Comments on: Reviving the concept of cousins.

By: Susannah

Susannah — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 06:21:07 +0000

As a person with Tourettes Syndrome, which as a disorder has inherent in it a lot of cousin-like traits with Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, ODD, Autism, etc. that look differently in everyone,I really liked this article and identify with its value. Although I accurately do not have all of the common comorbid diagnoses associated with Tourettes, it’s been super helpful to me to recognize which elements of OCD, SPD, ADHD, etc. may be relevant to my own experience and use information already existing within those communities to better understand and navigate within my self.

By: ooloi

ooloi — Wed, 10 May 2017 20:04:23 +0000

I like this a lot. Recognise a lot of AS traits in myself, feel very comfortable in company of autistic people, but don’t score quite high enough for diagnosis. Cousinship is nicer than a grey area.

By: Astrid

Astrid — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 22:38:43 +0000

Boy, could I relate to this. I am a woman with hydrocephalus who recently lost her autism diagnosis in part due to the hydrocephalus. It’s not like none of my previous diagnosticians knew about that, but oh well. Anyway, that lack of a formal diagnosis got me rejected from a Dutch autistic women’s forum today. As I was processing my hurt feelings, i read your article and felt so validated. I also wrote an article about this concept as it would help me within the autistic comunity on my own blog. I mean, I’m still self-diagnosed as autistic because I at one point had an autism diagnosis, but what if my previous professionals had agreed with my current one that hydrocephalus excludes autism? Then would I not still have had the same experiences, that are very similar to those of people on the autistic spectrum? I would. But by the exclusionary guidelines of many autistic communities, even the ones that allow self-diagnosed autistics, allistics are not welcome.

By: Reviving the Concept of Cousins – Our Autistic History (Month)

Reviving the Concept of Cousins – Our Autistic History (Month) — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 18:01:28 +0000

[…] Reviving the Concept of Cousins by Mel Baggs Originally posted at: https://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/cousins/ […]

By: Andrea Shettle, MSW

Andrea Shettle, MSW — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 10:31:06 +0000

Reblogged this on Rambling Justice and commented: Post by Mel Baggs. I'm reblogging because, as a person with attention deficit disorder, I often relate to some of the experiences that autistic people have with executive functioning issues (which can be a part of autism as well as a major part of AD(H)D). Mel suggests expanding the concept of "cousins" from autism to other disabilities. In this spirit, you could argue that auditory processing disorder is a kind of "cousin" of deafness in that many aspects of the experience for both disabilities are very similar to each other in that both communities have difficulties understanding what people say when they talk with their mouths. Of course it gets complicated because deafness, aside from being a disability, is ALSO a cultural identification, particularly when used by the signing community and capitalized ("big D" "Deaf", as opposed to "little d" "deaf"), and for cultural or linguistic identification not every aspect of your experience necessarily has to be perfectly identical.