Question About The Start Of Autism

[sarah_ab]

so did your mother document this change immediately after it happened? did she call the doctor and tell them about it right away?

i'm not saying anything against your mother.. just we like to create memories... this is why eye witness accounts are never accurate, because everyone remembers things they way they are.

perhaps your mother forgot that you had falled earlier that day and hit your head, or were having a temper tantrum and fell down...

memories are not accurate.

everytime i get a shot i get sick to my stomach for a few days, sorta the car sick feeling, and whenever i got a vaccine i would get a slight temperature.

its your body reacting to a foreign virus... geesh thats what a vaccine is, its introducing the disease into your body so your body learns to fight it off...

i have sensory integration problems as well. You have a neurological condition, as do i..most likely its related to this neurological disorder and NOT the vaccine that hundreds of millions of people get each year.

it is well documented that persons with neurological conditons will have sensitivies to sounds, tastes, and certain feelings...

there is absolutely NO documentation to support the theories that vaccines cause autism... just annecdotal evidence that no scientific study can back up.

you can believe what you want, and because you live in america you can chose to not have your children vaccinated, but you also live in a country where many schools require children to be vaccinated to attend, and where you will face backlash from people who do not want their young children who are not old enough to be vaccinated being around your children.

[Nat]

Do you have AS/autism too Sarah_ab?

[sarah_ab]

no i have a neurological movement disorder, i was born with it, but did not start displaying symptoms until i was 3-4 years of age, which is actually a bit earlier than most people with this particular movement disorder do. However, when i was 2 1/2 years old i was evaluated for a PDD as i had some of the early warning signs.

i did spend 8 years working in special education classrooms with children on all ranges of the PDD scale, and have worked with adults up to aged 83 with PDD's and other developmental and physical disabilities, and tried to research as many of the disabilities i encountered as possible to better serve my students and clients.

[Guest Katharsys]

I will just toss this into the mix, for the people who are on the antivax bandwagon. Not vaccinating your children kills. It not only risks killing your children, but it risks killing those children who aren't old enough to get their vaccinations yet.

I will give you this link to read, and it will break your heart. The blog that I am linking to is a well known skeptic, and is now the current president of James Randi Educational Foundation.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastro.../antivax-kills/

My youngest son has Autism, but I for one do not blame immunizations. I don't need anyone to blame on it, it just happens. Let's focus instead on finding a cure.

[PampersPete]

Funny,I thought the original intent of our government was to build roads and do shit like that. I don't remember reading about our Founding Father's talking about vaccinations

[AutieAB]

Funny,I thought the original intent of our government was to build roads and do shit like that. I don't remember reading about our Founding Father's talking about vaccinations

If governments didn't expand their aims and reach to match modern developments, you'd still be riding a horse to work.

[Nat]

I will just toss this into the mix, for the people who are on the antivax bandwagon. Not vaccinating your children kills. It not only risks killing your children, but it risks killing those children who aren't old enough to get their vaccinations yet.

I will give you this link to read, and it will break your heart. The blog that I am linking to is a well known skeptic, and is now the current president of James Randi Educational Foundation.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastro.../antivax-kills/

My youngest son has Autism, but I for one do not blame immunizations. I don't need anyone to blame on it, it just happens. Let's focus instead on finding a cure.

Define cure?

Lot of aspies and auties are offended by the word "cure."

I just wish they give more families the help they need for their kid with autism. Many of them struggle finding help their child needs. There are lack of services for them. Either it's too expensive for them to get the help their child needs or they just can't help their child. Some of them are lucky to "grow out of it" simply because their parents were lucky to find the help they needed or they were willing to work with their child than letting the therapies help them. Parents can also work with their autistic kids too so they can get better. I have read at Autism Speaks about some autistic kids lose their autism diagnoses because they are functioning at a normal level now but I always wonder if they have AS because sometimes they still look a little awkward despite that they have friends. But at least they are talking and connecting to people.

Maybe people on the spectrum are against Autism Speaks because they are trying to find a cure and people on the spectrum have this idea that they are trying to find a gene to autism so the parents can abort their babies so they won't have an autistic child. Also every time a parent tries to help their autistic child or they are suffering because of the lack of help for their child or because they can't find the help their child needs and they don't know how to help their child or handle him or her, they are seen as the bad guys by the autistic individuals. Every time a parent is working with their autistic child to make them better so their lives be easier, they are seen as by the autistic individuals they do not accept their autistic child and they are making them be something they are not. It pisses me off because I think it's very selfish to not help your child and to just leave them being disabled and they can never live a normal life as possible because their parents never worked with them or try to find the help they needed. Is that fair to the child? What if my parents just gave up on me and didn;t work with me anymore, what if they just decided to put me away in a institution, where would I be now? Maybe not sitting here in my own apartment with my husband. I probably wouldn't be at the level I am at now, my mom says I wouldn't have made it this far without her helping me. Would that have been fair to me if I didn't get any help in my childhood? Would it have been fair for me to be lower functioning because I didn't get the help I needed? Would it have been fair if I would never get married and have kids or be able to live on my own or drive a car. etc? Surprisingly I have not been shot down for my mother. Instead a few have told me it looks like my mother knew what she was doing and what needed to be done. Maybe those are the good aspies that said it than the bad ones who think autistic kids shouldn't get better because that is how they act when they make negative comments about parents who are trying to help their autistic kids succeed and get better.

