There are other causes of autism, such as measles encephalitis and herpes encephalitis.
Well, it’s pretty simple:
In autism, life skills are not necessarily correlated with IQ or academic attainment, if they were, autism would be considered merely a form of intellectual disability. Indeed, even people with Asperger diagnoses (often mistakenly thought to be just a particularly “mild” form of autism) tend to need a fair bit of assistance in adulthood.
Skill losses of the sort and pattern that mine came in are well-documented by this point (see Wing and Shah, 2000 for example) and occur in all parts of the autistic “spectrum,” particularly in those who are primarily socially passive, as I was noted several times to be in my assessments (social passivity is seen as possibly a milder form of the movement disorder that becomes more obvious in puberty).
Tony Attwood has documented that autistic teens, particularly girls, often get so involved in fantasy worlds that it can become really hard to tell whether they are out of touch with reality or just very involved in fantasy. I believe he mentioned non-human identity as a really common fantasy. (See his most recent book for more information on that.)
There is also the fact that, were I not also autistic and such, the odd things I expressed would not have been out of place in the area of the country I happen to come from. I am embarrassed about this aspect of my Californian upbringing, but I was taught (or attempted to be taught) what the word ‘telepathy’ meant from an early age, encouraged to contact ‘spirit guides’, etc. At a major school-related event one of the keynote speakers was a parapsychologist who encouraged us to get into strange careers like hers. I was encouraged not to be ‘closed-minded’ to the possibilities of alternate realities, fairies, UFOs, alien abductions, etc., and I was encouraged this by respected authority figures, not just by eccentric outcasts or anything. I went to psychic fairs and read books telling me that if I was the sort of misfit I was it really meant I was part of some collective that came from the stars and was here on the earth for a higher purpose, and went around people who believed that stuff. There was a group of kids I heard of who said they were being possessed by beings from the sky and that they did awful things to each other while possessed by them. Some of my classes involved divination techniques and other occult material. Aside from proving that California is full of new-age woo and that children tend to be gullible, it doesn’t really prove much about most of my statements being culturally unusual. Had I not been weird in other ways, they’d not have been noticed at all, given the things I’ve heard from totally unlabeled and fairly respected people where I grew up. I consider that kind of disturbing in itself, but it is what it is.
And simply being labeled gifted isn’t enough to know what that person’s life skills unrelated to academic achievement are in the first place. This is why we have such categories now known as ‘twice-exceptional’, for instance. In Finding Ben, the author of that book relates her son, diagnosed eventually with Asperger’s after among other things being considered psychotic, and with practically no life skills, including some aspects of toileting and hygiene. His verbal IQ was off the charts high. His performance IQ was off the charts low.
Jim Sinclair, an autistic person who has been around for a really long time, went to college at 13 and was considered gifted. He didn’t speak until he was 12. He has also experienced a similar pattern of skill loss to mine, in fact it was a friend of his who informed me of the existence of papers on this (which eventually led me to the Wing and Shah paper that my psychiatrist found to have explained everything he’d seen in me in terms of movement and speech over the years). He organized a group discussion of the topic once because there were so many people who experienced it. In fact, one hypothesis some of them came up with was it was autistic people who drove themselves to burnout who were most likely to experience something like this, similar to how polio survivors who try too hard to overcome the effects of polio and never rest enough are more likely to develop post-polio syndrome. I know many other people, including one person labeled Asperger’s who was working on a PhD at one point, who have gone from being considered ‘gifted’ to being considered ‘nearly totally incapable of anything’ from an experience similar to this. It might be that this is what it looks like when an autistic person pushes themselves past their limits and doesn’t know when to stop, it’s simply not known. But the phenomenon I experienced is known, just not yet explained.
Another well-known phenomenon is taking one autistic person, claiming they represent the entire autistic self-advocacy movement (even if they themselves claim not to), and then attempting to say that this person is not autistic, and therefore to discredit the entire movement. It was described in the Jim Sinclair article about ANI that I linked earlier. It has happened in various forms to a large number of autistic people, and it’s not because everyone in the world is suddenly leaping at a chance to be considered autistic for fun and profit or something.
Additionally, messing with one’s head is a colloquial term for a form of psychological abuse or bullying, and simply being bullied is not a sign of paranoia. Note also that it wasn’t me who was ‘afraid of people messing with my head’, but a psychiatrist who discovered what was going on through sources other than me (I was too socially naive to recognize it at the time, and was instead rejoicing that I had found a big group of ‘friends’ like my non-autistic older brother had always had) and wrote in my records that one of my goals had to be not having any further contact with these people or other people willing to mislead me. There is more detail I could give, but I do have some respect for other people’s privacy, and do not want to turn this into simply a personal attack. I just want to note that it was my psychiatrist, not me, who made this decision.
