Comments on: Survival situations

By: K

Thu, 01 May 2008 20:50:03 +0000

Hello. I don’t understand why some autistic people are opposed to cures or treatments. I just watched the video of how you boil a kettle. I cannot see why an autistic person would prefer that way if he or she had the option to be able to boil a kettle the way a non-autistic person would.

By: andrea

andrea — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 20:10:06 +0000

I think I’d be a lot better off being stranded in the wild than in some unfamiliar airport or supermall. The natural world is a lot easier for me to organise and decode from a sensory perspective. Generally speaking, it’s a helluva lot quieter, too; there’s room to think. You don’t even have to process things on a verbal level to cope with being out in the wilderness. I found for example, that walking around a herd of bison was much less stressful than walking through the London Underground.

By: Pete

Pete — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 18:09:37 +0000

When one of the fryers at work burst into flame, all my NT coworkers were freaking out and batting at it, resulting in a bigger fire! I calmly grabbed a fire extinguisher and put it out. I don’t know if I’d survive stranded in the middle of nowhere but I’d probably spend a lot less time standing around bemoaning my fate.

By: Blue

Blue — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 17:30:07 +0000

I’ve had several people inform me recently that they want to cure people of being autistic because they want them to be able to handle survival situations in which they’re alone in the middle of nowhere or something and need to handle assorted aspects of survival.
This is pretty creepy, unless these same people generally worry about the abiity of all people to handle survival situation in the middle of nowhere.

By: Athena Ivan

Athena Ivan — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 16:16:30 +0000

Ballastexistenz: I know that what you have blogged is quite true for me. I don’t bother telling people outright, because I know they wouldn’t believe me. I’ve tried hinting at it before, to little avail. I once got so, so frustrated with a situation I was in, at a college, that I hopped a plane to Paris, France. Crazy huh? I’ll have to do a long blog about that in my own blog, Letters from the Fortress….I’ve been busy lately so I have just the one blog post there so far. But anyhow, I landed in Paris, and I had to rely on my ability to speak and comprehend the language (which was fortunately good, and even improved, because of the very fact that no one else was there to translate for me. My inner mind knew that and made adjustments.) I was there all alone, I had to find a hotel myself, I had to find my luggage myself, I had to store it somewhere myself. I had to do everything BY MYSELF. And I learned quite a lot from that little adventure. I learned that if I am forced to do something for survival, I can do it. I “become” Ivan almost entirely. (those are the best words I can find to explain but still, they convey a different idea. It’s not like I become another personality, just another part of me, know what I mean? I hope I’m not droning on what people already understand lol, I just feel that because of past incidents where people misinterpreted my words in a horrendous way, I have to explain and explain til the cows come home.

Great blog, as usual.

By: The Goldfish

The Goldfish — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 10:06:27 +0000

If criteria for quality of life is put down to the ability to survive alone without the assistance of others, very many of us are done for.

However, I think the reasoning behind this may be simpler than you imagine. The best argument you can make for curing or otherwise attempting to elliminate any given condition is the argument that it kills people – and failing that, the argument that it is a significant danger to life.

Does autism kill people? Nope. Okay, so how can we make out it might kill people?

In a way these particular arguments could be worse; at least this time round they’re not suggesting that autistic people are a danger to other people…

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 08:42:52 +0000

I think it takes non-autistic children a lot longer than a year to figure out how to stay out of danger in the road. That’s why they are supposed to have an adult with them when they cross the street and get drilled in street-crossing skills throughout much of their childhood. But again, I really doubt this is what people are talking about.

I don’t, though, think that the problems autistic people have with crossing the street necessarily have anything at all to do with understanding what traffic is. Otherwise I would never end up in traffic, nor would many other autistic adults I know. (I have been trying for awhile to write a blog entry on the sheer annoyingness of the two most common assumptions about why autistic people don’t do things, annoying not because they never happen but because there’s far more than two reasons. One of those reasons is that we don’t understand something. The other is that we understand but don’t feel like doing something.)

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 08:16:38 +0000

Another common concern is that autistic kids throw themselves in front of traffic. My son does seem to be unaware that big fast things are to be avoided. The thing is, it has to do with maturity too. A 1-year-old NT child might also not be aware that cars are dangerous, and should not be allowed to wander off into traffic. Autistic kids take longer to mature, so parents need to be cautious considerably longer too. That might be perceived as inconvenient, but it’s not the end of the world.

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 06:04:16 +0000

The context recently has been several people who have defined “independence” as an optimal state that autistic people apparently have less of a shot at, I have countered that the “independence” of non-autistic people is pretty much an illusion, and then they throw something like this at me.

By: J

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 05:02:04 +0000

That may be the most sensless and arbitrary argument for a cure I’ve ever heard. Are they planning on dragging all the autistics out to the wilderness and abandoning them?