thank you for being you, and having the courage to put that you out here for such intense scrutiny.

You wrote: “I’ve seen too much of other branches of the disability rights movement to believe autistic people are special, and I do believe that autistic people’s utter determination to be special and unique and totally different”.

However it seems to me that to believe that autism is deeper than personality is to regard autistics as special. As far as I know, people who are physically disabled or sensory impaired, or diagnosed with a mental illness/disability such as schizophrenia do not regard their disability as being deeper than their personality.

I know that autism is not a personality type and I believe that it is probably a different type of brain functioning from typical people. But different easyily becomes special.

Maybe you meant that autistic people see themselves as special in relation to other disabled people and not as special because they’re autistic.

I think this quote was from Joel Smith who said:
“It also does not make the point that being disabled is minor, unreal, or not a really serious problem for people. Life can really suck, you can have very real problems, and you can need help – and still believe in the social model. Unfortunately some opponents have tried to make it out like the social model is a way of minimizing people’s suffering.”

I agree that the social model can accommodate individual needs however people who focus on the medical model tend to focus on the challenges people face and critics of the social model tend to focus on the fact that many people have a poor understanding and only quote the truisms or popular catch phrases, minimizing the impact of the individual’s characteristics. For these reasons, I welcome a view of different abilities which defines the issues wholistically ie focus on strengths and needs of individuals and also a problem solving approach to difficulties. For example some contributors have pointed out that there can be clashes in rights. Cost seems to be cited as a good reason to ignore the rights of one group over another. I believe that focus this is problematic. Cost can easily be trotted out as a reason to do nothing whereas creative problem solving which requires us to analyse the needs of different groups (that is the medical model) and accept their rights to equal participation (social) can come up with an equitable solution. Yes, these are artificial divisions, but humans often need to categorize information in order to deal with it conceptually. Maybe that is their disability. lol.

Unfortunately in the same way that women were often antagonistic towards the women’s rights movement, there are people with disabilities who do deny or downgrade suffering associated with atypical bodies and minds.

Often, they are people with disabilities who are overgeneralizing their own experiences to those of others.
eg the comment, “I believe that a person is only “disabled” if he or she thinks so.” In the case of autism, some people do suffer. I work with a young man of 13 who is suffering because he observes social interactions as being so easy for others and so hard for himself. He has friends and is not teased or bullied by his peers but he also recognizes qualitative differences in social experience and he is going through anguish way beyond fairly typical teenage angst. I don’t presume to tell him that his emotional pain is not real or that he does not experience more difficulty than others. Nor would I presume to tell him not to regret that he cannot have the ease of social ability that his peers experience. This young man has profound abilities eg perfect pitch, ability to calculate rapidly, but his disability is just as profound in that people need to relate to him on his terms, he cannot begin to match theirs and he knows it. If he did not care about social interactions, he might not see himself as disabled. Who are we to tell him that he is wrong to care or that if he just tries harder he can achieve whatever he wants. That is just crap.

I have a successful career but there is a cost to that. The cost is that I cannot work and sustain relationships. I don’t have the energy. I have significant difficulties with auditory processing and executive function. While I do better with social interaction than many people with ASD, it is not pleasurable and I find my work very taxing emotionally. I do not view myself as disabled. I prefer the term differently abled as indeed I have strengths that have helped me compete successfully for promotion. However, I make sure that my colleagues are informed about my difficulties because I need them to accomodate my needs eg I have great difficulty with meetings and require information to be presented both verbally and in visual form eg fishbone and venn diagrams to support understanding of complex abstractions, tables, PMI charts, flow charts etc. Interestingly, accomodating my different abilities helps many other people to use their abilities more effectively.

In my opinion, the strength of constructing a model of disability which encompasses both the social and medical models facilitates discussion and understanding of the rights movement and the very real differences and needs of the population of people with different abilities.

An aside which I find entertaining is a small story about a well known autism expert. i had set up an online meeting where he was to communicate with about 20 autistics in a chat room. He was terribly nervous and edgy and asked for a typist because he could not think and type. lol multitasking issues there. Part way through the discussion, the expert began to exhibit some verbally aggessive behaviour towards one autistic participant. He felt that the person was picking on him without justification. He definitely felt bullied and intimidated. The difficulty was that the autistic participant did not ask questions to clarify understanding. He made statements which were to be agreed with or challenged. In this situation of communicating with a large group of autistics, Dr Expert was disabled and was experiencing considerable emotional pain and bewilderment. If that kind of stress continued over a long period it would contribute to physical expressions of stress but this guy at no point saw himself as disabled. However I did. It really emphasized to me the extent that social influences, context and environment affect perceptions. We need human constructs such as models of disability so that understanding from different perspectives can be combined to provide an equitable way of providing services and supports and measuring success. This does not mean that everyone needs to understand or use the model structure. It is fine for individuals to focus on personal perspectives. It is not fine for service providers and lawmakers to operate from their personal experiences only.

Athena is a bit of an idealist……..at times. Ivan is a bit of a cynic……..and I’m………confused. Not always, but it does make for a bit of a chuckle……..

TI

The way I see it It’s far more effective to work in an established movement with different groups in a similar position than to build alliances and see how that goes, differing position where necessary . Also it puts things in a wider perspective rather than a narrow one.