As a doctor and a clinician, do you diagnose toddlers and young children with ASDs? If you do, why do you have no problem differentiating between ADHD and an ASD in the younger child, whereas other clinicians obviously do?
I didn’t say it was. But knowing of several toddlers diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, and having met IRL teens recently diagnosed with Aspergers who are fashion conscious and have boyfriends, girlfriends, and social lives, and even have good eye-contact, something is going on. They are not in the least bit disabled. You, personally, might not be diagnosing these individuals, Dr Hentor the Barbarian, but someone is.
It would seem to me that an ASD diagnosis gets kids “services” but an ADHD diagnosis does not.
ambaggs, would you join me in the Pit? No flaming; it’s just a bit too personal to discuss in Great Debates.
Another interesting person to look into with regard to this is Mary Newport, a savant diagnosed with Asperger’s. She co-wrote the book Mozart and the Whale with her husband. Like me, she suddenly experienced her teachers at a particular age as speaking a different language. (She didn’t get sent to a neurologist and get documentation of it, which I did.) She experienced a drastic loss of skills at that age. Not knowing what else to do, she took LSD, wondering when she was going to finally go crazy. But the LSD changed her in ways it didn’t change me (and she took it for longer). She eventually ended up being forced into a religious cult and an arranged marriage by her parents. Like me, being autistic and considered at least marginally good-looking at a certain point meant she attracted male attention (it is more common for autistic women to have that kind of experience than autistic men, but also more common for autistic women to be abused in those relationships than ordinary women because of our naivete). She didn’t lose precisely all the skills I did, or to the same degree, her pattern was different, but very real and familiar both to me and my family when they read the book.
I am droopy, I am the severely autistic woman Amanda Baggs (with the consorted help of her cohort Laura Tconsik as well as other possible ‘autism community’ and ‘neruodiversity’ related enablers) has been sources as the model for her ‘autism’ since as far back as when she was 18 or 19, circa 1998-1999.
At legal threat sent by a personal friend of her’s (one ‘Anne Bevington’ who is indeed part of ‘neuroldiversity’ and personal friend of Amanda’s, not licensed in nor practicing the particular law this involved, nor in the state Amanda nor I reside but an ‘old friend’ of Amanda’s from her Californai days) sent me a threatening legalese sort of letter to my home in an effort to intimidate and silence me. The degree and level of imitation here which covers all manner of my experiences, my abilities, the level of my disabilities, is astonishing and well beyond any ‘coincidence’ with Amanda going so far in some cases (“Getting The Truth Out” and her "re: Re: political incorrectness’ movie plus two regarding and quoting me verbatim on my ‘milestones never met’ with language) are just a few glowing examples. She not only adopts any aspect of me that suits her (only varying to embellish at times, anything I can do she can do better, any challenges I have, she has them more severely so, etc).
I have my doubts about a few ‘autism activists’ but none to date that I am aware of have gone so far as to source and use another human being such as been done to me. Amanda has a recorded history of failure to discern what she reads in books and and encounters online as being her own personal experiences, and with the help of her friend Laura Tconsik, traveled across country to start her new life modeling me, right down to my incontinence and nonverbal need for a communication device. I was first clued in by on my meeting Amanda Baggs online, she actually wondered if I was ‘fake’ until Tconsik informed her I was yes, THAT autistic, the one she’d been modeling herself after, and the perpetual ‘me too’ adaptation of just absolutely eveyrthing about me during our livetime IRC and Second Life chats. It was not until sometime after this that I saw others who had their own independent suspicious of Amanda Baggs had been locating and posting the truth of her background.
A few staple differences between Amanda and I:
I was diagnosed as having kanner’s syndrome autismi at the age of 2 in 1966, not in 1998 or 1999 at finding an ‘autistics.org’ and a willing ‘very politcal’ collaborator.
I was never functionally verbal nor did I present as a perfectly normal child who was talkative and able to attend a ‘gifted college’ at the age of 14, nor did my autism suddenly become 'worse (in what surely looks like a calculated move from what Amanda herself indicates was in part ‘put on to please’ paranoid schizophrenia with freeform brambling’s all over the internet to confirm this) to what looks like ‘catatonic schizophrenia’ as Amanda’s current evidently some idea of what autism is (it isn’t).
I still have the emails where Amanda Baggs tried very very hard in fact to convince me that he3r imitations of me were all in my mind aka ‘messing with one’s head’), and I, an all too willing participant and so eager to find a friend, someone with ‘striking similarities’ to my own situation when I have been pretty much the Mr Ed Talking Horse Fluke of Autism here, went along with this qs much as I could until I could no more. Amanda Baggs excuses this wanton plagueriism and robbing of my life by calling it ‘echolalia.’
