Oh, hey! Another young child with a diagnosed mental disorder misbehaves in a way that would probably just get a reprimand and a long trip to the time-out chair if the child did NOT have a diagnosed mental disorder, but instead is deemed to warrant manhandling, arrest, and a trip to a psychiatric hospital!

I can't even count the ways in which this ( Read more... )

Just read this. Please. It is not something you will like. It is true.

Now. Not all of that post is completely right for me. If I were to write something like that, the tone and words would be different. My life has been different. Now. I don't want this to turn into an argument about abortion or how one ( Read more... )

"Crowley has created a finely honed secondary cast, but her stars, Marilee and Biswick, are problematic in that neither feels like an authentic representation of a child with a syndrome (Biswick has fetal alcohol syndrome; Marilee, Asperger's); both are bright, articulate, and clever."

- some book ( Read more... )

So I pick up this new Jodi Picoult book because it's got a dude with Asperger's as one of the characters and I know it's probably going to be really, really horrible and cringe-inducing but a slightly masochistic curiosity compels me and I flip the covers open and...

Literally. THE first sentence I lay eyes upon, on the first page that fell ( Read more... )

News that upsets me.

(Grabbing or holding an autistic person who is already confused and stressed is almost a surefire way to cause them to freak out completely. Of course, grabbing a normal confused, stressed person probably isn't great procedure either, but because most autistic people are extremely touch-sensitive, it isn't really comparable. ( Read more... )

When Asperger's Becomes Cool.

(Okay, this is gonna be disjointed and rambly. Sorry. I have places to go.)

Yeah, so I was diagnosed as a little girl. There were some books, but not novels, and not popular movies, apart from Rain Man . It's been strange to grow up as my particular neurological disability becomes a pop-culture phenomenon, I can tell you ( Read more... )

em·pa·thy

Pronunciation: \ˈem-pə-thē\
Function: nounEtymology: Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion
Date: 1850

1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2 : the action of ( Read more... )

Three Four things that happened in one day (connect the dots):

1.  In my first class, the professor made a joke about emo kids and suicide. When one gal called him out on it, saying it was in bad taste and hurtful to some students, he launched into an off-topic whirlwind of 'splaining about how he wasn't really "making light of mental ( Read more... )