[Image is a screenshot of a page on Autism $peaks’ website. The title of the page is “Meet Our Partners”. The first section reads “Illuminator – $1 Million + Donated Annually”. Three organizations are listed: Alpha Xi Delta, Dollar General, and GameStop.]
[Image is a screenshot of GameStop’s description on Autism $peaks’ website. The highlighted part reads: “As a new partner to Autism $peaks in 2016, Game Stop hit the ground running and more than doubled its $500,000 campaign goal, raising more than $1.2 million to support the needs of the autism community. With an all-hands on deck approach, Game Stop inspired staff to support the initiative through empowering autism-related employee testimonials.”]
As of 2016, GameStop is now an official corporate sponsor of Autism $peaks, and one of the highest donating ones at that. This is yet another reason to stop shopping here.
Send Game Stop a message. Unfollow them if you are, don’t buy from them. Let them know they are supporting a group that advocates for the elimination of autistic people. In their organisation, autistic people have no voice or agency. There are no autistic people on their board. There is no actual, fundamental support for autistic people, only the victimising of families with autistic members. If they don’t care about that, hit them where it counts.
I think it’s ingenious that autistic children sometimes use scenes or quotes from favorite stories to communicate an emotion and the whole situation that produced it, when they don’t have the words to communicate those complex ideas more directly.
Narratives are, for most people, a powerful vehicle for communication and personality development. In a sense, we are the stories we tell about ourselves, and autistic children are tapping into the power of narrative in extremely compact, efficient ways, very young.
Considering that explaining my own feelings and reactions to things can take pages of writing and lots of introspection, I salute the efficiency of these kids’ solution.
The problem with the story strategy is that your conversation partner has to be familiar with not only the story, but the particular scene or quote you’re referencing. Not only that, they also have to see the same situation and emotion in it that you do.
Parents and teachers of autistic children can’t always do that. But when they watch Disney movies (or whatever) with their kids, it lets them see a rich, complex inner life in kids they thought weren’t even fully present with them. (Ron Suskind has a problematic but well written example of this in his NYT piece on his son’s love of Disney, especially the sidekick characters).
Parents can learn to do this, and some parent bloggers describe it in detail. (MomNOS, mom of Bud and author of A Hair Dryer Brained Child in a Toaster Brained World), is a great example. Unfortunately, professionals don’t teach parents to recognize and value their children’s ingenious communication, and then model more widely understandable language for their feelings. Too many professionals still see quoting as “echolalia,” meaningless behavior to be discouraged.
As people with disabilities, writers, and fans, we have a golden opportunity to explain to the world the value of communicating through references to stories. Maybe we can show it’s not so different from NT’s quoting in conversation from movies and TV shows. Maybe we can even get NT’s to adopt this communication style, and it will help them share their feelings about complex emotional situations when they lack the right words.
To other autistic people, have there ever been times where you read something about autism (or about an autistic person), and you just feel whoever wrote it knows nothing about the disorder?
Yep. Anyone who tries to claim autistic people are unable to be embarrassed, and anyone who assumes a nonverbal autistic person who needs lots of daily help and can’t make their communications understood is incapable of self-awareness is showing a massive sign that they, the writer, don’t know squat about autism.
Anyone who shuts down autistic people who speak positively about being autism and try to tell us there’s nothing good about autism don’t know squat about autism.
Anyone who only sees tragedy, brokenness, suffering and hopelessness doesn’t know squat about autism.
It is incredible (in a bad way) how many assumptions other people make about autistics who can type. Even parents of autistic kids, special ed teachers, and others who really should know better.
The minute I type “I’m autistic,” they slap the “high-functioning” label on me and assume I can speak, live independently, have a job, and don’t need help to get by in daily life. (In reality I can do some of these things but not others…and you definitely can’t assume any of them based off typing ability.)
Because I have a PhD, teach and can speak in coherent sentences, when told I’m autistic, people I’ve met thought all autistics were basically Rainman and when would I have a breakdown, what should they do?
It’s becoming not-so-hard to believe a billion or more people in developed nations with access to education and internet are completely ignorant about pretty much everything.
Rather than teaching adaptive functioning skills to change dangerous behaviors, aversive electric shock causes only great suffering, pain and trauma. At best, the shocks temporarily repress behaviors by using fear to control residents. That is not treatment. That is torture, as Disability Rights International argued in its damning investigative report on Rotenberg’s practices.
yes, electric shock “treatment” is used against autistic people. this article by the fantastic Lydia Brown is important but graphically describes torture and abuse by medical practitioners against autistic people. consider this a content warning.
The Doctor Is Out 