Neurodiversity » Art/Play/Myth

Brief Hibernation

Mark Stairwalt — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:00:32 +0000

Apologies for the light posting as we gear up for an ambitious year. Encouragingly enough traffic remains strong, however the winter break anticipated late last year seems to have finally arrived. Frequency of posting should head back up as we move into February.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Tolkien the Introvert

Zygmunt — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:00:15 +0000

J.R.R. Tolkien was the sort of man who tended to stick close to an adored few friends and family. He was an academic who spoke awkwardly and had an uncharismatic presence. He loved obscure subjects that no one else cared about. Yet within himself he developed a whole world that no competitive, self-promoting socialite could ever think to imagine.

Indeed, his project was not tailored to meet popular demand. It was written first for family, friends, and most of all, for his own satisfaction.
From these insular motives comes a great deal of its power.
There is something haphazard and unpolished about Tolkien’s storytelling. His pace is slow, the direction of his plot imprecise and shifting. It’s always given me the feeling that I’m sitting with him by a fireplace and he’s prodigiously making it up or recalling it from memory right there on the spot.
Tolkien had a natural grasp of the Subtle way of thought. He understood the charm of imperfection. As a result he sounds more like a storyteller, less like an author.
The details we learn aren’t necessarily relevant to the plot. A lot of that stuff is just for fun. You have to understand that playful impulse, that curiosity and creativity for its own sake to enjoy the story to its fullest.

Tolkien never intended to single handedly resurrect the mythological paradigm in Western society, but his stories obviously spoke to a deep human need
Tolkien understood viscerally that no society could be grounded without legend and mythology—narratives that establish a meaningful continuity that extends far into the past and which will extend into the future. A continuity that invites us to be a part of something greater than our own fleeting lifespans.
Tolkien was a true introvert and his mythology tells us something of a sense of isolation and alienation in a rapidly changing world.

When one encounters interpretations of the Lord of the Rings, the first thing people always seem to look for is allegorical references to the World Wars.
To do so is to fundamentally misunderstand the man was about.

Though Tolkien writes epic stories about great nations, the geo-politics of our world were never his overriding concern.
He was there in the trenches during WWI and lived through WWII, yet he never wrote obsessively about futility and disenchantment as did so many other writers from his ‘lost generation.’ Nor did he seem to perceive the opponents of his nation as evil forces out of some sense of nationalistic zeal.

Many of us who are familiar with Tolkien’s stories dismiss most of the real world allegorical interpretations, seeing instead reflections on the nature of good and evil. After all, the ethical questions posed by Gyges’ invisibility ring have been around since ancient Greece:
If a man named Gyges finds a magic ring that makes him invisible and unaccountable for his actions, would he still be moral?
Should he still be moral?
The Ancient Greeks believed that Gyges should resist his desire for power. Though external laws and punishments do not apply to him, the real danger is being reduced to a warped animal state:
Gyges need not fear going to jail, but by casting away restraint, he becomes prisoner to an ever growing addiction to power.
In the Lord of the Rings, there is a contrast between the Bagginses and Gollum, Sam and Boromir when faced with the temptation of the ring. The corrupting influence of power is clearly a theme, but it is not the theme that rules them all.

Tolkien’s works, though generally upbeat, have an elegiac message constantly hinted at: the old world with its legends, tradition, and magic is dying…

In this old world, with all its epic events, it is often a Hobbit, someone small, reluctant, and shy who has the formidable inner strength to save the day.

In the Hobbit homeland, the Shire we see an idealized representation of traditional village life, sheltered from events that shake the rest of the world.
The Hobbits work hard and grow their own food, but there is no rush or sense of toil.
There are no strangers in the Shire. All the families are known to one another, as are their reputations.

In the new world, our ‘age of men,’ traditional culture is dying out. It would seem there is no longer a place for these little people. Tolkien tells us those few who survive will be forced into hiding.
It’s a world where you have to compete to survive amidst a faceless crowd.
A world in which even friendships are contingent upon social status and money.
A fast-paced world in which no one has time for second breakfast.

It is not the clash of nations or moral quandary that seems to preoccupy Tolkien, but deep changes within society itself:

-The elves, the epitome of ancient virtues are forced to leave the continent by the oncoming forces of change. They embody a sense of mystery and reverence that cannot exist in a world where everything is explained away as mundane phenomena, where predictability and repetition are the aims of most endeavors.

-The ents are losing a bit more of their vitality with every passing year. Eventually they will all be ordinary sedentary trees. Their abhorrence for the cutting of trees and of machines echoes Tolkien’s personal disapproval of industrialized mass culture.

-The dwarves, stubborn, honorable, followers of principle live in a post-apocalyptic world, their underground cities overrun and in ruins. The new world won’t need their craftsmanship. Their skills will be replaced with machines. They too are doomed to fade away and be forgotten.

Humans alone are to be the future but they are fickle and perhaps prone to evil without the wisdom of the ancient races to guide them.

In the Orcs, we see a polar opposite of Tolkien’s values, a deliberate perversion and antithesis of the elves. In their race we can see his worst fears come true.

Most often, the Orcs are depicted as a screaming, faceless mass-produced mass(it is implied they might be manufactured rather than born). They move and act only as groups. They have little sense of individual agency or self. Beyond instant gain and self-promotion, they have no personal initiative. There are no Orc heroes. Their leaders rule by pure coercion. Bonds of honor and loyalty are absent. At all levels of the Orc hierarchy, there is constant, fierce competition, even for trivial scraps. Their whole society is mechanical by nature. Their armies move inexorably and in great numbers but with no sense of spirit, driving values, or purpose.
Ultimately, they’re all just obeying the will of the big boss and would be unable to act decisively without him. In every way, their society, to the extent it can be called a society is held together only through the exercise of naked power.
Furthermore, Orcs in true contrast to elves have no concept of beauty, sanctity, reverence, or mystery. Their world view is literal, pragmatic, joyless, relentless. They are devoid of creativity and imagination.

This Orcish culture tells us something of how Tolkien perceived our emerging new world. A world in which everything that made life worth living was under attack and an Orcish sort of life and world view becoming predominant.

His fantasy universe was not so much a direct allegory as it was a personal reaction to social change. Tolkien was stubborn. A devout catholic, he persisted in using Latin at mass even as everyone else switched to English.
In his personal world, he persisted with the conventions of ancient Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Celtic legends.
Middle Earth would seem in part to have been his personal defense, his stand against the overwhelming forces of modernity.
Indeed, Tolkien tells again and again the story of a few brave individuals in seemingly hopeless opposition to insurmountably numerous and powerful enemy forces.
Dying out and coming under overwhelming assault from all sides is a pervasive theme of Tolkien’s mythology.

As an introvert perpetually at odds with the mass society, Tolkien’s besieged defender mentality speaks deeply to me. Especially powerful for me is Tolkien’s conviction that the outwardly modest but inwardly strong amongst us can prevail against a monolithic mass no matter the odds. Tolkien is one of my heroes.
He may have been one of the last hobbits who could dare live out in the open. He had the good fortune to make his way into the relatively tolerant environment of the university. Without his job as an academic, it’s hard to imagine that Tolkien would ever have had the opportunity to pursue his eclectic interests.
He probably would have been crushed as others like him no doubt were(and are).

When I first read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as a kid, it was just a great story, but even then when I wasn’t worried in the least about analyzing, I somehow felt Mr. Tolkien was on my side.
Now, I look to Lord of the Rings as a protest against an increasingly Loud society.
It is a project that openly defies the collective reality through the creation of a new world with new languages and societies. Everything about it, the world building, the con-langing, the plot tangents, the archaic tone, the emphasis on inner integrity over outer attributes, the lack of calculated mass appeal and shameless scraping to get to the top – it has all the ingredients for being deemed “a waste of time” or “self-indulgent” according to the conventional social understanding. Indeed, Tolkien’s works are more heretical than ever in an age defined by zero-sum popularity contests.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Tolkien the Introvert appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Introvert vs. Extrovert: Restaurants

Zygmunt — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:00:10 +0000

I found the ideal sort of introverted restaurant in England. It’s a dying breed of restaurant except perhaps in the countryside where only 20% of the country’s population lives. It’s another Britain really, as foreign to the rest of the country as is the Continent. This sort of restaurant is called a pub.

Every small town has at least one. Often, the building was originally an old stagecoach inn that serves up the same sort food it would have 300 years ago. Upon entering, it’s clear the average person used to be shorter. A modern person of average height stands just a few inches below the ceiling. It’s like entering a comfy hobbit hole. The stone walls are often clearly the uneven type thrown together by hand. Usually, there is a crackling fire on the hearth.

Pubs are typically quiet places. They are meeting places for the locals. Not just rowdy men or young people but entire families. On slow Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays there’s usually a quiz night or some other special occasion to attract patrons.

There was a feature of pubs that at first absolutely stunned an American like me:

You have to go up to the front and order food yourself when you’re ready. If you just sit there, no waiter will come to pester you.

Once you’ve gotten your food and drink no one pressures you into asking for the check and getting the hell out of there. In fact, it’s routine for people to stick around talking for a long while even after they’re done sipping at their beers. No pressure, complete relaxation.

And the beer: It’s primarily what’s called ‘real ale’ in Britain. It’s dark, bitter, thick, and foamy. It’s liquid bread that would fill you up before you could ever get very drunk off of it. It’s often served only as cool as a cool cellar. It makes one tranquil, warm, and drowsy on a rainy winter day when the sun goes down by 4 PM.

The menu at a pub rarely has more than half a dozen different entrees. Choosing a meal is always quick and simple. After having a steaming, piping hot steak and ale pie one might wonder why British food has such a horrible reputation. Culinarily, the British are the masters of desserts served hot. In the cold and clammy climate of the UK there’s no delight greater than a freshly prepared berry tart or treacle sponge drenched in lots of hot custard.

This pub experience was all an immense departure from the norms of my home country and from the majority urban UK.

The typical American restaurant is a corporate chain in a rush to make quick profits. Customers are rushed to tables and are pressured to make decisions within a few minutes of sitting down. “Do you need another minute?” the waiters ask with nervous sweat visibly beading on their brow. I often wonder if they’d be in fear of getting fired by their manager if I told them “No, I’m going to sit and chat with my friends half an hour over an ale before actually ordering any food.”

Actually, it’s not uncommon for a typical American waiter to turn nasty if they think you’ve taken too long. They adopt a petulant sneer and start pretending you don’t exist once you’ve figured out what to order at your leisure.