I don’t have Amanda’s smarmy word wrangler way with words, and I could not be persuaded by ‘neurodiversity’ to say the political and other crap she is saying, so this awful carnival funhouse mirror image of me was constucted in the form of one Amanda Baggs. a number of neurodiversity people are fully aware of the situation but either say it ‘looks bad’ to have her ousted as the feigner that she is, or that she ‘says such lovely thigns does ot really matter that she’s not real’ – to which I answer it looks bad because it IS bad and yes, it does matter very much that she is not real.
Others have been threatened and swamped by Amanda’s tendency to bombard with sheer volume until they concede to her instructed way of seeting things.
I will not.
I have no political message, I have no particular message at all, all I have is a live that is indeed unique but mine, and its my rights that are being violated in the name of ‘autism advocacy’
Dr King never had to paint on any black face and Dr King never had to lynch threaten or otherwise violate the rights of not one Black, not one, in the name of his civil rights activism. No activist that I have ever heard of had to feign fake adopt from or otherwise violate or threaten any one of those which they claimed to be a part of or advocating for, so why does Amanda Baggs, and why won’t she take down the offending movies and comments that are based on me and are littered throughout her writings and claims, instead making more and more, based on me, wherever she goes?
Why use a legal system she knows I can’t access both due to financial AND my very disabilities which she models, to attempt to harras me to silence?
I fully expect that, as has been done in other places, Amanda will send volumes of ‘persuasion’ and intimidation to the moderators and anyone here who dares question her so that my existance and her usage thereof is once again simply silenced.
Take down this address as soon as you see it, and if you are or have a lawyer who is an expert in autism and these issues surrounding intellectual property rights and/or can get me a professional writer to help me write my life story in a book with verification (because maybe I cant make it to a california court of law with no lawyer but if given a chance I can indeed verify my life as my own and my own only, can provide dates names, etc, but need these and my and my family’s privacy etc protected). Please, if you can provide either of these, who can work ‘probono’ because I have no money and neither does Amanda and I’m not after money, I just want her and this stopped. I just want her to stop.
Ironicaly I was ‘half way’ to being a supporter of ‘neurodiversity’ untilo my discovery of being used like a tool for approximately 10 years by Amanda unbeknownst to me until this past year.
Because I am unique, don’t have a BS message to dispell, does not mean my life and my rights should be open season, least of al to those claiming to be ‘advocates’ for people exactly such as my self.
Who is going to protect me from the advocates?
Especially, who is going to protect me from one who is by default of knowing my life as intimately as she does plus having been TOLD directly, knows the devistation this has caused me, the way I have nearly lost my independence, the limited way I understand myself ‘self awareness’ apart from others and the major 'mindfck this does to me… her only concern in all of this has been for herself, that on word of this getting out, someone may somehow cause harm to her. Not a concern at all for the damage she has caused another human being for her own personal gain, quick fame and fortune, all expense paid trips, etc, quite at my personal expense.
Take down this address fast, before the moderators here succumb to the Amanda Baggs Autism BS Machine and remove this post, please, and contact me via YouTube if you can help:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=drooooopy
People with ‘factitious disorder’ and a ‘way with words’ who love performing to please and attention should not be allowed to do this to anyone, me or any other autistics or anyone at all for that matter.
Please get the word out and help me put a stop to it anyway you can.
One thing I have read about people like Amanda is they do move from one ‘disability’ to another and especially so if found out and exposed.
She can talk rings around anyone like an expert used car salesman, but one thing she cant hide is the truth.
Thank you.
Droopy
Amanda, how did LSD change you?
It didn’t, really. Not unless I was on it at the time (at which point I became vastly more functional, to the point where people thought I’d been on it and stopped taking it). It postponed a massive overload/burnout/depression thing, but didn’t make it worse or start it or stop it (I was planning suicide the night I was offered it, went right back to that kind of thing when I stopped taking it).
I’m sorry, folks, but this has gone well beyond anything that could be reasonably construed as a debate.
We now have multiple posters claiming the same real life ID.
This thread is closing and I am declaring a 12 hour moratorium on threads regarding autism.
This is a Forum for debating issues from the significant, (the war in Iraq, global warming, the reality of a god, the designatd hitter) to the trivial, (the war in Iraq, global warming, the reality of a god, the designatd hitter).
It is not a place to hammer out the “realities” of long term discussions or feuds from other places.
I make no judgment regarding which humans are posting from which usernames, but I note that we really do not have the resources to run down and authenticate every claim. Once such claims become more important that the ideas and philosophies being debated, we have left the realm of the discussion of ideas and entered the realm of dueling personalities and their avatars.
When identity becomes the focus of the discussion–a focus that can be spoofed and which the staff is not trained to adjudicate or authenticate–then the discussion is no longer reelevant to our Fora.
All the recent guests who have posted are welcome to continue to post on the SDMB, but the topic of the reality of “Amanda Baggs” is no longer welcome, here.
This thread is closed.