for certain that what you are saying is true - in fact, the vital difference between facts and interpretation. It's doesn't appear to be a mere convention used to make a point. People who write that way often act as if they honestly believe they know for certain what is merely conjecture. And I made a promise to myself that I would do my best to avoid being like that.
I'm willing to get slightly lowered marks for that. I don't think it's fair, it makes me very angry, but I'm not going to change anything by throwing a tantrum about it, and I'm not willing to give in either. It's not like I'm going to fail, either - I got 80% on my last essay.
I don't have any idea if I will be able to change this convention. It all depends on whether I become famous or just do my work and do it well with little recognition. But at the very least, I will stick to my principles.

We're Not All Sexual

2009-02-14T13:07:00.000-08:00

Many people have complained about the portrayal of disabled people as asexual. Although I really don't understand what it's like to have your sexuality denied and ignored like that, I do understand that it's not a good thing.
But there seems to be a tendency to assume either that disabled people in general (or in certain categories) have nothing in common with normal people, or to assume we're not really different from normal people - or only in superficial ways. In terms of disability and sexuality, this comes off as either assuming all disabled people are asexual, or assuming all disabled people are just as sexual as anyone else.
The latter assumption is what I see many disability rights activists expressing, when they talk about sexuality. They discuss sexuality as something universal to all human beings, including disabled people. Some acknowledge sexual differences such as being gay, but they still say that everyone has sexual feelings.
Well, not everyone does. Certain disabilities, such as intersexing conditions and autism, are associated with asexuality. Not every autistic or intersexed person is asexual, but a certain number of us are. We exist, even if your claims that all humans are sexual deny our existence.
It's especially bad when sex education materials do this. As a pre-teen, I got sex education that denied any sexual differences - even homosexuality - and left me confusing nonsexual liking for sexual attraction because I didn't realize it was possible for me not to have crushes on boys. I don't really blame my school for not telling kids about asexuality, because it's so rare, they probably didn't know about it. But there are sex education books out there for autistic kids that also suggest that everyone has sexual desires starting in puberty - and asexual people are not rare among autistics, especially autistic girls. There are also some autistics who develop their sexuality later than usual, typically in their twenties, and therefore are asexual as teens but not as adults. I'd estimate that at least a third of autistic teens will have no or very little desire for sex. A third of your intended audience is a lot of people to ignore.
And I think a big part of this is the idea that saying disabled people - any disabled people - are asexual has been portrayed as a nasty stereotype. Somehow, even acknowledging that we exist, that we aren't interested in that sort of thing, seems to be taken as denying that we're real people with emotions. Well, no, asexual people are not emotionless. We're not incapable of love, because love does not just mean sexual attraction. It's possible to love a close friend, a parent, a child, or a sibling. And that love is just as real, and can be just as passionate, as sexual love.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all to be asexual. In fact, I'm glad I am - it seems to save me from a lot of angst, since I'm not constantly looking for Mr Right. I just wish there wasn't this idea that sexuality is fundamental to every person. Our society is obsessed with sexuality, but we're disability rights activists, we're supposed to challenge society's assumptions.

Rights of Nasty People

2009-02-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

Minna Mettinen-Kekalainen, a woman with Asperger Syndrome and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, has finally been given the care she needs, after much protest. She is severely disabled and was cut off from home assistance, only managing to stay alive because her friends were willing to feed her (she needs tube-feeding).
In protest, she started a hunger strike, which she called off in order to stay alive (possibly she figured out that her starving to death wouldn't bother someone willing to deny her such basic care as tube-feeding and diaper changes).
So this one has a happy ending, at least for Minna (I'm not sure if there are others similarly cut off by this agency).
But some of the comments on her case concern me.

"I ... do fear that this will give her the idea that it is ok to treat others with disrespect. I don't fall for the aspergers BS, I think giving someone a label allows them continue with their behaviour - never seeking any sort of self improvement because it's 'just the way they are'. And right now she's got everyone wrapped around her finger."
naturewalker

"Trained or not to handle it, if she doesn't have the control to treat people with the dignity she expects for herself then they shouldn't have to enter her residence."
roo2

"Try being the health care worker who can't please.... Place her in a long-term facility and she will get what she needs."
llofthellmo