An American restaurant is not so different from a night club! The noise level is usually astonishingly high with hordes of people crammed in close proximity. Customers are brought in and out of the establishment on a conveyor belt. Time is money! One can observe a freshly abandoned table wiped down and reset within a few seconds by frantic workers. Such a scene resembles a pit crew changing tires on a race car.

Who would ever want to sit down and have a meal in such horrid adrenaline drenched atmosphere? Clearly, though this place must have a strong appeal to most customers.

What could this appeal possibly be?

Anyone who’s worked in restaurants, retail, or hospitality already probably has some idea of the answer. It becomes clear that certain customers get a rise out of an environment teeming with stressed out underlings at their beck and call. An ugly truth about many people: feeling powerless in their everyday lives, they love nothing better than a clerk or waiter to lick their feet and massage their perpetually bleeding egos.

I often have trouble getting any relevant information about a restaurant when I look up online reviews. More than half the time, people have little to say about the food but instead obsess endlessly about how their waiter was five minutes late with their drinks.

No matter what one’s rank in America, one can always go to a restaurant and have an attractive, well-dressed young person grovel and make silly insincere recommendations about a menu they’ve never actually been able to try out for themselves. I strongly suspect this pre-packaged subservience plays a role in how people justify paying the substantial bill of eating out.

Unfortunately, the introvert, though harboring as many frustrations as anyone else, has little desire for this rent-a-sycophant system. No sooner has a menu been opened than a staff member descends like a gadfly, making obsequious sales pitches and asking for a decision with desperation that’s thinly masked by a grin. The hurry, the noise, the sheer ugliness and venal nature of the entire outfit! Few places could seem more unappealing to an inward oriented person. There’s no possible way to communicate to that waiter to do away with all the hurry and pretense. Even if the waiter could be made to understand, they would be compelled to stick to form by the expectations of their boss. There’s little to do but to focus on the positive aspects of the meal, still knowing well that the experience could easily be immeasurably better.

The Loud person never seems to understand that the human body is not just a machine. We do not fill ourselves with food as a car is filled with fuel. The circumstances in which we sit down to eat, who we sit down to eat with are just as important to our nourishment as any physical quality of the food itself. To be relaxed at the table is to be a free person. To be stressed and hurried even at the dinner table is to live as the most abject of slaves…

Where socialites take over, social institutions that might support Subtle people die out. Restaurants, like so many other aspects of life, have become little more than a reflection of the sheer desperate ambition of a Loud majority.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Introvert vs. Extrovert: Restaurants appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

LA Times Scooped by Shift Journal (seven times)

Mark Stairwalt — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:00:38 +0000

Directly in the title of the fourth and final installment of a series on autism which has been by turns both predictably biased and reasonably informative, the LA Times last Friday ventured to print with a startling new assertion:

Autism hidden in plain sight

“What happened to all the people who never got diagnosed? Where are they?” the article asks, later continuing, “Evidence suggests the vast majority are not segregated from society — they are hiding in plain sight. Most will probably never be identified, but a picture of their lives is starting to emerge from those who have been.”

Groundbreaking news? Certainly in some quarters, and props to the Times for bringing it to them. Longtime readers of Shift Journal however may have a nagging sense that they’ve seen that language, somewhere … already.

___

… thinking here was a writer capable of bringing attention to the under-the-radar autism we had found to be hidden in plain sight.

– Reverse Van Winkle, 11/27/09

___

Pandemic autism that’s hidden in plain sight, an autistic spectrum populated overwhelmingly by undiagnosed fellow travelers and autistics-in-hiding—if this is an accurate description of autism’s full spectrum, then where are all these supposed autistics?

– Covert Ops in Autistic Self-Advocacy, 2/19/10

___

Autism has been here all along.

Considered as an evolutionary condition with far-reaching social implications, its full presence and impact remain hidden in plain sight, unrecognized and uncredited.

– Shift Journal sidebar, rewritten 3/27/10

___

My premise all along – as reflected in the sidebar as well as many earlier entries – has been that autism is far-reaching in its social implications, and that its full presence and impact remain hidden in plain sight, unrecognized and uncredited. I mean this in both of the senses I’ve just described, in terms of the role autism may have played in cultural innovation throughout history, pre-history, and evolutionary time, and also in terms of the present-day spectrum and contemporary culture.

– The Autisitc Cohort as a Distributed System, 1/21/11

___

But then this is how most humans react – with denial – apparently, when that which has been “hidden” in plain sight all over the land suddenly shows up in the neighbor’s backyard, or in polite conversation – or on the teevy news shows.

– What’s So Funny About Wikileaks and Autism? 1/28/11

___

Whatever the answer, it’s a question I come back to over and over. Whether I happen to be chasing phantoms just at the moment or not, the notion of everyday autism everywhere, hidden in plain sight, consistently overlooked and misidentified, is one that’s haunted me for over a decade now.

– If Not Us, Then Who? 2/11/11

___

That said, the ideas that drive me to be involved here are that there is a huge undercurrent of autism in modern society, that there is no meaningful dividing line between diagnosed autistics and the rest of us, that autism is such a significant part of who we are as a society and as a species that we would not recognize ourselves without it — and that all of this is hidden in plain sight, visible only for those who have eyes to see.

– Waiting for the Fireworks, 3/18/11

Shift. Journal of Alternatives: Neurodiversity and social change. Autism views before they’re news, since 2009.

While the above is presented (mostly) tongue-in-cheek, readers interested in an actual in-depth, ahead-of-our times, book-length theory describing autism’s place in human society and evolution are invited to download or purchase site founder Andrew Lehman’s Evolution, Autism, and Social Change.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

Still Half Drunk with Delight

Mark Stairwalt — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:42:39 +0000

Bee Swarms Mimic Human Brain Neurons to Make Decisions

Swarms of bees and brain neurons make decisions using strikingly similar mechanisms, reports a new study in the Dec. 9 issue of Science. In previous work, Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley clarified how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform “waggle dances” to prompt other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found.

– Bioscience Technology, Friday, December 9, 2011

Granny Weatherwax’s beehives were tucked away down one side of the cottage. Some were the old straw kind, most were patched-up wooden ones. They thundered with activity, even this late in the year.

Tiffany turned aside to look at them, and the bees poured out in a dark stream. They swarmed toward Tiffany, formed a column, and—

She laughed. They’d made a witch of bees in front of her, thousands of them all holding station in the air. She raised her right hand. With a rise in the level of buzzing, the bee-witch raised its right hand. She turned around. It turned around, the bees carefully copying down every swirl and flutter of her dress, the ones on the very edge buzzing desperately because they had farthest to fly.

She carefully put down the big sack and reached out toward the figure. With another roar of wings it went shapeless for a moment, then re-formed a little way away, but with a hand outstretched toward her. The bee that was the tip of its forefinger hovered just in front of Tiffany’s fingernail.

“Shall we dance?” said Tiffany.

In the clearing full of spinning seeds, she circled the swarm. It kept up pretty well, moving fingertip to buzzing tip, turning when she turned, although there were always a few bees racing to keep up.

Then it raised both its arms and twirled in the opposite direction, the bees in the “skirt” spreading out again as it spun. It was learning.

Tiffany laughed and did the same thing. Swarm and girl whirled across the clearing.

She felt happy and wondered if she’d ever felt this happy before. The gold light, the falling seeds, the dancing bees … it was all one thing. This was the opposite of the dark desert. Here, light was everywhere and filled her up inside. She could feel herself here but see herself from above, twirling with a buzzing shadow that sparkled golden as the light struck the bees. Moments like this paid for it all.

“This is the part about autism I can never explain. This is the part I never want to lose. Without this part autism is not worth having.“

Then the witch made of bees leaned closer to Tiffany, as if staring at her with its thousands of little jeweled eyes. There was a faint piping noise from inside the figure and the bee-witch exploded into a spreading, buzzing cloud of insects which raced away across the clearing and disappeared. The only movement now was the whirring fall of the sycamore seeds.

Tiffany breathed out.

“Now, some people would have found that scary,” said a voice behind her.

Tiffany didn’t turn around immediately. First she said, “Good afternoon, Granny Weatherwax.” Then she turned around.

“Have you ever done this?” she demanded, still half drunk with delight.

___

Excerpted from Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky, second of the Tiffany Aching books, chapter fourteen.

With a deep bow to Julia Bascom’s The Obsessive Joy Of Autism, which is currently taking Mark Zuckerberg’s Mansion of Mirrors by storm.

Thanks to Meredith L Patterson, @marydydd, for making my day with the tweet pointing to the study mentioned above:

Flocking and swarming #algorithms, *bitches*. bit.ly/vJNASY

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Metaphors for mental illness

Sarah Schneider — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:00:31 +0000

Last summer, my son began having severe, unexplained panic attacks several times a day. At the time, my only framework for understanding his symptoms was the medical model of mental illness. I was introduced to this model in Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac, which I read after my sister’s first suicide attempt in the early 1990s. Since then, I have had several mental health crises of my own and received two DSM diagnoses. My sister has six or seven. My four-year-old son has five and counting. So 3/5 of my household is “mentally ill.”

The medical model felt counterintuitive at first; I had always thought of mental illness as a reaction to life experience. When I was depressed, I believed it was because I was poor, because I didn’t have a boyfriend, because something bad was happening in my life. I had to consciously train myself to remember that really, I was depressed and anxious because my brain was wired wrong.

Years of cognitive behavioral therapy drilled the medical model into me. A string of therapists criticized “I’m depressed because of x event in my life” as a cognitive distortion. The “right” way to think about it was in terms of neurotransmitter levels—depression was a disease of the brain. My sister and I share many symptoms, which helped me accept that our mental health issues were the result of genetic brain wiring.

But the reductive medical model—the idea that neurological differences are exactly like physical illnesses and should be treated as “brain diseases”—is really a little bit of science and a whole lot of metaphor. Nobody understands brain chemistry well enough to completely explain human emotions and behavior. Theories about the causes of mental illness are products of culture, and they shift over time even within the same culture.

Today, mental health practitioners generally agree that biology plays some role, but so do life circumstances such as trauma, abuse, poverty, and physical illness. Yet our primary metaphor for describing, understanding, and treating psychological distress is the medical model. Our vocabulary (pain, suffering, symptoms, pathology, illness, diagnosis, treatment, recovery) is drawn directly from our understanding of physical illness.

