Comments on: …I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, etc.

By: Thirza

Thirza — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:50:57 +0000

Thank you for that, I think people don’t get that psychiatric drugs as a rule have psychiatric side effects.

By: andreashettle

andreashettle — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:04:01 +0000

Barbara Kasoff You may want to read some of the things Amanda has written about language in http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?cat=51 You may also want to browse around this blog in general to see what else you can learn -- you might pick up some things along the way that you hadn't even thought to ask about. You may note that there are two ways you can browse: by date (this blog goes back to 2005), see the calendar in the left hand column on this page. Or you can browse by category, also in the left hand column on this page. Also, go to http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=317 and scroll down to see comments #56, #92, #105, #133, #134, #138, #147, #158, and #161 — all of these comments have a bunch of links that might be of interest to you, and might answer some of your questions. Do especially be sure to explore the links to blogs by other autistic adults. Amanda is not the only intelligent, articulate, insightful autistic adult writing on line (or in print), so there is a lot you can learn from others too.

By: Barbara Kasoff

Barbara Kasoff — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 05:59:02 +0000

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us – you must know how incredibly helpful it is for us to hear from you. I have a wonderful 10 year old grandson who is very bright, speaks a little, and is learning to read,write and do math. How do we open the door for him to express his feelings via written communication as you have. I don’t believe he comprehends language the way you do – we have to work so hard to get him to understand the most basic things. He loves the computer and can type, but we can’t seem to get across to him how to use it to express his thoughts. Did you always understand what people were saying to you, or did this evolve?

By: Jesse the K

Jesse the K — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 08:59:42 +0000

Excellent points, as always, about the psychotropic drugs being a decidedly mixed blessing. I’ve experienced the drugs as terrible and as useful, depending on the drugs and my current state.

I commend to all an excellent resource and forum on dealing with psychotropic drugs, especially helpful for people with multiple diagnoses and tons o’ meds coursing through their systems:

Crazy Meds

By: Julian and Yarrow^Amorpha

Julian and Yarrow^Amorpha — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:18:08 +0000

Some of the weirdest, most “crazy”-appearing behavior that’s come out of various people in here has been when we’d overdosed on caffeine. Well, I know ‘overdose’ is relative, but in our case it would mean hitting a point where we believed very extreme things, either very grandiose or very paranoid, and/or started babbling a lot of nonsense. The last time it happened, we got cops coming over to us and doing the “are you okay, stay where you are, do you need help” business, when we’d taken caffeine pills to stay awake and finish an assignment for school, and ended up lying on a sidewalk screaming and crying and refusing to talk to anyone who got near us.

But… yeah, urgh, we’ve known way too many people who ended up doing/believing bizarre stuff while on psych drugs and having that treated as “part of their illness.” It’s about as illogical as looking at brain images of people who’ve had physical changes in brain structure from high doses of neuroleptics and deciding that their “disorder” is causing their brain to physically degenerate. Couldn’t be that the drugs had anything to do with it. Naaah. And it’s just really coincidental that all the stuff supposedly caused by their brain degenerating– slurred speech, akathisia, dyskinesia, etc– just happens to be exactly the same as the side effects of the drugs they’ve been put on. (Yeah, heavy sarcasm alert on that one.)

On the New Age stuff, our experience is that that stuff can… make you crazy even without chemical “help,” but drugs can just exacerbate that. At one point, we got talked into taking Prozac (actually going back on, because we had taken it in high school but later quit) because of some really paranoid ideas we’d ended up with after involvement with a spiritually exploitative “friend,” and talked into believing that the paranoia was “part of your OCD.” (With which we’d been diagnosed in high school, and really did have all the extreme, classic symptoms at one point, but it had actually started to taper off a little before all the business with the “friend” happened.)

Looking back, trying to separate what really happened from the psychiatric mythology that had been constructed about us by doctors and that we bought into for a while, I think the Prozac actually helped to make the paranoia worse rather than fixing it; we were just more numbed-out. But it didn’t actually seem to decrease the number of times we got paranoid; in fact, we were still feeling it constantly, and frequently deciding that any worst-case scenario our mind came up with must be true, yet still believed we must somehow be “doing better” in some objective way because of the drugs. And we kept going into rages and screaming at people (or doing the equivalent online by flaming people) while taking it. Nothing had changed, we just didn’t care as much– that was the main “benefit” we got out of it, and doctors saw our being more indifferent to stuff that wasn’t going away as a sign that we were “getting better.”

(Actually, though, and we didn’t realize this until years later, the level and type of paranoia we were experiencing would most likely have been called psychotic if we had gone into a lot of detail about what exactly was going on. So we managed to dodge that diagnosis. I think that if we had gone into the whole psychotic patient deal at that time in our life, we’d probably still be stuck in it. At least, everyone we’ve personally known who was given certain types of drugs for that reason became more paranoid than they were to begin with, and more often. But of course, that was declared to be something that had supposedly been part of them all along.)

By: Charles aka Chasmatazz

Charles aka Chasmatazz — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:03:55 +0000

Drugs: if we didn’t have them, people would need them less.

By: David Leafgreen

David Leafgreen — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:34:01 +0000

Just because a person has autism does not automatically mean that medication is needed. And what medication can make an autistic person able to produce and respond to body language like NT’s do? What medication can make an autistic talk like NT’s do? What medication can make the “volume controls” on the senses like those on typical people? And what medication can instill self-help skills? Since I don’t have any health insurance after I lost what was a really good job techically speaking, but a disaster socially speaking, I can’t see myself spending my hard-earned money on medications I really don’t need. It is much better to change the environment to accommodate the needs of an autistic person than to try to “change” the autistic with drugs.

By: VAV

VAV — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 12:38:09 +0000

I am curious to know whether, in the overall, the autistic folks contributing here think that taking psychoactive perscription drugs is worth it. I fully expect to be told that every autistic person, just like any other person, is different and their millage is going to vary. I know that. But at the same time, I have a lot of friends who identify as bipolar, and almost all of them tell me that some medication is very useful. Meanwhile, I have a lot of friends who identify as addicts and most, but not all, of them say that medication causes more problems than it solves — that’s been my person experience too. So I am just wondering if, in a generally sort of way, how people who identify as autistic feel about the overall utility of medication.

By: Sir Sefirot

Sir Sefirot — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:51:41 +0000

OMG.

Now you’ve gotten me really worried. I’m autistic myself (plus ADD), and currently I’ve been on Zyprexa (2.5g) for some weeks. It’s supposed to help me focus my thoughts and attention, but all I’m getting for the moment is being sleepy the whole day. Given on what I’m hearing about this chem and what you say, I don’t know if I should continue with it…

By: bullet

bullet — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 05:33:10 +0000

I have never taken any drugs, prescribed or otherwise and judging from some of the responses and ballastexistenz’s thread, I am relieved that I haven’t. As a child growing up in the UK it was almost unheard of for a child to be placed on medication for perceived neurological differences and difficulties. And as an adult I can make the choice.
As for the statistics, well, I have appalling self help skills, I get very nervous about touch and intimacy, I get overwhelmed and shutdown or get very irritated and snappy if there’s too much auditory and visual stimuli around me, I frequently blank out, I cannot maintain friendships, cannot organise myself, cannot follow verbal multistep instructions a lot of the time without needing reminders and my sense of danger is not what it should be at 31.
Only, despite all that, I’m married, I’ve been with my husband for over 13 years and we have two gorgeous little lads. I’m a member of a parenting forum and have been on loads of meets (I don’t tend to say much, but I still go :D) and I’m going on another in April. I’m happy, at ease with who I am and I feel very positive about myself. Statistics aren’t the whole story :)