Are you autistic? I am.

[CC27]

hunter (39,948 posts)

Are you autistic? I am.

Autism almost killed me in adolescence and it's the root cause of all my PTSD and most of my scars, both physical and mental.

My inability to "read" people, and propensity to say whatever pops into my head, has gotten me into a lot of trouble. I've told of some of my experiences as amusing stories here on DU, but leave out most of the violence.

I quit high school at sixteen because I was always in trouble. I was great at multiple choice exams which got me into college, from which I was "asked" to take time off twice, the first time for fighting with a teaching assistant, among other things. This teaching assistant was probably as autistic as I was but a little more prone to reacting violently. I took the hit and took the time out because I was an undergraduate.

It took me nine years to graduate. I have the equivalent of a minor in English but the chair of the English Department refused to sign off on it. Fully exasperated with me, she'd previously told me I write like an ESL student with a head injury. A dean of the college did sign off on it, but he only wanted to be rid of me and politely said so.

My grandfather, an engineer for the Apollo Project, was similarly afflicted. His personal life was always a flaming catastrophe, his relationships with colleagues often tense.

I can easily imagine the horror my life would have been if I'd had more restricted verbal abilities, obsessions that were not useful to society, even greater klutziness, a complete inability to write, and much less awareness of how others think. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Oh, and people, even doctors, blamed my mother for my disabilities. This only reinforced their opinions of her when she'd turn into a stone cold bitch on them. My mother was my greatest defender. (And she never took any Tylenol...)

My form of autism is clearly inherited from my dad's side of the family. He had cousins who were not functional in ordinary society, hidden away in apartments the family paid for, sometimes employed by people who accepted their severe limitations.

Kennedy is a flaming pile of shit. If there are environmental causes of autism the only rational way to discern them is through hard core science. Otherwise people are just making shit up. Kennedy is making shit up and this misinformation will harm people.

Yes, people can be on the autistic spectrum and sail easily through life regarding it as a simple personality quirk that shouldn't be discriminated against. That does nothing to help those with more severe difficulties.

I wrote this in response to a thread that has since been deleted.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220666758

If the Biden admin had made these findings you would be cheering. F you.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

What if a woman could get a pre-natal test to diagnose autism and then wanted to abort in the event of a positive result?

[SVPete]

I'm no RFK Jr. fan, and probably made that clear in a post or three a bit of a while ago.

I'm routinely skeptical of the two claims now out there about what causes autism (the acetaminophen claim is new to me, the other being anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines cause it). On the pop culture side the claims are predicated on the increase of autism diagnoses in the past 50 or 60 years. While the "increase" is real enough, 50 or 60 years ago autism was not a medically defined thing, nor were diagnostic behaviors identified. In simple terms:

* Formal autism diagnoses started from near-zero 50 or 60 years ago;

* Formal diagnoses increased for at least a decade or two (from the early 1970s, IIRC) as doctors learned of the condition and accepted the validity;

* Formal diagnoses increased over the entire time as parents became aware of the condition and realized, "My ______ does that";

* Also in the mix on the pop culture side is the pop-culture phenomenon of trendy diseases (e.g. hypoglycemia in the late 1970s or TMJ in the late 1980s; both real conditions, but the trendiness made things more difficult for those actually having the condition);

* Also possibly contributing to the increase would be fraudsters who found some government program they could defraud with phony diagnoses and treatments.

Putting it simply, trying link the increase of autism diagnoses to the increase in the number of childhood vaccines or the increase acetaminophen use due to making it OTC has to take into account the full historical context. So, I'm skeptical about the supposed acetaminophen-autism link, but unlike the anti-vaxxers' claim, there is research underlying what was recently announced.

hunter was probably an RFK Jr. fan until he started working with Trump.