NAMI touts the medical model as a way to destigmatize mental illness. NAMI’s mission statement reads, in part, “mental illnesses are no-fault, biologically based, treatable, and may eventually be curable.” They got the “no-fault” part right, but arguing that mental illness is no-fault because it is biologically based is an unnecessary leap. Wouldn’t mental illness still be “no-fault” if it were entirely the result of trauma? Wouldn’t psychological distress and neurological difference be “no-fault” even if we didn’t frame them as illness?

In America we stigmatize all illness: Diabetes? Your fault for eating so much junk food. Cancer? Quit smoking, already! The word disease connotes contagion, rot, uncleanliness, and moral inferiority. The stigma associated with mental illness is even more insidious, because it’s bound up with personality and identity. People with mental illness are “just not trying hard enough;” they’re “overreacting;” they need to “buck up.” This stigma discourages sufferers from seeking support, informs public debate about funding services, and marginalizes and dehumanizes people with neurological differences.

So decreasing stigma is a noble goal. But this fascinating New York Times article (The Americanization of Mental Illness, via Amanda Baggs) presents evidence that the medical model actually increases stigma. The author cites a study in which subjects were more willing to administer electrical shocks to people said to be suffering from “brain diseases” than to people who suffered from a mental illness because of “things that happened in [their] childhood.” This is a very powerful argument against referring to neurological differences as “diseases.” When metaphors have a measurable effect on the way people are perceived and treated, we ought to choose them carefully.

The medical metaphor often fails on a practical level. Observation of psychological distress in another person is not like a bacterial culture or an X-ray. Diagnosis is highly subjective, is affected by the practitioner’s cultural background and biases, and depends on the patient’s ability to communicate verbally. Much of psychiatric diagnosis is a description of observed behavior, which begs questions about who does the observation, how the norm is defined, and who decides which behavior is non-normative.

In America, mental health treatment usually involves medication. But the metaphor breaks down here too. Antidepressants and anti-psychotics are not like antibiotics. Psychiatric medications work differently on different people in different circumstances, and culture determines their use and perceived effectiveness. Choosing the correct drug and dosage usually requires trial and error for each individual. When medication relieves suffering, it is useful and welcome treatment. But psychiatric medication is also used to suppress non-normative behavior. In this case it is not medical treatment; it’s a tool of social control.

I don’t believe in spirit possession. But the New York Times article argues that in cultures in which this belief is widespread, people who experience mental illness are treated with more dignity and humanity, are more likely to stay with their family and community, and have better long-term outcomes than people whose treatment follows Western medical protocol. The relative stigma attached to the two metaphors is part of the explanation: spirit possession is temporary, and “brain diseases” are perceived as permanent.

When my son’s panic attacks began, my first instinct was to look for an environmental cause. I spent several days convinced he was afraid of the beach, because the first attack happened while we were on vacation. When we returned home and the panic continued, I remembered — oh yeah, I’m doing it wrong again. I should be thinking about brain wiring. Thus began an exhausting trek through our HMO’s mental health service delivery system. At the end of it were several psychiatrists offering anti-anxiety pills.

After some consideration (I’m not opposed to medication on principle, and have seen it work effectively for anxiety in other family members), I decided against it. My son, at the time, was three years old and weighed less than 35 pounds. I couldn’t find any long-term studies on safety or effectiveness of anti-anxiety drugs in kids his age, much less any thoughtful dosage recommendations. By the time we clawed our way far enough into the bureaucracy to see an actual doctor, the attacks were less frequent and more manageable, so it didn’t seem worth the risk.

Each doctor we saw offered a different diagnosis. The most ridiculous was “disruptive behavior disorder,” proposed because my son’s response to his anxiety often involves verbal and physical aggression. The doctor who suggested it seemed shockingly uncurious about the underlying psychological distress that drives the behavior. Defining suffering strictly in terms of the way it inconveniences other people is callous, unimaginative, and not very useful. “Disruptive behavior” implies a willfulness, an agency, that I just didn’t see in the involuntary thrashing of a frightened three-year-old.

The panic attacks recurred daily for a month, then tapered to a few a week, and then disappeared. Neurological difference may be hard-wired, but symptoms are transient. In the same person, over time, they can range from completely disabling to nonexistent. Partly because of their transience, the panic attacks remind me of a weather system; a storm that came through and then moved on. We have some understanding about what causes extreme weather — but we can’t prevent it, or even predict it with much accuracy. And like most psychological suffering, our ability to predict and control it is less important than how we cope with it.

Ultimately, I realized that understanding the cause and finding the right name for the “illness” didn’t matter. What’s most important is how we respond in the moment of distress. What worked in my son’s situation was not a pill or magic “cure,” but helping him find ways to soothe himself — to acknowledge and accommodate the anxiety rather than try to suppress it. The next time a storm comes through, we will both be better prepared.

Sarah Schneider blogs at Kitaiska Sandwich.

Metaphors for mental illness appears here by permission.

[image from Henri Rousseau via Michael Franks' Tiger in the Rain; performance here]

He’s a tiger in the rain. It’s the thunder and lightning he can’t explain.
Just a tiger in the rain, who’s frightened.

Introvert Survival: Any Small Thing

Zygmunt — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:00:06 +0000

One of the most powerful remedies for feelings of depression, loneliness, and rejection is a hobby or discipline that commands your intimate attention. As a kid I loved insects and all kinds of small life. I gained an appreciation early on by dissecting bugs from the garden under a stereoscope. I realized just how intricate and otherworldly they were. I had already seen how most people passed them over, only noticing them long enough to kill them.

Years later during the deep black states of mind of my teen years, I learned that by doing something intimate and intricate with my surrounding environment could revive me.

Once as I high school junior, I was crushingly depressed and lonely. It was a depressingly sunny cheerful day near the end of the school year when everyone else seemed so happy and unified.

I turned my attention as I had done since childhood to the leaves and branches of various shrubs. I knew well how to search. I soon noticed small bumps that I instantly recognized as plant galls. Plant galls, I well knew were the nurseries of the larva of tiny parasitic wasps.

I broke off some galls and snuck into the biology lab. No one was there but me.

I delicately cut open the galls and extracted the larvae for viewing under the microscope.

My state of mind was much improved when I was done.

Something, any small thing that makes you appreciate the enormous intricate beauty of our universe will save you.

Any small thing at all will work. Sometimes all I had to do to ground myself was simply to stop and watch the afternoon shadows of swaying tree branches, a single autumn leaf drift all the way from its branch to the ground, a ray of sunlight suddenly shoot through a high window as the sun rose just the tiniest bit higher. The key is shifting one’s attention from the social plane and becoming aware of the vast, chaotic extra-social reality that surrounds us. Eventually that outer Void becomes home.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Introvert Survival: Any Small Thing appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

The Story of the First Thanksgiving (Journal of Alternatives Edition)

Calvin Trillin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:00:32 +0000

In England, along time ago, there were people called Pilgrims who were very strict about making everyone observe the Sabbath and cooked food without any flavor and that sort of thing, and they decided to go to America, where they could enjoy Freedom to Nag. The other people in England said, “Glad to see the back of them.”

In America, the Pilgrims tried farming, but they couldn’t get much done because they were always putting their best farmers in the stocks for crimes like Suspicion of Cheerfulness. The Indians took pity on the Pilgrims and helped them with their farming, even though the Indians thought that the Pilgrims were about as much fun as teenage circumcision.

The Pilgrims were so grateful that at the end of their first year in America they invited the Indians over for a Thanksgiving meal. The Indians, having had some experience with Pilgrim cuisine during the year, took the precaution of taking along one dish of their own. They brought a dish that their ancestors had learned from none other than Christopher Columbus, who was known to the Indians as “the big Italian fellow.” The dish was spaghetti carbonara–made with pancetta bacon and fontina and the best imported prosciutto.

The Pilgrims hated it. They said it was “heretically tasty” and “the work of the devil” and “the sort of thing foreigners eat.”

The Indians were so disgusted that on the way back to their village after dinner one of them made a remark about the Pilgrims that was repeated down through the years and unfortunately caused confusion among historians about the first Thanksgiving meal.

He said, “What a bunch of turkeys!”

Excerpted from Calvin Trillin’s The Tummy Trilogy.

More complete excerpt here.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Whose Stories Get Told: Regarding Feeling Unsafe In The Glee Fandom

Julia Bascom — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:10:35 +0000

This is the second completed installment of five in the Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation series, the other four of which are Dear Fail!Allies,The Greatest Crime In Television, and eventually Grilled Cheesus And Race and Moral Ambiguity vs Author Intent. More may come! They can be read in any order. The posting is random, at intervals, and probably requires more thought than I can afford. It’s an absolutely Glee fandom specific endeavor, though the ideas should apply outside of the specific examples, unfortunately.

This particular piece is something I’ve been struggling with for months, and it finally came out tonight.

*****

“I’m in a wheelchair, but I’m still a guy.”

First, an awkwardly personal moment.

Several months ago, I was outed by another teacher to several speech pathologists at work. One of the women was completing her practicum, and her supervisor and instructor were observing her session with our pupil. I was there to keep him calm, as being watched by five or six teachers as you complete a speech exercise when you are working through selective mutism can be rather stressful. I wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to myself, just sitting nearby and redirecting or reassuring him when he needed it. I was dressed appropriately; I made sure to sit just like the women around me; I kept out of their conversation but smiled and nodded and was polite and quiet. I’m not sure exactly when it was that I made my fatal mistake. I kept my hands in my lap, but it might have been when I answered a question about his AAC device a little too knowledgeably or with a little too much enthusiasm. Perhaps it was when I noticed the tightening of his movements and suggested he have a quick break. Either way, eventually one of the women wanted to know what my job was, exactly. “Oh, she’s our intern,” the teacher said, and I smiled and nodded and then she kept talking. “She’s like our translator for half these kids. She has a really unique understanding–she’s also autistic, like them.”

And I was out.

It’s not the kind of outing you were expecting, was it?

Would you believe me that it was more terrifying, more humiliating, with worse consequences than when I was outed as a lesbian in that room earlier that year?

That’s one anecdote. Here’s another.

As a simultaneously queer and developmentally disabled fan, one of my great struggles last season was watching the ship wars between Brittana and Bartie fans. There weren’t a whole lot of Bartie fans in the first place, and I quickly figured out that, as a lesbian, I was supposed to ship Brittana. It was practically compulsory. Their relationship was groundbreaking and I was supposed to be excited and moved and relate to it and no, no one wanted to hear my thoughts or see my excitement on seeing a couple with disabilities navigating high school together. Who cared?

