It’s painful to look back, especially when I was ignored, neglected, and given wrong treatment to better understand my Asperger’s. I was bullied all throughout high-school for being “dumb”, pessimistic and socially awkward. Growing up in a Korean household didn’t help because I struggled through abuse, academics, and the lies my parents told my psychologists so beginning of the 6th grade, I was put in special classes with people who had Down syndrome along with having numerous para professionals monitoring my classes. To this day I am struggling with immense anxiety and self harm but I’m impressed that I made it this far in college as an art major, being in a fraternity and most importantly, improving social skills.
I'm proud of you. You can overcome all adversity. You are built for pain. Your purpose is to overcome it and to be an example of moral perfection and absolute resilience and mental resolve. This is your mission. Go and fulfil your purpose.
That was enormously insightful. I hadn't thought about how broad the autism spectrum category really was. It may actually be too broad and some distinguishing of different conditions may be in order. And, as is sometimes alleged, it may be overdiagnosed. And we probably should give schools more flexibility to accommodate the needs of neurodivergent students (autistic or not) without formal diagnoses (we should be more concerned about getting students what they need to succeed and less concerned about why they need it). I appreciate the time Dr. Grandin spent on what are now unfortunately considered old fashioned virtues. Children of all neurotypes do indeed need to be taught how to work both in and out of occupational settings. They need to learn courtesy, respect for the rights of others, and responsible conduct. And they need to be given appropriate opportunities to interact with others, to take reasonable risks, figure out what they're good at and how to apply it.
Just about to watch, I disagree about the likelihood of overdiagnosis, I think it's more likely to still be underdiagnosed, BUT I completely agree with your thoughts on the spectrum being too broad, some type of distinction needs to be made, because grouping all of us when needs are so vastly different doesn't help anyone, and harms people by either making people have unrealistic standards for autistic people, or by making autism be taken less seriously as a disability when people mildly impacted are described the same way as those severely impacted. It doesn't make sense to group all of us together, and it'd help doctors and service providers immensely to have a rough idea of potential needs without needing individual assessments to even get started with every single client.
Yeah, I guess that's kind of where we're going by the things we've started. Autism is interesting in the face of nature. And you're right, however, we shouldn't change ourselves for the spot it isn't or wasn't necessary, we should change the spot to fit ourselves.
It's difficult to give an opinion on this without sounding like a jerk. Rambling, seemingly unfocused, left me wondering what the talk was actually about.
That's the price required to benefit from her immense skill in her field. It's worth paying if the content is of value to you. This is a problem for a lot of us unfortunately, some folks just can't get past the delivery, and some even unfairly judge the message based on their intolerance of the messenger. Fortunately, patience is a skill that can be learned 😊