True.

Thing is that such people are procrustean thinkers: they wish to fit the world to their view of it, as opposed to the practice of fitting one’s view of the world to the reality that presents itself to us. In Personal Construct Terms, it’s actually a less intelligent way of doing things, since it is excessively rule-driven, the main rule being that the world must fit my expectations or it is a catastrophe (this kinda ties in with Ellis’ theory in RET…) – very akin, also, to Piaget’s concrete operational stage of cognitive development… it’s as if their thinking abilities have halted just there.

As for what we can do about it…. sadly, nothing.

Zilari wrote an excellent post about that, not long ago. She said it better than I could, so I think I’ll leave my commentary at that.

I moderate a community where psychiatric issues come up a lot, and there are many people who have a very strong attitude of “The doctors who say that we and people like us are mentally ill are wrong, but they’re right about *other* people needing certain kinds of help and intervention.” I had just given someone the link to the Hearing Voices Network, and people immediately started talking about how concerned they were that I didn’t seem to be taking this seriously. Apparently, for them, ‘taking it seriously’ meant telling her what everyone else was telling her, which mostly amounted to “Listen to your doctor and take your meds.” (And then of course got accused of “saying all doctors are evil” when I talked about the dangers of neuroleptics, but that always happens.) The doctor, of course, was treating this young woman’s experience as ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ and seemed to be doing an out of the package approach.

…and the irony always seems to be that no matter how many accounts you can give either of your own personal experience or the experience of others you have known, you still get accused of not understanding the seriousness of the issue at hand.

You mean the sort of reductio ad absurdum comments that tend to go along the lines of “So you mean to say we should just do nothing and never give anyone any help at all?” We keep running into that… over and over, not just with autism: it seems that the second you criticize the dominant medical approach to anything, or suggest that it doesn’t actually help people as much as it’s claimed to, someone will get in line to castigate you for, supposedly, ‘thinking everyone is perfectly all right and nobody needs any help,’ even if you’ve said nothing remotely of the kind. Or of ‘not taking people’s problems seriously.’ Or of ‘not understanding what a serious issue this is because you’ve never been severely affected/known someone who was severely affected.’ (And then they start in with the horror stories, never mind that some of them might actually just sound like horribly pathologized versions of us at some point in our lives or those of people we know.)

We read somewhere that the devil sends lies into the world in pairs so that it’s easy to use one lie to scare (or whatever) people into believing the other. There’s usually a tacit agreement between two such lies, an assumption shared by all the people who are trying to figure out which one is true (often the assumption is that it’s an either/or matter, but by no means always; and some things are either/or). So the explaining follows the pattern of, “No, I don’t think it’s a matter of A vs B. A and B both presuppose X, and I don’t agree with that. It’s a matter of X vs Y.” But it can be very hard to get Y into their heads, and sometimes they try to summarize what you said in terms of either A or B, so it’s hard to know if they’ve understood (though it usually means they haven’t).

People want two extremes, or they want (if fashionable enough) a “spectrum” between two extremes. It seems difficult to write something and actually have it read without imposing a black and white category on it, or else a gradation of grey between black and white, when really we may be talking fluorescent purple or dark green or something.

For instance the gender binary. You’ve got boys (blue) and girls (pink) and if there is someone who doesn’t seem to completely fit either (in whatever way), they must be either a defective version of one of those, or something in-between (purplish). Well, there is a third primary color out there.

Yeh, but you have a brain with a functional mind living as a result of it; Weintraub has let go of the functionally cognitive bits of her brain in order to be able to get away with reacting so reflexively to things and jumping to wrong conclusions…

Her problem, not yours… don’t be overly concerned about her… I’m not.

Amanda, I love your blog entry on the child “Kate” who needed all those “interventions” in order to become a functioning adult. I don’t understand why parents imagine that accepting autism is the same as letting a child sit in a corner all day. That would be considered abuse if it was done to a typically developing child, and should never be done in any case. Why is it that if you oppose the therapy espoused by a particular group, they assume that it is the only approach available, and if you do not take that particular approach you are “letting your child rot”? And it’s particularly strange that this point is made by both ABA parents and chelation parents equally.