Asperger Syndrome is not characterized by being mean and nasty to people, but by being literal and socially awkward. People who understand that the AS person is not intending to be rude are not going to find them very offensive - unless they're nasty as well as autistic, since after all normal people don't have a monopoly on that. And knowing how service providers often screw people over, I doubt Minna did anything wrong. According to her, she threatened to report the nurses because they weren't following her doctor's orders - something that could have been seriously harmful or even life-threatening, depending on the orders they weren't following. And given that you don't need to be very competent to get hired as a care provider, and the low pay means many care providers don't view the job as important, it certainly makes sense that they'd screw up or be lazy.
But let's say that Minna really is a nasty, unpleasant person, who was verbally abusive to her care providers. Remember that she is also a severely disabled woman, almost completely paralyzed, which means there's no way she could physically harm someone. Would her being nasty and verbally abusive mean that she deserves to die from medical neglect?
I don't think so. It's expected, if you work as a service provider, that you will be able to deal with verbal abuse. My mother, who works as a cashier, has dealt with nasty people and knows that her job requires her to stay polite and make a reasonable attempt to please them. She'll rant about them to her coworkers and family, that's just fine, but she has to deal with them. If she was not able to do this, she wouldn't have lasted long in her job.
I understand that some people can't deal with verbal abuse. I can't. And if I was applying for a job working with people, I'd have to learn to deal with that. Of course, few people would actually enjoy helping an abusive disabled person, but few would actually be unable to cope. Those who are literally unable to cope should either find another job or - if they are good workers in other circumstances - simply be assigned to work with those clients who they can deal with (just like someone who can't handle seeing naked adult men could work with a child, a woman or someone who can dress themselves and handle their own toileting). It might be possible to assign more workers on shorter shifts with that person, so each worker gets a break earlier. But it's not acceptable to deny that person care.
Much as many people would like it, being nasty and verbally abusive does not take away your human rights. And diaper changes and tube-feeding, for those who need them, are not privileges. They are rights.

Personality or Coping Style?

2009-01-28T07:52:00.000-08:00

[Warning: Don't read if you were institutionalized unless you're willing to risk being triggered.]
I'm reading The Intelligence of the Feeble-Minded (L'Intelligence des Imbéciles) by Alfred Binet and TH Simon, published around 1909. Alfred Binet, in case you don't know, was the one who invented IQ tests. In this book he and his coworker study a variety of subskills to see if they vary by intelligence level, as well as providing very detailed behavioral descriptions. It's quite interesting.
One thing they discuss is personality. They say that among 'feeble-minded' people there seem to be two personality types - rebellious characters and docile characters. These, they say, are unrelated to intelligence level, though the rebellious ones are often underestimated because they're harder to test.
The docile types are basically super-compliant people, who will follow all sorts of commands given, no matter how pointless. For example, they repeatedly took this one guy's cap and hid it and told him to find it, over and over, and the most resistence he showed was to lean away slightly to make it harder for them to reach his hat. Finally, he refused to get it off of a horizontal bar, but that was the first refusal after obeying the same order dozens of times. They say these people are easier to test, although they can be too agreeable. For example, when studying suggestibility, they got one guy to pretend there was an invisible dog and an invisible General, to the point where they thought he actually saw them, until the following conversation:

"Q. Very well, that little dog, and then the General, were they people like us?
A. Ah! the General, yes. (He has not understood the point of the question, he wishes to say that we are not like dogs).
Q. But is it true that you have seen him?
A. Yes. (He smiles, his eyes glisten).
Q. Well, why does that make you laugh?
A. Because you talk to me of the General. (Seems confused - laughs as he lowers his head).
Q. But why do you laugh in speaking of the General?
A. It's a joke you played on me.
Q. But have you seen him?
A. (With hesitation) No, I didn't see him.
Q. But you talked with him.
A. (Hesitating) Yes."

At this point, they recognized that the guy was not suggestible enough to have hallucinations when the doctor suggested make-believe things, he was just docile enough to play along with the doctor's game. As they said in summary:

"We believe that Albert was never duped. And now he is a little ashamed of his compliance and is in a very troubled and complicated mental state when we question him. He still wishes to agree with us, for he is too timid to resist; hence his contradictions. All the time he tries to divine our thoughts; we could still make him say anything we wished."