It's like many aspies want to hide behind the label and it's a free ticket to being lazy and all and not have to work on things and have everything evolve around us. To me that's being a leech to society and dishonest and those people sicken me because they make the condition look bad and make the rest of us look bad looking like we all use our autism as an excuse, it's not fair to the rest of us who don't use it as an excuse. I don't know if lot of it comes from the self diagnosed or from people who are diagnosed with it. Some people have said the ones who do actually have it, try and help themselves and try and work through it while the ones who are self diagnosed, use it as an excuse and hide behind it. One of my online friends was diagnosed with AS in 2004 and it made him a better person. Before the diagnoses, he was unemployed, sat at home in his apartment, didn't go out and socialize and spend lot of time with his obsessions but after the label, he is doing all that now. He now hangs out at the bar, has a job and does more things and only spends time with his obsessions for a little bit in his spare time. He doesn't want to be a stereotype he says. He joined Wrongplanet when I showed him the forum but it depressed him because he saw too many people there hiding behind the label and complaining about their problems and not doing anything about it and didn't have a life. I told him those were probably the bad ones he saw and they stick out more than the positive ones so it will look like that is all they do there when really they don't and it's only some members there who do it. So he doesn't go to any aspie forums because they depress him after being at one forum about autism.

Also the bad ones try to manipulate people by comparing it to a broken leg or to other conditions that can't get better so they won't have to change by working on their skills, that's how it feels to me when I see it in posts. We may get better but we might not fully outgrow it but our symptoms can get milder as we work at it. Just like dyslexics get better when they get the help they need and some of them are so lucky they can write very well because of the help they got when they were kids you wouldn't even guess they have it. That's how lucky some autistic kids are who go from LFA to HFA or to AS or to losing their autism label.

I admit I was a brat when I was 16 because I thought I was supposed to have my way and have everything evolve around me just because of my AS and it surprised me that my mother said I still wouldn't get my way if I had real autism. I even thought it was a free ticket to rude behavior but wrong. Having AS doesn't give us the right to be jerks and not have to learn things and we can get everything our way. I think the reason why families give in on their autistic kids by letting them get their way is because they don't want to deal with their meltdowns or tantrums so they learn how to control their family. To get their way, just have a tantrum and they will let you have your way. Basically that was what I learned in my teens with my anxiety, have an anxiety episode, I get what I want by my brothers. If they were in my area, I would get upset, they leave so I learned all I have to do is have anxiety and they will leave my area.

Also with non verbal autistics they tend to be underestimated because they are mistaken to be retarded so people assume they don't know any better with their actions but really they just learn to take advantage of their disability to get their way. In high school I learned I could get away with things because I was underestimated so I I did it out of frustration so I am sure autistic kids do the same thing because they are underestimated so they can get their way by melting down and they don't have to try and control it because it gets them what they want. Even my own mother says it's wrong to let an autistic child have their way because what does it teach them or do for them? Even my old therapist said the same too.

Oh yeah when I was in high school kids tried to get me to pull the fire alarm because they thought I won't get in trouble for it but I knew I would so I never did it. That just shows how people underestimate people with disabilities by assuming they don't know any better when they do things.

Okay, that's the end of my rant.

[PampersPete]

The only reason the government is so huge is because of nosy,busy-bodied people who want someone to do their bidding for them. Take government warning labels on buckets for example. Do we REALLY need a warning label on a bucket that your child might drown? NO! We have them because of stupid fucks that didn't do their job as a good parent and the lawyers started to sue bucket manufacturers because they're greedy vultures. Same thing with metal ladders and electricity. If the government would but out of our lives,natural selection could do it's job and there wouldn't be as many stupid people in the world making my pursuit of happiness so much easier

[Guest Katharsys]

Define cure?

<snip>

First, my apologies for abbreviating your posting in my reply. I would encourage everyone to scroll back up and re-read your entry on the forum.

However, to answer your question. I define "cure" as something that would help my child so that he is no longer having to deal with this situation. Not struggle through it, not work around it, but make it so he didn't have to deal with it. I define cure as something that would bring back the lost children, locked within their own minds, back to their families. I define cure as something to where no parent ever has to worry about this with their children ever again. That simple.