I wanted to know why only one story, one half of myself, counted. No one could explain.

A third story, and then to the point. Perhaps you can see it already.

I went to a college, for a while, infamous for its lesbians. I’m sure there’s a more decorous way to put it; I never cared to learn. It was a completely and utterly different world from the one I grew up in, and I loved every last queer second of it. Finally, being a lesbian wasn’t an issue!

Having disabilities still was.

I mean, how was anyone supposed to navigate a relationship with someone who didn’t like to talk, who sometimes couldn’t, who wore massive noise-blocking headphones at dinner and who couldn’t manage parties or groups of people or sometimes even just one person? What were the rules for that? Did that even happen? How do you flirt with someone who won’t make eye contact?

It’s important that I am very clear here. It’s not that my classmates were horrible people. It’s not that at all. With few exceptions they were nothing but kind–and that’s a loaded phrase, but there’s not time for it here–and universally they did know how to relate to someone who could geek out about the neuroscience (and cognitive science, and philosophy) of vision, who could help with their linguistics homework or sing along to Last Friday Night or mix screwdrivers with alchemical precision. They just didn’t know what to do when that person wore glasses because she’d damaged her eyes banging her head repeatedly against walls, or who sometimes needed to pause in the middle of a conversation and diagram a sentence so she could understand it, or who learned music so quickly with the same ears that also made her scream when she wasn’t warned for a fire drill. There weren’t any stories about girls who went to college already well-verses in mixing drinks because they’d gotten so good at mixing 125 mls of Zoloft into eight ounces of pineapple-orange juice every morning.

There weren’t any stories about people like me. I was not something to be conceived of, I was not expected. There were no scripts. I didn’t exist.

(So I didn’t count.)

Now, to the point.

I am a lesbian with disabilities. I am an autistic lesbian; I am a lesbian with bad brains.

Glee fandom has taught me that exactly half of this identity is acceptable.

I am sure I should be grateful for this. It is an improvement, after all–outside my bedroom door, I’m not allowed any of it. Being a lesbian is a good way to get myself raped or killed in my, in this, town. I know this. So I apologize for my ungratefulness, for my stubborn, bratty selfishness, when I point out…

…being half a person means that I’m still not actually a person at all.

Here’s the thing. I can’t actually turn my disability off. I can pass as less disabled, sure–not as non disabled, but less, of course, in some circumstances, if I’m prepped enough. Hey, did you catch that? I can pass. Passing is a concept that applies to ability too, not just sexuality or race? Did you know that?

Probably not, actually.

The Glee fandom, at least the parts I’m in where I encounter this problem, seems fairly knowledgeable and progressive and all those other nice, soothing words about a lot of things. People generally know what I mean if I say Kurt can’t pass or Blaine passes as white. It’s not perfect, of course, but I’m far more likely to be understood than if I say Artie can normalize himself or Brittany has become increasingly unable to pass.

Pass as what? She’s bi, everyone knows that, what else could she possibly be passing for?

(Well, actually, she’s written and played as disabled, the actress has said so.)

No she’s not. You’re giving the authors way too much credit. That must have been an accident. Sloppy characterization, bad writing, lol Glee…no. They wouldn’t write that. She’s not.

(And then this is where I finally, finally, get nasty.)

Am I an accident?

Am I sloppy?

Am I not supposed to exist?

Is my story worth telling?

It’s not supposed to be personal, except for all of the years I’ve known the answers to those questions. Yes, yes, no, no.

I think the casual impersonality of it is what makes me feel unsafe, actually. It rests on the assumption that people like that aren’t reading or participating in these discussions (how could they, they’re retarded) and that our stories don’t even exist to be told. I mean, do disabled people even have sex drives?

And yes, to be clear, I absolutely do mean it when I say I feel unsafe. I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to feel when I realize that I do not exist to large swaths of people.

A great deal of the time, passing means passing as nothing at all. I don’t exist. And you know, still, I automatically typed and that’s fine, that’s whatever after that last sentence, because you’re not supposed to make an issue of it. Not supposed to draw attention. I don’t exist.

I’m not in your stories. When I see myself, I’m wrong. I’m bad writing. I’m not in your stories, and I don’t get any stories of my own. I don’t exist to the greater world, and ultimately I’m not allowed to exist to myself.

But that’s fine, that’s whatever.

There’s a violence in invisibility, you know.

There are little speech patterns that creep in when we talk about Brittany, sometimes. About who deserves her, as if she has no agency, as if she can’t know her own mind.

(Do I? Do I get agency? Or do I just need to be grateful for whatever affection and attention I do get? Should I find the boys from ninth grade again and apologize to my abusers for kneeing one of them in the balls? Should I have known it wouldn’t get better?)

There’s a violence I still can’t talk about, in the end.

Let me take the focus off me. I’ve been debating whether or not to leave that sentence in. Let me take the focus off me, because this is not how you stay invisible. But…but keep the focus on me, because isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what this show, or at least this essay, is about? Keep the focus on me, because there are so many different ways to be invisible.

Quinn. Quinn and her slow, silent breakdown all last season. Quinn and Lucy. Blaine. Blaine and looking back and realizing that some needy, broken sophomore was trying to mentor an older, stronger kid, because he can be however you want him to be. Mercedes, swallowing a crush she knows goes beyond all reason, but reason never had much to do with it. Mercedes, good old reliable Mercedes, realizing that the moment she’s not so reliable, the moment she wants more, the moment she’s visible, is the moment she’s no longer wanted.

I’ve been all of those kids. I’ve lived all of those stories. So, so many of us had.

And when we hear that these stories don’t exist? That they’re just bad writing? Just lazy plotting, poorly executed versions of better, real, worthy stories? That they’re not worth telling on their own merits, that no one wants to see that?

We don’t argue, usually. How are you supposed to argue when apparently a story you’ve lived is just some hackneyed, inferior attempt at something worth attention?

We don’t argue, because our stories are judged unacceptable and by extension so are we, and that’s a conversation we don’t actually need to have again. Glee tells a lot of stories, and they aren’t usually the ones the real people want, and of course, we already established this, we aren’t allowed our own stories. No, of course not, and should they somehow be written and acted and shot anyways, they can still be grabbed and labeled as something different entirely, graded against an entirely different narrative, and thus still easily found wanting, derided, and thrown out.

And that’s fine, that’s whatever. That’s how it works. I just want to know…

…why.

I just want to know…who decides whose stories get told?

Who decides which are worth telling?

And why aren’t mine on that list?

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

Whose Stories Get Told: Regarding Feeling Unsafe In The Glee Fandom appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Dear Fail!Allies (Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation)

Julia Bascom — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:00:58 +0000

Will I ever stop writing about Glee? Who knows! Not today!

I should note that this actually turned out to be the second part of five, not the first of three as I say below. The first part is The Greatest Crime In Television which I did a while ago.

This is tragically fandom-specific–and Glee fandom at that–though I daresay the sentiment and logic is applicable elsewhere. It is angry and the writing is self-indulgent and too clever by half. It is the first completed installment of three in the Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation series, the other two of which are Grilled Cheesus And Race and Moral Ambiguity vs Author Intent. More may come! They can be read in any order. The posting is random, at intervals, and probably requires more thought than I can afford.

(This is what I do instead of the magic-meta. I am sorry.)

Dear Fail!Allies,

I am not one who finds value in fail!culture or analysis by bingo card. These are terms I invented, so I will explain: I don’t like playing games where the viewer who wins is the one who managed to identify the most -isms or gender/disability/sexuality/class/race!fail in a given piece of media–at the purest level, in any turn of phrase. I am suspicious of any and all politics that can be fit into a box on a bingo card (I got three racisms and an ableist slur! Idiotcounts, right?) I believe in complexity, nuance, and no absolutes or right answers.

I hate widgets and buzzwords and I distrust instinctively anything that makes thinking, reacting, or living into something easy or evaluative. A culture that puts the people with the most Internet access or the greatest ease manipulating words and modulating responses as arbiters of what is good and right is a culture that is not safe for me or a lot of others. I know this instinctively. A culture that values criticism over introspection is not one in which anything is being refined or built towards. A system of evaluating evolving materials and breakable people as though they were static is self-destructive and completely counter-productive.

To borrow your language for a moment: I am not advocating the abandonment of academic or social criticism. I am advocating a critical engagement with the nature and forms of popular “criticism” itself.

Let me abandon my Internet pseudo-scholar voice for a moment. I’ll be a meme instead. I will break out my own bingo cards and “call you out” on your own “massive fail.” Here we go:

You’re doing it wrong.

When you worry about Sue “corrupting” poor, sweet Becky and Brittany and taking advantage of their innocence and naivete and childlike trust?

That’s ableism. That’s more ableist than anything the show has ever written.

You’re doing it wrong.

When you call the writers (led themselves by a gay man) homophobic for not having two gay characters with a history of violent and sexual abuse due to their sexuality make out in one of the least-safe environments in their world?

That is actually about six different levels of trivializing and presumptuous and privileged and fetishizing and yes, homophobic–to say nothing of the completely and utterly fucked politics that might make it okay for a straight “ally” to call a gay man homophobic.

You’re doing it wrong.

When you go into a rage that the plus-sized actresses all have multiple stories about food or size, and ignore the needed and positive messages sent about body image, self esteem, and size acceptance? When you complain that Puck’s interest in them is unrealistic, that Lauren isn’t pretty enough, that Sam would never date a Black fat girl?

Well, to quote the lady herself: “Okay, you need to stop, because you just said like ten offensive things and I’m starting to get embarrassed for you.”

You’re doing it wrong.

When you wonder if Brittany can ever consent to sex, given what her mental age seems to be?

Developmentally disabled people everywhere pray to be saved from this well-meaning kindness and concern.

You’re doing it wrong.

When you explain that it’s problematic for a Black girl to use tots as a plot device, but are silent about Santana’s obsessive love for BreadstiX, Coach Bieste eating entire chickens or huge bowls or pasta, Finn praying to a sandwich, and Sam’s body image problems? When you actually believed her storyline was only about tots, because what else could she possibly have a storyline about that episode, could she possibly be using food as a cover for, why on earth would she be taunting her increasingly distant best friend and crush with his one sure trigger?