The rebellious type is quite different. One girl they described threw any object they gave her onto the ground (without acting angry). Some act surly and defiant, while others start crying when asked to do anything. Another woman sat smiling and giggling while answering 'I don't know' to every question, even ones she could answer when she tried. He notes that the rebellious ones typically are much more likely to cooperate with easy tests than hard ones, making them seem less capable than they are. Their performance varies depending on who does the tests, because some people are better at getting them to cooperate than others.
Although it's clear that they probably prefer running tests on the docile people, they describe the rebellious ones as showing a positive form of assertiveness on those tests where agreeing makes a person seem dumber. For example, they don't go along with the invisible dog and the invisible General.
One caveat they give, in my opinion, explains everything about these personality types:

"We shall not here treat this subject fully; certain material conditions have hindered us; it is not the imbecile in a hospital, it is the imbecile in his family or in a family colony that one must know. We have seen our subjects only in the unnatural surroundings of a hospital, or worse in the narrow limits of our office, where we had called them; seated near a table, replying to questions, talking, or submitting to different tests, they were somewhat like students at an examination. A professor would form a very narrow view of the youth of his time, if he saw them only during an examination. We resemble somewhat such a professor."

To me, those personality types sound like ways in which people can cope with being profoundly disempowered. All the people they studied, remember, lived in an institution, and even before coming to live there many of them - especially the lowest functioning ones - probably had little or no control over what happened to them. In the institution, people could do all sorts of things to them, giving no reason whatsoever, with the expectation that they would obey. For example, in one chapter, they discuss tests they ran on pain perception, in which they pricked their subjects with pins, pinched them, put their hands in hot water and put lighted matches to their noses to see how they'd react. The rebellious ones typically acted scared and tried to leave, one woman, for example, making up an excuse that it was time to go and eat. The docile ones cooperated, to a point that I think suggests dissociation: one guy was pinched unexpectedly and pulled back with a cry, but on seeing the serious expression the doctor had, he willingly let them prick him with a pin and showed no sign that it hurt.
Amanda Baggs and Laura Tisoncik, in their conversation on institutions, described what sounds suspiciously like Binet and Simon's 'docile type':

"Laura: Oh gee. I spotted it in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness that is not so much... it is a kind of submissiveness but it's not submission in any kind of normal way. Especially since you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were, so you could follow the rules. Without necessarily appreciating the fact that there weren't necessarily any rules for any particular event or... I don't know how to describe it. You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it's like, "Where is it, it's hiding here somewhere!" This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules. And meanwhile not necessarily getting what actually should be done, because you were busy looking for the rules. It's a paradox there ...
Amanda: And then there were the apologies...
Laura: Oh yes. The neverending... to properly read the apologies, read them as "Don't hurt me! Don't hurt me! Don't hurt me! Please! Don't beat me up, don't tie me down, don't torture me!" Which, I obviously had no plans on doing any of the above, but again you were reacting to the situation as if you were still in the psych hospital. And that obviously wasn't the case, but again that's a typical PTSD sort of thing. And I certainly understand it very well, because that kind of an experience really makes an imprint on a person for life. You can't go through that experience of reaching that absolute bottom level of human experience without being seriously affected by it.
Amanda: As I recall it wasn't just actions I was afraid of, it was thoughts.
Laura: Oh yes, of course. I didn't go through that, but then I didn't go through brainwashing. You did. I fortunately spent most of my time in places where they kind of throw you in there, lock you up, and kind of forget about you. I think the only time I ever saw doctors at state hospitals was when I was being admitted and when I was being released. So there was nobody there playing warp-your-brain with me."

As for the rebellious type, that reminds me a lot of myself. In a setting where I feel safe, I'd have cooperated with many of his experiments (particularly the invisible dog and General, because I love to play pretend), but if he was one of my teachers at school, and particularly if he pinched me unexpectedly or otherwise tried to hurt me, I would not have cooperated. Indeed, I'd have to feel very powerless to even cooperate as much as his rebellious subjects did - for example, the woman who made up an excuse of going to eat to escape his pain tests stood by the door but was too scared to open it herself (rightfully so, as he'd probably have stopped her and if she tried to run away big burly attendants might have come to pin her to the floor).
Amanda Baggs and Laura Tisoncik also describe behavior like one of his rebellious subjects in the conversation on institutions (referenced above):

"Laura: ... I tended to look rather threatening. Not to mention the fact that the ward was very impressed with me when I arrived. The first time I was there, which was the only time I was around a lot of teens and the like, I would have gotten there anyway, but the last thing I did was pour a whole bunch of ink over the psychiatrist's notebook. I was sort of like a mini-hero when I arrived and the story got around, because the guy was a terrorist and a bully. And most people didn't have the courage to do anything to him or stand up to him or whatever. Although certainly there was a lot of discussion in the wards occasionally about killing him. So when you arrive as the hero, the courageous one, that tends to limit the likelihood that you're going to get bullied."

