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Navigating Competing Worlds: The Elusive Ideal of Normalcy
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been very busy with my job and with getting acclimated to the routine of my graduate program. I’ve formed a great connection with the little guy I care for, and in my...
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Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg on 10/28/11 | 2 Comments | Read More
Quiet Hands
1.
When I was a little girl, they held my hands down in tacky glue while I cried.
2.
I’m a lot bigger than them now. Walking down a hall to a meeting, my hand flies out to feel the texture on the wa...
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Julia Bascom on 10/27/11 | 16 Comments | Read More
Grabbers
It’s a grabbers vs. flappers warzone.
On the one side are the flappers. We wave and twist our hands in front of our faces or slap them against our chests. Our heads punctuate our moods and the music...
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Julia Bascom on 10/27/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Mind conversation with myself
Mind conversation with myself.
How to speak about the differences in perceiving the world before you learn that your view of the world is not the typical way? How would you know the difference between...
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Alicia Lile on 10/26/11 | No Comments | Read More
Occupy The DSM (Open Letter and Petition to the DSM-5 Task Force and the APA)
To the DSM-5 Task Force and the American Psychiatric Association:
As you are aware, the DSM is a central component of the research, education, and practice of most licensed psychologists in the United...
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Guest on 10/25/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Introversion and Schizoid Traits
Not so long ago, I was dropped a link by a reader to Wikipedia’s entry on schizoid personality disorder. I was shocked as I read it over.
I read through the descriptions and lists on this page and f...
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Zygmunt on 10/24/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Autism, Culture, & Representation (course description & reading list)
With this supposed increase in autism has come an increase in texts about autism (across media, across genre), much of it volatile and emotionally charged. Our main objective in this class, then, is t...
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Melanie Yergeau on 10/21/11 | No Comments | Read More
Evidence Christ Was Autistic?
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 behavior...
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Alan Griswold on 10/20/11 | No Comments | Read More
Diary of a Drooler
This is a story about disability.
This is a story about the politics of drool.
This is a lot of things, and maybe you should just read it.
...
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Julia Bascom on 10/19/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Everyone? Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Autistics?
Just a quick companion piece here for Zygmunt’s account of his grappling with the social justice system of extroverts — a group that if not provably neurologically distinct, certainly seems to hav...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/17/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Extroverts and the Concept of ‘Deserval’
We turn on the TV and encountering the concept is inevitable:
“I deserve it.” says a waifish, urban thirty-something woman as she justifies buying that expensive dress or that decadent slice of ra...
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Zygmunt on 10/17/11 | No Comments | Read More
Thinking In Binary: Recently at Reddit
This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me:
“The digital realm is biased toward choice, becau...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/12/11 | 10 Comments | Read More
What Is Psychopathy’s Place In Neurodiversity?
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 o...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/11/11 | 5 Comments | Read More
Life After Mass Society?
I received this comment from a reader:
Hey this is Adi. I have been reading a lot of your posts and like this blog a lot and I am posting for the first time.
I have a question that has been bugging me...
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Zygmunt on 10/10/11 | No Comments | Read More
Book Review: “Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism” by Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg
“Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism” by Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg is a “sequel” to “The Uncharted Path” which I reviewed here and followed up here.
When we last left Rachel...
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Guest on 10/7/11 | No Comments | Read More
Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Conversations (pt. 2)
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 p...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/6/11 | No Comments | Read More
Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Description (pt. 1)
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 wa...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/6/11 | No Comments | Read More
Indistinguishability and Modeling- or, To a Friend or Three
I think that for too many of us, we are brought up to look for role models upon which to model our behavior. This modeling is something that I think is sometimes so very encouraged in some of us- Auti...
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Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone on 10/4/11 | No Comments | Read More
When it comes to development differences, environment dictates when it’s a disability
The other day, the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, commented that attention-deficit disorder should be a “paddleable offense.” He compares ADD/ADHD to having “ants in the pants,” and says that ...
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Emily Willingham on 10/3/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Introverts vs. Extroverts: Learning
The acquisition of knowledge has a very different meaning to introverts and extroverts.
Extroverts: Learning is a means to an ends
Introverts: Learning is an end unto itself.
Extroverts learn somethi...
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Zygmunt on 10/3/11 | 3 Comments | Read More
Autism War Fizzles Out
Five years ago, the Combating Autism Act was passed with great fanfare, authorizing a billion dollars in federal spending for autism research. The act’s proponents made clear, in language every bit...
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Gwen McKay on 09/30/11 | No Comments | Read More
Welcome, Crow’s Eye Readers
We’ve been getting a significant traffic bump from the recent comments thread and/or the blogroll (thanks, Jack) over at political blog The Crow’s Eye, and since it may not be readily apparent wha...
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Mark Stairwalt on 09/29/11 | No Comments | Read More
Advice For Children, Unsolicited
Do not trust knowingly decent people. It isn’t their native temperament. They want more than simple kindness, or good faith. They want security, the promise of reward, or to pretend that they can ha...
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Jack Crow on 09/28/11 | 3 Comments | Read More
Asperger, Self-diagnosis and the Media
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, t...
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Alicia Lile on 09/27/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Extrovert Success and the Introvert
What kind of life in society is considered a success? In obituaries we see ‘was a great person/parent’ and all kinds of statements, but never do we see ‘This person was successful. In their ti...
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Zygmunt on 09/26/11 | No Comments | Read More
A Question of Humanity?
Autism is often referred to in ways that dehumanize autistic people: That autism leaves a child seemingly soul-less; that the person once present in that body and mind is now missing or unreachable. T...
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Autism & Oughtisms on 09/23/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
Unwarranted Conclusions and the Potential for Harm: My Reply to Simon Baron-Cohen
I want to thank Simon Baron-Cohen for taking the time to respond, in his September 10th post on the Autism Blogs Directory, to one of my early pieces on autism and empathy. I am very gratified that he...
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Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg on 09/21/11 | 9 Comments | Read More
A Safer World
Over the past decade, the United States and other countries have worked to stop terrorism, educating citizens to recognize and report potential dangers. Some terrorist attacks have indeed been preven...
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Gwen McKay on 09/20/11 | No Comments | Read More
Extroverted Critic: “You Need to Be More eMOtional”
“Sometimes you need to let go man and just go with your eMOtions. You think too much.”
What Subtle person hasn’t spent years getting bombarded with this platitude?
The critic is usually well-mea...
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Zygmunt on 09/19/11 | No Comments | Read More
Sometimes it feels like Nice is a Dirty Word.
Being polite is this really tricky thing for me.
On one hand, I know that I struggle with being polite, even when I mean to be. There’s lots of little things that even after ages of studying, I miss...
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Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone on 09/16/11 | 2 Comments | Read More
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