The writers aren’t the ones who can’t see beyond some powerful stereotypes in this situation!

You’re doing it wrong.

When you complain that Kurt Hummel is too effeminate or “stereotypical” and why can’t we get a real gay character, someone a little less of a sissy…

….

You’re doing it so wrong it is physically impossible for you to be more wrong.

When you wonder when Artie will ever talk about his accident, or if we’ll ever get to see it, and weren’t his scenes with Tina in Dream On so touching, and why didn’t his Born This Way shirt say anything about his legs? When you ignore all his lines about being fine with himself, and you trample all over an amazing storyline about disability acceptance and pride?

I know that pity and sensationalism are easy, but they’re also disrespectful and actively harmful.

You’re doing it wrong.

When you get offended on the behalf on Black people everywhere because two characters who are demonstrably full of shit, if not actively racist, called Mercedes lazy and you went ahead and believed them despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary including an entire storyline in that very episode, an episode explicitly about race, dedicated to showing how even Rachel realized that in the end everyone was explicitly screwing Mercedes over?

Yeah, sure, the writers are the ones relying on racist stereotypes instead of deconstructing them in characterization and the narrative. Mhm.

You’re doing it wrong.

When you hear some people complaining about Sugar appropriating an Asperger’s diagnosis to be rude, and you rush to decry the inherent ableism of the character without checking your sources–at which point you will discover that the people leading the charge are parents of autistic kids, not autistic themselves, do not believe “ableism” exists, and regularly tell autistic adults to go kill themselves? (Including this very one!) Or that a lot of autistic people are pointing out that Sugar represents an incredibly common problem for people with a lot of different diagnosis, a problem you contribute to every time you say you’re “just a little OCD” or “feeling kinda bipolar today” and they really appreciate her storyline?

Here’s a handy hint. It will come in very, very useful in the future, I think! Don’t tell a minority group how they should feel, what they should think, what they should want, or how they should be, or are, being portrayed.

You’re doing it wrong.

Look. You can dress it up however you want. You can appropriate and mutate academic words and theories, you can turn the world into your own personal trooper tale, you can position yourself as an ally or champion, you can ‘splain and ‘splain at whoever will listen, you can look for things to be offended by and end up creating more, you can declaw and silence actual advocates and activists because this is just clearly too personal and painful for them and you’re quite eager to help the freaks poor, poor dears….

You know. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

You do whatever you want. I just want you to know two things:

1. You’re doing it wrong.
2. Minorities everywhere pray that you will one day stop using words that you don’t know the meaning of.

We do not, actually, need a swarm of well-meaning people brimming with kindness and interest and pity and fascination and rage, armed with degrees in sociology or gender studies and the right kind of politics, to defend us. We know, we know. You know it.

We lived it.

Please, please listen to us.

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

Dear Fail!Allies (Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation) appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Sugar, Self-Diagnosis, Appropriation, And Ableism: So Here’s What You Missed On Glee (pt. 2)

Julia Bascom — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 06:00:07 +0000

I have four short little stories for you all.

One of them is about my brother. Well, my brother and I–we’re both autistic, and neither of us can pass for shit. We might not be identified as autistic straight away, but neither of us passes for normal or acceptable or typical, not even close. Now, when I was in high school lo those many years ago, I survived a lot of abuse which is really not the point here. I went to public school though, and he’s at an excellent private school–a lot like Dalton, actually, complete with abandoned out-buildings–with accommodations and is in AP US History and music theory and doing very well. And although we’ve had a tumultuous relationship, I had hoped that maybe the worst of his bullying was over, that he would escape relatively unscathed.

Our sister (neurotypical) started there a couple of weeks ago. She came to me on Thursday to tell me that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s so bad that my sister, who is just starting to notice the looks we get in public and shares no classes with him, picked up on it immediately. It’s so bad that my very socially-conscious teenaged sister is ready to go to the administration and make a scene.

It’s also very, very different from what I went through.

One of the girls harassing my brother self-identifies as having a different mental disorder every week. This week it was, apparently, Asperger’s. She’s been telling my sister that he really needs to get evaluated, “talk to someone,” “take some pills.” She’s been spreading it around.

For the record, before my brother takes his pills in the morning, Mom has to sit with him and prompt him through every bite of his breakfast. He has really, really bad ADHD, and he forgets to swallow, or he wants to sing about his plans for the day, or he needs more orange juice but on the way to the refrigerator he gets waylaid trying to rearrange the dishes on the counter.

My sister overheard a group of upperclassmen wondering if our brother had ADHD last week, because he’s just so much and so obnoxious.

“He does, so fuck off,” she snapped.

“Wait, really?” they said.

That’s the second story.

See, self-diagnosis and armchair-diagnosis is such a common thing now at this school that the idea of anyone actually having any of these disabilities, of maybe possibly god-forbid being affected by them, is something that simply does not occur to the people doing the speculation. My brother is just obnoxious, see. He doesn’t have a brain that requires a cocktail of expensive, semi-effective, and damaging drugs to hold still for six hours a day. He’s just annoying. People with Web M.D.’s from the University of Google bully him because…

I don’t know why. I don’t know why disabled people seem to trigger some sort of xenophobic kill-switch in other brains. Frankly, I don’t want to. Too many memories.

There are some things I do know, however. One of these things is that it is very, very common and popular and accepted in our society at large to say things like “I’m so OCD,” or “that chick must be bipolar,” or “oh that’s just my ADHD showing” or “I just feel so depressed some days.” It’s not okay to say those things when you actually have that disability–the number of times I’ve been scolded for mentioning that I’m autistic is too high to count. But if you don’t have a disability, you can appropriate that label to explain away and laugh off your personal failings all you want, no big deal.

There’s a lot packed into that last sentence, actually. I built it very deliberately. One of those things is the fact that we still, as a society, have not moved past the fact that a mental disability is really just a fancy code for not trying hard enough. Another is the idea that people who can’t try hard enough are jokes. And the third is the philosophy that health and morality are actually the same thing.

The dismissive, flippant way our culture talks about pretending to have mental disabilities is founded in some really ugly rhetoric. It has some really dangerous consequences for a lot of people. But it’s just so cool, so fun, so quick, so easy to say “we’re all a little autistic,” and I should stop taking everything so seriously, yeah?

Let me put it another way. The most common reaction I get to mentioning my autism is “don’t put yourself down.” A close second is “…but I like you.”

(A third involves bruising.)

That’s the second story. The third story involves teenagers, and an increasing number of adults too, looking at all of these messages–diagnostic labels just mean you don’t try hard enough, health is morality, people who don’t–there is no room here for can’t–try hard enough are jokes–and taking them to their logical conclusions. The logical conclusion is very, very simple. They have ADHD because they sometimes fall asleep in class after lunch and they don’t like doing homework.

My brother doesn’t, because he is just a failure as a human being.

The fourth story is about this marvelous TV show. It features ground-breaking and award-winning portrayals of two characters with developmental disabilities, as well as a character with OCD. During a related movie, a fan was featured with a diagnosis of Asperger’s. The other thing to know about this show is that its creators take their source material very, very seriously. Oh, not the physical location or even the laws of physics, no. But the emotional weight and impact of things, absolutely. It’s one of the most honest shows on air in that regard. This show is very, very good at showing what things, including disability, mean for the people living with them. In fact, it’s kind of what their third season looks like it will be about.

It’s also a fundamentally political show embarking on a very noisy season. And it’s chosen to show the people bullying my brother, and the people causing so much harm to disabled people every day with flippant comments, in a negative light.

Which brings me to the last point. Why is Sugar choosing Asperger’s, specifically?

Because it’s getting this level of response.

Because people are used to “I’m a little bit OCD,” and “I think I might have ADHD sometimes.” That’s completely and totally acceptable in most circles. It’s hard to make a point about something unacceptable if no one notices. Oh, Glee does that all the time, but they’re being a little less ambiguous here. They’re not going to spend a season and a half developing a storyline about overcoming casual homophobia–they’re slapping us in the face with a character’s casual ableism.

It’s a very deliberate and political choice.

I applaud it.

Part 1 …

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

Sugar, Self-Diagnosis, Appropriation, And Ableism: So Here’s What You Missed On Glee appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Sugar, Self-Diagnosis, Appropriation, And Ableism: So Here’s What You Missed On Glee (pt. 1)

Julia Bascom — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:00:17 +0000

Glee is a show whose buzz is owed almost entirely to manufactured controversies. Unfortunately, this latest one is invoking autism, and as an autistic person and fan, I’m weighing in. Again. I’m not f-locking. I will delete nasty comments, derailments, and personal attacks, all of which I’ve already dealt with today. For those who were lucky enough not to know: autism politics are vitriolic. Nasty stuff. Wonder if the writers know what they’ve stepped in.

So! Glee!

There’s this character, Sugar, who describes herself as having “self-diagnosed Asperger’s, so I can basically say whatever I want.” Of course, she does a really, really bad job of crip-face, and her last line is a furious “NOT ASPERGER’S!” There are a couple different takes on why she says it. I think she’s saying she doesn’t have Asperger’s. Others are saying that she’s saying that the particular rant she just gave had nothing to do with AS. Either way, actual autistic people can’t pick and chose, and she’s very, very obviously not autistic.

I think she’s brilliant. She makes me see red, she feels like a punch to the gut, but she’s brilliant.

Now, before I get into it, this is Glee, so let me just clarify a couple of things:

Anyone who thinks that Sugar’s actions won’t be addressed hasn’t been paying attention to how the show works for the past two years. Anyone who thinks that her plot has anything to do with actual autism, or the issue of self-identification in the autistic community, is putting assumptions into play that the show has never expressed an interest in. And anyone who thinks she is written as actually autistic, as some parents have been suggesting, has some serious ableism of their own to unpack.

Finally, since this conversation is also drawing in a lot of people with very little knowledge about the show: anyone who thinks that Glee trades in stereotypes and makes jokes at the expense of minorities and that’s all is really missing out on some incredibly nuanced stories, and probably won’t be able to follow a word of this. I’m not interested in defending the politics of Glee
here. If you think that Kurt’s a flaming queen and Artie is a prop and that’s that, then I really don’t have time to engage with you right now or defend something you’ve already decided is indefensible.

But! For those curious as to how someone who is autistic, into Glee, and really into analyzing disability politics on Glee is thinking about Sugar, read on!