My main point was that not vaccinating your children, you run the risk of killing not only your child, but those around them as well. This lack of vaccinations is causing diseases that were almost wiped out, to come back with a virulence. (pun intended)

Additionally, there are questions about the initial study published in Lancet about "fixing" some of the data. In the review by the GMC, there was "in most of these children autistic features were present before they had received their MMR vaccination and in others such features only became apparent after a much longer interval than a few days after MMR."

For further reading on the skeptics views (read: Science based testing of correlation v. causation), I refer people to another blog looking at the ongoing discussion: Science-Based Medicine.

[Yvhuce]

Funny,I thought the original intent of our government was to build roads and do shit like that. I don't remember reading about our Founding Father's talking about vaccinations

[stage whisper] That's cause they were using diseases to kill people and steal their land[/stage whisper]

[AutieAB]

I just know this is going to end up being a really long post. Apologies in advance for waffling!

I don't think any sane person would criticise a parent for trying to help their child to develop coping strategies for the challenging world they live in. I know I had plenty of help to develop mine but I still had to do a huge amount of self-development all by myself in early adulthood. I spent literally *years* contemplating and processing what autism was and how it related to me. An example from when I was about 17: Whenever I joined the back of a checkout queue in a shop, I used to start to feel a rising panic and tension that would increase as I got to the front of the queue. I'll admit from the anonymity of a pseudonym that I damn near melted down very publicly on many occasions. Eventually I came to realise that it was because there was an impending and unavoidable social interaction coming up that I wasn't well rehearsed enough to handle without getting flustered (NTs are now wondering how on earth paying for something in a shop is social interaction, but believe me, it is). Through huge amounts of analysis of how the process of buying something actually works, I managed to get to a point where eventually, I could do it comfortably. Now if someone had actually tried to help me with that at a much younger age than 17, it would have made my life a lot easier. Likewise I have no issue with parents helping their children desensitise their sensory problems, etc...

What tends to get my back up is the issue of "cure" for one reason only - it simply wouldn't be possible to remove the 'bad' parts of autism without fundamentally altering the personality and character of the person being cured. Someone in my family once said something like this to my mother: "wouldn't it be nice if one day came home from school and [me] was just a 'normal little boy'?". My mother explained that she'd have to send the child back in that case because "that boy would not be my son." I can't put it better than that.

On the matter of Autism Speaks, my personal reasons for disliking them so very strongly (and believe me, I do dislike them very strongly!) are several. In no particular order:

First up, they (and other groups) claim to be 'the voice of autism', etc. Even their very name implies they speak *for* autistic people. They don't. They speak for a small subset of parents of autistic children. When the media need an 'expert', they don't go and find an autistic person, they call Autism Speaks (et al) and that's not on. Autistic adults have their own voice (spoken or otherwise) and we do not need Autism Speaks to advocate on our behalf, especially when their policies are so out of whack with what most autistics feel.

Second, this may seem a minor point but it's pertinent in my eyes at least. They insist on perpetuating the use of that damn 'puzzle piece' logo. 10 or 15 years ago, most autism organisations used the puzzle piece motif in their logos in some manner but eventually they realised that it can be perceived as rather distasteful. Nowadays, only a few (mostly North American) organisations still use it, the rest have moved away from it, thankfully. The implication that autism is mystifying and/or that we're somehow the piece that doesn't fit in the societal puzzle (two of the more common interpretations of the concept) is rude, insulting and outdated. It's time to let that logo die.

On a related note, those "Odds of" adverts - bloody awful - quite aside from the fact that the stat they use (1 in 66) is bunk, the odds of an autistic watching that ad feeling like shit? 1 in 1...

One of the really big issues is the focus on developing a test for pre-natal screening. Now I'm by no means pro-life - I support a woman's right to choose HOWEVER, I very strongly feel that unless there is a major deformity and/or the baby has such a condition that it has zero chance of surviving and/or continuing the pregnancy would threaten the mother's life, then abortion based on disability or illness screenings should not be offered. I firmly believe that when you decide to have a child, you take a risk that said child may not be 'perfect'. That's part of the process of life and you don't get to send the child back because you don't like it's problems. If you're not willing to take that chance, you should be thinking very hard about whether you should have a child.

There are 4 people in my household. 75% of us are autistic. How different I am from everybody else no longer dominates my thoughts because in my house, I am "normal"

[PampersPete]

[stage whisper] That's cause they were using diseases to kill people and steal their land[/stage whisper]

Very good point Yvhuce

[Prudie]

Autism can start in the womb. I believe that it does for most on the spectrum. The autistic spectrum can also be genetic, thus starting in the womb as much as gender does. My family is an example of such a case, and we suspect that this has been true for hundreds and hundreds of years at the least. That people on the spectrum are all a bunch of asexuals is a load of bunk, though it has a smidge of truth to it just like most loads of bunk; there are asexual people on the spectrum (and off, of course) and there are those on the spectrum who give off false impressions of being asexual.