It's much more pleasant to think, as Binet and Simon seems to do, that the docile and rebellious behavior patterns are simply innate personality types. But I don't think that's the most accurate view. And it's upsetting to think of the suffering that their patients went through.

Assumed to be Normal When You're Not

2009-01-27T08:10:00.000-08:00

I've heard many high functioning autistic complain about people assuming that a person who can speak well can't have trouble holding down a job, managing money, or keeping their home liveable - all things that even high functioning autistics can have trouble with. When they notice trouble in any of those areas, it's typically assumed to be poor social skills (eg not knowing how to apply for a job) when in fact social skills are only part of the problem there. While there are plenty of services for autistic kids - although there probably should be more - there's almost nothing for adults, especially adults who can talk reasonably well and have a higher IQ*.
Apparently this scenario is nothing new:

"One of the main reasons that the moron is so dangerous under present condition is that he is not understood; he is assumed to be normal, he is treated like a normal person and is expected to react like a normal person. There is no evidence to prove that the feeble-minded person taken in the beginning, understood and properly treated, becomes vicious, bad or dangerous. On the contrary there is much to prove that he is not vicious; he may be made so by mistreatment but he is not so naturally. A menace to society? Yes when mistreated, when not cared for, when allowed or compelled to bear the burdens of intelligent people."
(Henry Herbert Goddard, Feeble-Mindedness, 1916)

"It is now several years since that this city was excited by the trial before a Master of Lunacy of a young man whose ability to manage his affairs was doubted. ... The jury supported the doctrine of the liberty of the subject, and the poor congenital imbecile was allowed to go his own way to destruction, with the result of becoming speedily bankrupt in fortune, ruined in health, and a scandal to an honored ancestral name."
(John Langdon Down, Mental Affections of Childhood and Youth, 1887)

Of course, there are differences between that idea around the turn of the century, and the current discussion of high-functioning autistics. Firstly, they were discussing people who would presumably (and in Goddard's studies actually did, although he had a higher cutoff for normal IQ) have a below-average IQ, rather than normal-IQ cognitively disabled people. More importantly, these were doctors, not self-advocates, and the help they were proposing was disempowering to those being helped. But the idea that someone who's treated like they're cognitively normal when they aren't can get into trouble as a result - that's nothing new.

* Not that lower-functioning autistics don't have trouble getting services - especially if they break stereotypes in some way. I've heard of autistic facillitated communication users being cut off from services because their IQ scores are too high - even though they're still unable to do many self-care activities or keep themselves safe.

Dan and the Monster Autism

2009-01-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

Action for Children has started an ad campaign portraying an autistic kid as being trapped inside a monster, then fighting his way free with their help. I just emailed the following reply:

"I am an autistic 19 year old. I am not a monster, nor am I trapped inside a monster. I'm just a unique person who has been misunderstood and abused by many others.

It's not my fault, or the fault of my autism, that other kids called me names, shoved me, etc. Nor was I bad when I did the only thing I could see to do, and lashed out at the bullies or ran away from school. That was better than when I shut down and lashed out at myself.

It's not my fault, or the fault of my autism, when my teachers insisted that I rearrange my mind to fit their curriculum. When I refused to obey them, hid under tables, or just stood there defiantly until they called my parents, I was advocating for myself. When I thought of myself as stupid, lost interest in things I used to like, and promised myself I wouldn't be 'bad' anymore, that's when I did something wrong, because I was hurting myself.

If no one else will defend your rights, you must defend them yourself. But some kids, like Dan, give in and accept the poisonous blame. They attack themselves, trying to defeat the monster inside. They learn that they're broken, and they must spend 'as long as it takes' to make themselves into worthwhile, valuable human beings. My parents told me that I was always a valuable human being, but many kids don't have parents who do that.

If you claim to be committed to helping children break through injustice, then do that. Don't tell kids they have to defeat the monster that is inside them, tell them they're OK and they must respect themselves. Don't tell them the way they were born, the way they are, is inherently broken, or else you're the injustice they need to break through."