There are three basic questions about Sugar. Why couldn’t she just be (another) bitchy character? Why is she faking a disability? And why is that disability Asperger’s?

The first (why they couldn’t just make her the rich, bitchy, and annoying girl) is the easiest.

Because this season Glee has nine, count ‘em, NINE kids whose characters and plotlines involve passing in some manner. Three of these have to do with disabilities they can’t hide. (Also, cool, it’s 3 for race, 3 for disability, 3 for sexuality.) And then we’ve got Quinn’s dirty laundry, and Emma’s everything, and it’s all kind of the same. All these characters are struggling with parts of themselves which they have, or haven’t, learned to accept after season two–and for most of them, they’re discovering that acceptance isn’t enough. There are still other people in the world, and there are still consequences.

So the utter and complete and raw awfulness of Sugar doesn’t come from her being a bitchy and entitled rich girl who can’t sing and isn’t used to getting her way. It comes from her strutting into a safe space these kids have created and pretending–and not even pretending very well–to be something she’s not, something she can turn on and off at will, for fun and profit, at no cost to herself and every cost to them.

She’s not going to get away with it. She already didn’t get into glee club.

This season of Glee is already extremely and obviously political. They’ve been building up to it for two seasons, setting characters like Mercedes and Mike and Tina up, normalizing Artie and sneaking in Brittany and turning Becky into a full and autonomous character, and everything they’ve ever done with Kurt and Blaine and Santana. Sue Sylvester was compelled to run for congress because of cuts to her sister’s medicaid. I still am not over that. She might never mention it again, but since when has that ever been something that a comedy cared about? And I’m at an advantage here because I know spoilers, but, trust me. It’s not going to stop any time soon.

But it’s not just political in the sense of “Sue Sylvester is running for congress, everyone hide.” It’s is Brittany going to graduate, it’s Santana doing whatever Sue wants because Sue implied that she’s not as closeted as she’d like, it’s Kurt and Blaine auditioning for the same role and not kissing in public, it’s Mike telling Sue Sylvester she’s being offensive, it’s the kids not even pretending to respect Will anymore and so, so much more.

It’s about living with the consequences of being who you are, and letting audiences see that. It’s also, quietly and sometimes so loudly, about changing the rules.

Sugar is a girl who has a very poor grasp on all of this, and no regard for consequences because she’s never had to live any. She’s the natural foil.

As to why she is written as faking…

I have four short little stories for you all.

Part 2 …

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

Sugar, Self-Diagnosis, Appropriation, And Ableism: So Here’s What You Missed On Glee appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Extrovert Critic: “You Read Too Much”

Zygmunt — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:00:51 +0000

We’ve all heard this criticism. We read too much. When we’re seen reading, especially some subject material that seems uninteresting, we seem ‘out of touch,’ ‘with our head in the clouds,’ ‘on another planet.’

In general an introvert submerged in reading is perceived as trading the vibrant world around them for the dusty and colorless world of books. The experience within books seems like a faded and flat flower pressing compared to the three dimensional, colorful, living flower.

To the extrovert, a book is a pale abstraction that crumbles away against the vitality of actual experience. By extension, someone who spends considerable time reading is dry, abstract, lacking in personality, vigor, and practical knowledge.

To an introvert, however, there is nothing abstract, cold, or distant about habitual reading. Rather than distracting from the surrounding world, it sheds light upon it and makes it richer. For a Subtle person, the information found in books makes the experience of our world immeasurably more beautiful. It allows us to reach back into time and through the wisdom of ages so that we may put our world into perspective.

Books allow us to perceive the wonders of our world through countless other people scattered across time, place, and circumstance. To a subtle person, an extrovert lives in a very small pond indeed. They understand their universe almost exclusively through a random handful of contemporaries. That they see introverts as deprived is just a symptom of their ignorance.

A Loud person tends to perceive dead words on a page that yield a pale impression and nothing more. Someone who focuses on all things on the Surface remains on the surface of things. A Subtle person seamlessly moves beneath the dead words and into the pure meaning they represent.

To a Loud person, the content of books is dead, dry, fossilized information. You get a can opener and open it up when you need it.

To the Subtle person, books are living streams of consciousness from other human beings in which we can actively participate. It can be almost like becoming someone else for awhile, a way of freeing ourselves from our own lonely perspective and mental patterns. We are often accused of being selfish, yet we perhaps spend far less time living in the desires and thoughts of the self than do our extrovert critics.

An extrovert could respond that TV and film perform the function of allowing one to step into another’s shoes. Surely these are more tangible, visceral mediums and therefore far more effective than a book. After all, we empathize with the characters we see on screen and are drawn into a director’s vision.

However, books operate on another level because they demand active participation and voluntary shedding of our own perceptions. Visual entertainment gives us the vision and all we have to do is sit back and watch. There is not much participation, mostly just passive dictation to the viewer. TV and film can be excellent ways of escaping our own world. They offer a complete vision to replace our own.

The importance of books that extroverts tend to miss is that one must create the vision. We must actively concentrate on adopting the thought patterns of another and seeing clearly through their eyes. In books, we must actively bring our perspective in synchrony with another. Thus we expand our own perspective rather than replacing it temporarily with someone else’s. When reading a work of fiction, for instance, we must draw from our own experiences to bring alive the blueprint the author has set before us. In trying to make the plan come to life, we are reshaping our own mind until we have a key that fits in the door to another mind. The more we practice, the better we become at falling into the mental rhythm of another human being and escaping the confines of our own solitary vision of the world. The fluid, multi-faceted understanding that results from reading is a source of incredible euphoria the equal of any of life’s greatest pleasures.

That an extrovert would consider us dead, absent, and isolated from the living world because of reading reveals their inability to see that the dry words on the page are merely a blueprint, an invitation to build something. A something that never turns out the same for any two people who try it, or even for one person who builds from the same blueprint twice.

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Extrovert Critic: “You Read Too Much” appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

related: Rulers of Celephais

The Greatest Crime In Television (pt. 2)

Julia Bascom — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:00:54 +0000

Stealing a person’s words, their ability to look clearly at something and see it and know that they do, is the smallest and easiest way to kill someone.

What I mean is, I say child abuse, and people think of my student, caged and beaten and raped and made to eat out of the garbage for nine years. Well, yes and no—yes, because if anyone deserves those words, it’s him, and no, because things are rarely so harsh and vivid and obvious. There’s a reason children like him are so rare and his situation comes up in textbooks as a Worse Case Scenario, one of the Worst in the History Of Our State. Life is a game of ripples and things adding up and subtle variations.

My student will never be the same because he never got to be not-afraid for his first nine years, until eventually he just couldn’t feel fear anymore. I will never be the same because they made me take my clothes off in the car once because I’d drooled all over them, and because I only had to be hit a couple of times before a raised voice was enough to have me looping those experiences and hitting my self, all on my own. His father hit him in places no one could see. I wished someone would just hit me one more time, now that I knew what I could do, so someone might believe me and maybe it would stop. One of those experiences is stark and dramatic and mercifully rare; one is quiet and common and so easy to justify, overlook, pass over. People see my student’s misshapen collarbones and fall silent in horror; no one notices that after a lifetime of being slapped and grabbed for flapping I can’t raise my arms from my side, because the whole point was to make me unnoticeable.

Our situations are different, and so it gets decided that one of them doesn’t count. Similarly, people who have never had the horror of growing up in a community where you get taken away if you’re not good enough declare that since my student’s institutionalization was stopped at the eleventh hour, it doesn’t count. (Just like, if you run away fast enough from the homophobes on the street corner, somehow magically nothing could have happened. Just like if you never say no, you must mean yes. Just like, if they don’t put a gag in your mouth or knock you out, you should be able to fight them off.) I’m glad the world is so very tidy and convenient and adjustable that knowing you were supposed to spend the rest of your life somewhere unspeakably horrible because you just aren’t good enough has no effect on a thirteen-year-old boy. I mean, clearly someone needs to tell him this, as he for some reason feels otherwise. Someone should also probably tell his classmates, who now know—and who always knew, but now it’s reconfirmed and a little more fresh in their minds—exactly how unsafe they are.

It doesn’t count because he doesn’t (we, they, you, don’t) count.

There aren’t any stories about that.

I have this niggling suspicion, though, that there are an awful lot of people in the world who have been told that they don’t count, don’t get to be in the stories, things were never quite bad enough, or maybe they were too bad to be real. I have this feeling that there are an awful lot of us, and that if we just stopped keeping ourselves a secret, we might blow that lie out of the water.

This is where Glee comes in.

Glee tells you, right in the pilot episode, that it’s about not-people discovering that they’re people. Oh sure, there are layers and complications and distractions and other features and a million different ways to say the same thing, but it really does come down to that. It always surprises me, because since when is that a story I see on my TV?

We consume media in a context of constant, casual violence against some and dismissal of everyone else. We expect to be entertained in the middle of an environment in which no one, no matter how skinny or blonde or popular or perfect, can expect to be safe and happy for long. If our television program is going to do anything besides lie to us about following our hearts and happy endings, we’d rather it at least didn’t mean it.

So Glee gets sneaky about it. They give us Bryan Ryan, a Special Guest Character who gets an entire episode devoted to what it is to be a closeted gay American without every actually showing any icky attraction to men. They delve down into layers of nuance and complicated human relationships and the terrible compromises we make and they talk outright about being closeted and cutting yourself off without ever pulling a visceral homophobic reaction from the audience because Neil Patrick Harris (and can we talk about that casting choice?) kissed a guy.

That same episode we have Artie, our wheelchair-using character, learning how to tell people that he doesn’t care about his legs, he doesn’t need to be fixed, he’s got other things he’s worried about. Difference is, he’s not some sort of coded metaphor. You see his chair before you see him. And so all the other characters (and the audience) see is a poor, suffering boy (in a wheelchair, just a cripple bound to his chair) miserable because he can never achieve his dream of being a dancer. Artie spends the entire episode negotiating what all of that means, and how to make himself heard and believed through all the other noise, while, yes, getting a little sad that he can’t just get out of chair and make the entire problem go away. But the episode is called Dream On, and being able to walk doesn’t change the people around you.

The point these two intertwined storylines make is that it doesn’t matter how badly you want people to hear your own voice, they much prefer the dream they have of you in their heads. It’s an entire episode, on the heels (and a continuation) of the similarly-themed Laryngitis, devoted to showcasing that on every level, from casting to costumes to musical numbers to the actual lines delivered, Glee plays around with metaphors and story-telling and scale and variations on an idea and performance versus experience to look at how humans negotiate the space around each other.

