I’d like to add that I don’t make this comment as an attack on any particular physiotherapist and I’m extremely grateful to the physiotherapists for everything they’ve taught me. I am certainly NOT suggesting that their profession shouldn’t exist – they’ve taught me so much that I’m grateful to know. The things they taught me and the methods they used to teach them were too different from “normal” physical education to have been taught by a “normal” P.E teacher (although I think if ANY type of human being should be excluded from the ranks of “normal” humanity, it should be P.E teachers). There should be people specially trained to teach movement people with co-ordination disorders, people who have had illness or injuries that cause physical impairments and anyone else who has more than usual movement difficulty how to move, just as there are people specially trained in teaching dyslexics to read and spell, teaching people with speech disorders to speak, teaching blind people to read braille etc. But people who teach people to do things should be called teachers or tutors or educators or something along those lines. They should not be called therapists.

So, one of the things they really liked to do was beat the hell out of me, nearly every day. Now, if a ‘normal’ kid fights back against being bullied, then it’s just considered that — fighting back against the bastards who are bullying you.

HOWEVER, in my case (primarily due to the fact that my school had created an IEP for me, and could conveniently explain everything in terms of my visual problem alone), I was declared to be “acting out”, and fairly extensively subjected to the school shrink.

If you’re not “normal”, then those in power can — and usually will — dismiss you out of hand, and one of their most successful ways of doing this is to view every aspect of you as some sort of pathology related to your particular disability.

Brilliant article, as I said.

Don’t forget the money! It’s easier to argue for someone else (health insurance, school system, whatever) paying for your kid’s horseback riding or art lessons when they’re called “therapy” than when they’re called “hobbies.”

(DISCLAIMER: I read this YEARS ago. I’m probably mis-remembering or fuzzing over a lot of key details. But this should be the general gist, at least in spirit and tone.)

In high school I didn’t understand why, but I felt comfortable hanging out in the special ed. room. I found out about AS in the 90’s and thought, huh… maybe I was one of “them”, one of “those disabled people” after all. I thought that hanging out with them or not rejecting them was, at very least “the right thing to do”, if not some sort of good deed… and turns out I was one of them, only staying with “my own kind”. The irony.

And then with this post you illustrate that it’s just PEOPLE, none of whom are completely ABLE, that would be ridiculous. Which is not something we think about every day…

Not sure this makes sense, and pls. excuse the overuse of quote marks, but … what I mean is, thanks, and this was a very clever idea.

And, of course, whether one is subject to medical/psedomedical pathologising has to do with whether one’s seen as equal or not (“equal to what” is always unasked). Here we go round the Mulberry Bush.

Language shapes thought, people get most of their ideas about life from the media, and the media need to stop using those words. Even “working with” is better. And I’d like to get five minutes alone in a room with whoever on the Tribune used the word “reverse”, as in “working with autistic kids early helps to reverse the condition.” I also find myself correcting people who insist on using the word “improve” to mean “stop behaving in an overtly autistic manner”.

Treatment and therapy suggest that autism is a mental illness, decades after it’s been proved to not be. Intervention sounds as if the kids have been getting into the liquor cabinet.