(There’s very little joy in the Glee Club, sometimes, if that gives you an idea of what they mean.)

We start out with the writers taking a complicated, unjust experience, stripping away the salient, fundamentally other part of it, and delving waaaaay down into it and all its complexity and nuance. It becomes a story about the fucked-up ways people treat each other, and the fucked-up consequences that has. The audience, to some degree, gets it, and likes it, because it’s not ANGRY, it’s not about TEH GAY, it’s not scary and divisive and other. We don’t have to change the way we treat whole classes of people because of this now, do we?

(I think the point being made is that yes, we do, but it’s entertainment so if you don’t want to hear that, you won’t.)

Probably the most frustrating part of Glee is that the show focuses on universal problems of human relation, but it’s aired in a world where only a few characters out of the oversized cast are universally regarded as human. The only two characters played and seen straight-away as human, right from the start, are Finn and Will. Besides being straight white middle class males, they have two other very important, tightly-linked things in common:

1. They’re allowed to rage.
2. They don’t hurt people on purpose.

Kurt (gay) snarls in his songs, Quinn (teenage pregnancy) yells that she’s furious, Puck (juvenile delinquent and Lima Loser) explodes and punches people and gets sent to juvvie, and those are all Bad Things. Finn kicks over a chair, Will terrifies his wife, and those things are fine. Those things are natural, healthy, human reactions to the (not-) people around them being awful. Kurt and Quinn and Puck learn to be angry quietly, to smile through their teeth, to take names and social security numbers and sometimes just to wait. Finn and Will are allowed to feel, and show, their hurt.

Their rage is safe and predictable and about socially sanctioned things and won’t ever shake anything up. Kurt, Quinn, Puck? They might hurt someone’s feelings.

They might make someone uncomfortable.

They might ask someone to risk something.

Kurt and Quinn and Puck can hurt people just by breathing, just by being there, and it will always, always, be deliberate. Finn and Will only ever hurt people by accident, and that’s the catch. Finn and Will are people. Good people. Good people don’t, can’t hurt anyone, and since Will and Finn are Good, and since they didn’t mean it to hurt, didn’t even know it could, it doesn’t.

(They’re not like my student’s father, so obviously intent on destroying people, and so their actions have no consequences. They’re good, and if we feel hurt by them, then that’s our fault, and if we argue, then we’re bad, bad people, trying to sully their goodness. That’s just not who they are.)

Isn’t that a cool trick?

(That is the real reason my phobia of lifting my arms, and my student’s near-institutionalization, and so many other things, Don’t Count—what was done was never meant to hurt, and the people who did it don’t hurt, that’s just not who they are, the whole thing is really just better off forgotten, it doesn’t ever need to feature, it doesn’t (we don’t) count.)

But what Glee does such an uncannily good job at showcasing is just how, exactly, anyone can make anyone else Not Count, and what that does to all involved. Simultaneously, it fleshes out people we see first through Will and Finn’s eyes—because we can’t see not-people through their own eyes—and turns them from cheap and easy stereotypes into painfully real, immediate, people. The process is messy and long—two seasons in and it’s still not quite complete—and it’s complicated by the fact that it happens with an audience going through the same process. People laughed at Bryan Ryan’s quips and cried at Artie’s tears and didn’t quite put the pieces together. The cast donned shirts stamped with their shame and sang about baby I was born to survive, and it wasn’t quite obvious enough to change everything.

(It’s entertainment, it’s not supposed to mean anything, and it has to be packaged such that people can ignore the real parts if they don’t want to see them. It’s not allowed to count.)

But a few of us get our words and our stories back, and if they were any more obvious about it, it wouldn’t work at all.

It’s (we’re) all the same, you see.

Part 1 …

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

The Greatest Crime In Television appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

The Greatest Crime In Television (pt. 1)

Julia Bascom — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 06:54:21 +0000

Sometimes I think the greatest crime in television is caring.

Giving a damn is already practically illegal anyways, so it makes sense. A lot of the time, in fact, giving a damn is actually more of a punishable offense than anything actually offensive. I get yelled at for organizing books too efficiently, for Chrissakes. It doesn’t even stand imagining, what happens when we say stop it, don’t call them that, you’re talking about another person, do you mean to, do you understand, you can’t do that. When I ask someone to please don’t say “retarded,” it hits me, you’re working in a fucking special ed classroom for crying out loud, your student is three feet away, what are you thinking, it is agreed that the problem is that I can’t take a joke.

I cried for ten minutes when they said “the ayes have it” last night and New York got marriage equality, and Dad told me to quiet down, he was trying to sleep. I didn’t know what was worse—not being able to tell anyone about the results, not being able to tell anyone about the newest cut that barely even stings anymore, or being so fucking grateful that at least I wasn’t called dyke, because we know how that one goes.

(My brother gave me a sarcastic thumbs-up, and my sister told me that she’d known it would pass, and she’d give the rest of the country ten years. I wanted to congratulate her on being so blithe, I wanted to ask if she knows how long a wait ten years is, I wanted to remind her that at least mom would go to her wedding, I wanted to ask her if she’s ever watched people vote on her right to make a family and if she’s ever seen them vote it down. But that’s not funny or neat or easy and thus allowed, that’s messy and hurt and I would mean it, and so I kept quiet.)

I was at the White House conference on bullying in March, which framed violence, in all forms—physical, sexual, emotional, verbal—against students as a civil rights issue. In a group discussion, some immigrant students from the Chicago public school system told us, in excruciating detail, about the physical, racially-based violence they experienced every day. They said that, whenever they tried to report this violence to a teacher or administrator, the same response would come back:

“Why are you telling me this? You’re making me upset. You’re hurting my feelings.”

(The students are being beaten, are failing classes because of chanted racial slurs whenever they sit down, are afraid to come to school. The teachers feel bad because the students are implying that perhaps, if they are not safe at school, the teachers are not doing their jobs properly. The teachers’ feelings are hurt. So the students, the victims, get punished again.)

It’s not a racial thing. It’s not an issue of Teh Gay, or of cripples and madmen and fools. Strip away the aesthetic revulsion, the fear and the ignorance, the complicated socio-economic histories and the familial scars, and people still like to treat other as disposable objects, good for entertainment and not much else. We’re each other’s toys, and if we don’t amuse sufficiently then we probably need to be whacked a few times, the way you hit a CD-player when it skips. Maybe we need new batteries. Probably it’s easier to just throw us away.

(Some people say we evolved the way we did because we’re so good at killing, and we certainly killed off our preceding species quickly enough. It’s a quick hop-skip-jump from amusement to mascot to mystery to menace, and broken human playthings seem to implicitly threaten that we’ll steal, or at least break, all the other toys too. Loss and sacrifice and discomfort and fear we might be next can all trigger our kill-switches, apparently.)

Perhaps I’ve lived an exceptionally awful life, but I find that hard to believe when I watch flocks of smiling, popular people being silently unhappy together. There are reasons people lie about and keep secret how they feel and what they think, and I’ve seen one too many terrified college girls fighting and drinking and cutting all their hair off and then going to class the next morning with bright, store-bought smiles to believe that it’s just me.

True, I get furious, sometimes, when I tell someone about being mistreated because of my autism and they respond with a tale of their own frustration at the hands of some cruel peer or unnecessarily draconian teacher or boss. One of these things is not like the other, and the whole thing never reads as anything other than the familiar “that never happened, that story isn’s allowed, let me show you the script, let me show you the acceptable ways to be and get hurt, too bad they’ll never apply to you.”

Sometimes, though, these things are almost exactly the same in all the ways that viscerally matter. I’m abused because I’m a not-person. To hurt someone without using your fists you just make them feel like a not-person, or, at the very least, a not-okay-person, and you can do that to anyone. Everyone suffers because, as humans, we’re just naturally very good at hurting each other.

Which is not to say that we aren’t also very good at making each other feel incredible, or at least happy, or even just warm and safe for an hour, and that can be enough. We have families and stories, and these are not only terrifying weapons, but also powerful things that can create a lot of good—and when they don’t, we can make new ones. There’s joy and beauty in the world, and sometimes another human seems to hold it all in the spaces between their joints.

Maybe that’s why we hurt each other so very well.

It’s all very stark and dramatic, and that’s a useful way to make a point, but life doesn’t come with points. Life comes kind of blurry and murky and bled-together and wonderful, and maybe looking back you can scoop some of it into a coherent narrative, but the words are never quite sufficient. After all, they said I could get married means something bright and happy, but there’s also something angry and resentful and undefined, because they never asked if their marriage offended me. And then we have to think about all the things marriage means and represents, and what it means for the couples who, watching the votes be counted, whisper that they’ll still love each other just as much if it doesn’t pass. Life is just too big for the words we have and the stories we learn, except for when it’s the other way around.

Most of us don’t go around slaying dragons and going on quests of many miles. Happily-ever-afters are unsettlingly complicated, and the problem with slaying one Evil Overlord is that another always pops up. Curiously, Evil Overlords like to disguise themselves as people we rely on and must be polite to, and quests of many miles tend to consist of driving oblivious children to and from soccer practice, piano lessons, and gymnastics every day for ten years and never driving over and off the bridge.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation is a truism, but no one ever asks why, and if maybe it’s because we think we missed the train to something spectacular years ago and there’s no honor in what we have left, and so we don’t claim the words and stories we were taught to dream as our own. We grow up, and we stop reading children’s literature and picture books, and we’re told that archetypes and mythos are something besides history and biography, and we lose our sense of importance and solidity and any sense of ownership of our own story or right to any words which might mean anything.

Stealing a person’s words, their ability to look clearly at something and see it and know that they do, is the smallest and easiest way to kill someone.

Part 2 …

Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.

The Greatest Crime In Television appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Evidence Christ Was Autistic?

Alan Griswold — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:21:20 +0000

Here is the abstract from a recently published paper (Izuma 2011):

People act more prosocially when they know they are watched by others, an everyday observation borne out by studies from behavioral economics, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. This effect is thought to be mediated by the incentive to improve one’s social reputation, a specific and possibly uniquely human motivation that depends on our ability to represent what other people think of us. Here we tested the hypothesis that social reputation effects are selectively impaired in autism, a developmental disorder characterized in part by impairments in reciprocal social interactions but whose underlying cognitive causes remain elusive. When asked to make real charitable donations in the presence or absence of an observer, matched healthy controls donated significantly more in the observer’s presence than absence, replicating prior work. By contrast, people with high-functioning autism were not influenced by the presence of an observer at all in this task. However, both groups performed significantly better on a continuous performance task in the presence of an observer, suggesting intact general social facilitation in autism. The results argue that people with autism lack the ability to take into consideration what others think of them and provide further support for specialized neural systems mediating the effects of social reputation.

It’s difficult to read that passage without being reminded of Matthew 6:1–4, from the Sermon on the Mount:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.

What would Jesus do? Apparently not what non-autistics would do.

(Izuma 2011): Keise Izuma, Kenji Matsumoto, Colin F. Camerer, and Ralph Adolphs. 2011. “Insensitivity to social reputation in autism.” PNAS 2011: 1107038108v1-201107038.

Alan Griswold blogs at Autistic Aphorisms.

Evidence Christ Was Autistic? appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

What Is Psychopathy’s Place In Neurodiversity?

Mark Stairwalt — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:25:31 +0000

Psychopaths loom large in the autistic anxiety closet. Our single-day traffic record at Shift Journal belongs to Scott Shea’s Spotting Psychopaths in the Workplace, which garnered nearly 1800 hits on the day it was posted. Conversely, it’s easy to see how autistics are favorite targets not just for the sort of psychopaths who make headlines and bring in decent box office, but also the everyday psychopathy of the schoolyard and the office. It’s a special relationship in more ways than one.

I was reminded of this when I ran across a letter published a couple days ago by Jon Ronson, who is among other things the author and filmmaker responsible for The Psychopath Test, both a book and a documentary. Predictably enough Ronson hears from people who are curious to know whether he ever gets emails from psychopaths, and this past Saturday he posted one such letter. It appears to have come from an extraordinarily self-aware psychopath who describes his experience as a self-referred patient at a mental health agency, for a course of treatment which lasted upwards of four years.

My case was rather unusual in that I self-referred. The mental health agency had not had a walk-in of this kind before. In the lead up, I had found myself becoming overwhelmed with a predatorial instinct that I could not shake – I’d sit, watching crowds of people go by, driven to mania by what I saw as their limitless inferiorities. Plans were set that, once enacted, would be very difficult to walk back from.

The age-old caveat here of course is that the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing form, that psychopaths as master manipulators are fully capable of painting just such a potentially disarming and thoughtful picture of themselves. So sure — keeping in mind also the Devil’s power to plant that fossil record that’s duped the paleontologists all these years — take the letter for what it’s worth. The reason I bring it up here is that once one starts comparing the language and reasoning used by this psychopathic letter-writer, and the language and reasoning put forth by the neurodiversity movement, striking similarities become apparent. At which point one must consider whether it is more likely that the irregular army of self-advocate autistics which has emerged over the past decade is engaged in a collective act of psychopathic manipulation (and I’m well aware this point of view does in fact have its fans) … or whether science and society have managed to misunderstand both autism and psychopathy in a similar fashion.

Yes thearapy was transformative, though it is possible to overstate its impacts. I will always see the world through different lenses to much of the rest of the world. My emotional reactions are different, my endowments are impressive in some respects, not so in others, much like other people.

It is also the case that, being ‘normal’ takes a degree of energy and conscious thought that is instinctive for most, but to me is a significant expenditure of energy. I think it analogous to speaking a second language. That is not to say I am being false or obfuscating, merely that I will always expose some eccentric traits.

Seeming contradictions and ambiguities bedevil those who observe both psychopathy and autism from a wide angle. Ronson for instance is on board with businessman and radio host Thom Hartmann’s long-standing assertion that American-style corporatism functions as it does because it incentivizes the best and brightest psychopaths to compete for the most elite corporate CEO positions. And as psychopathy emerges as the worm in the corporate apple, it’s turned out that many of the best minds of each generation bear fruit not in spite of but precisely because they are autistic. What, then, might the analogous, unambiguously positive contributions of the psychopath be?

Well, lets look at what (bright) psychopaths are naturally quite exceptional at… We are good at identifying, very rapidly, extreme traits of those around us which allows us to discern vulnerabilities, frailties, and mental conditions. It also makes psychopaths supreme manipulators, for they can mimick human emotions they do not feel, play on these emotions and extract concessions.

But what are these traits really? – Stripped of its pejorative adjectives and mean application, it is a highly trained perception, ability to adapt, and a lack of judgment borne of pragmatic and flexible moral reasoning.

In a sense, one can almost see psychopathy as a mirror or photo-negative image of autism, each occupying opposite ends of a particular axis. As it happens, Ronson is also big on the notion of psychopathy as a spectrum. He recounts alarming himself over the number and extent of psychopathic traits he learned to recognize in himself and in others, and eventually runs up against the same absurdity encountered by those who attempt to draw a clear and consistent line across the spectrum, between autism and not-autism. Unlike those burdened with cobbling together the next DSM, Ronson is not above playing this absurdity for laughs.

And then, who wouldn’t want to know a psychopath such as this.

These days I enjoy a reputation of being someone of intense understanding and observation with a keen strategic instinct. I know where those traits come from, yet I have made the conscious choice to use them for the betterment of friends, aquaintences, and society. People confide in me extraordinary things because they know, no matter what, I will not be judging them.

I do so because I know I have that choice. After years of therapy I am well equipped to act on it, and my keen perception is now directed equally towards myself.

Continuing, the letter-writer relates that he anticipates the same accusation encountered by countless autistics who are able at least some of the time to “pass

Its true that I do not ‘feel’ guilt or remorse, except to the extent that it affects me directly, but I do feel other emotions, which do not have adequate words of description, but nevertheless cause me to derive satisfacton in developing interpersonal relationships, contributing to society, and being gentle as well as assertive.

Such as statement might tempt you to say ‘well obviously you’re not a real psychopath then’. As if the definition of a psychopath is someone who exploits others for their personal power, satisfaction or gain.

Not only does the choir respond, “As if the definition of an autistic is someone incapable of feeling empathy” (or lacking an imagination), I’m also reminded here of a recent citation by Michelle Dawson @autismcrisis:

“different people may acquire moral values through different mechanisms” http://j.mp/nNUmHA survey-based study of empathy etc in Aspergers

“Different people … different mechanisms” and the struggle we have with accepting those differences speaks more to me of a conflict between The One (acceptable kind of person, kind of mechanism) and The Many (legitimate ways of being in the world) than it does between Good and Evil, and yet it is with Evil that psychopathy is explicitly identified. Implicitly, much the same association still holds for autism. Make no mistake, my own brushes with psychopathy have been harrowing enough that I’m not lacking in respect for its destructive power (nor for that matter is Mr. Ronson). And were I of a mind to, I could Eeyore away many a night bemoaning the Good that autism has cost me and mine, and will cost us yet. But when something is taken to be Evil, the ways in which we are able to experience it are few, and unattractive, and most importantly unfruitful.

What power, beauty, and fruitfulness we are capable of, I suggest, lies not in fighting the good fight but in taking care in how we conceive, recognize, and experience events and conditions from psychopathy to autism and beyond. It may well be that what evil has been perpetrated to date lies more in our own sins of omission, in our failure to take such care, than in any supposed quality inherent in that which we’ve chosen to fight against.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Conversations (pt. 2)

Mark Stairwalt — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:05:41 +0000

He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts — no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, “No, I like it well enough.” It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato’s definition of a man — a biped without feathers — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato’s man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, “How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!” I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord” — said he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. “Satisfied!” said he; “some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!” Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.

Part 1 …

Source: Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Description (pt. 1)

Mark Stairwalt — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:00:41 +0000

Rather than trying to spark a debate over postmortem diagnoses, the primary intent here is to showcase and encourage an appreciation for Thoreau’s fascination with and delight in his neighbor who was in any case a striking character. Thoreau is modeling a sense of wonder that’s all too lacking in this age of diagnosis and treatment.

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… Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side.

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man — he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here — a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, “if it were not for books,” would “not know what to do rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. — “Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?”

“Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.”

He says, “That’s good.” He has a great bundle of white oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house — for he chopped all summer — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn’t a-going to hurt himself. He didn’t care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall — loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, “How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges — by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.”

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim — “By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he “liked to have the little fellers about him.”

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, “Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child …

Part 2 …

Source: Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

Asperger, Self-diagnosis and the Media

Alicia Lile — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:00:17 +0000

I am aware that the TV show Glee portrayed a self-diagnosed Aspie (someone with Asperger) as someone using this as an excuse for being a jerk. Not only could this not be farther away from the truth, this is extremely harmful for everyone, the ones that are Autistic, both with Asperger, self-diagnosed Asperger and all in the Spectrum.

We already face a serious problem of discrimination, abuse and bullying. We need the media to show support, not to discriminate us even further.

Using the fact that it is self-diagnosed doesn’t make it okay.

Self-diagnosed people don’t invent things. It’s not all in their heads, it’s a reality, not everyone can get a diagnosis, not everyone wants one and not everyone needs one. It doesn’t mean they don’t have Asperger.

Getting a diagnosis is not easy. There are several reasons why, some of those are: if you are a female, if you are an adult, if you live in a place were Asperger is not known, you don’t have the money or like me all of those, you face a serious problem if you want an official diagnosis (I have an unofficial professionally confirmed diagnosis and I’m looking for someone to make it official if you must know).

Many have problems with mental health professionals. I had problems with some that stopped me from getting the official diagnosis.

I suffered a lot of bullying and discrimination and couldn’t even finish school properly. I can’t go to college because of fear and now even more doors are open to make this kind of problem more common.

Like I said before I live in a country were Asperger is not well-known, but shows like Glee are. People here take what they see on the television as reality, the first thing that they are going to see is that people with Asperger (and all in the Autim Spectrum) are jerks, and self-diagnosed Aspies are people looking for excuses to be rude and hurtful.

Anyone can think on the results of this kind of publicity: more children and adults suffering discrimination, abuse and violence. We don’t need this. People die from this, people kill themselves because of this. You might think this an exaggeration, that we shouldn’t take TV characters so serious, but the reality of things is that the media has a lot of power and people believe what they see. This was not funny and the results are not funny, making jokes of people with disabilities and of a stigmatized group is not funny.

I do hope for an apology, for research in the future and responsibility in this matter.

Alicia Lile blogs from Brazil at Moonlit Lily.

Asperger, Self-diagnosis and the Media appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]