No, school is not for fools, it is just designed for fools. There is a difference.

One thing that the video gets right is how schools are designed to beam messages into the student body’s head without question or elaboration. Eat, absorb, consume, and so forth. In an increasingly overpopulated world where every subsequent generation has too many children for the previous lot of adults to cope with, this is basically a case of taking the easy way out. And that is the point we are going to go over in this article. Namely, that schools take a one size fits all approach, and thus the easy way out. Unfortunately, when you are autistic, not known to be such, and have multiple sensory issues that can lead to wanting changes to your situation so desperately that you will do anything in order to effect them, this can have devastating consequences and effects. The training of teachers and other school staffers to properly respond to this has improved quite dramatically since that song was record. In other words, it has the virtue of being there at all. But it still has quite a long way to go in the sense that teachers need to understand what the word individual really means. And by understand, I mean grok.

Hypothetical situation: Autism Speaks has just ceased to exist. Now what?

I find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an organisation that is allowed to call itself a charity being hated by the people it claims to be working for to a greater extent than is the case with Autism Speaks. In fact, Autism Speaks’ behaviour in general reminds me of one of the few moments in RoboCop 2 that even comes close to working. During the MediaBreak segment that opens the film, we are told that the police in Detroit have gone on strike once again. In the accompanying interview footage, an officer states that the company that has taken control of the police service in the city has cut the force’s salaries by forty percent and cancelled their pensions. And now, he says, said company will not even talk to them. “God knows why,” the officer opines, “but they want this strike.”

Symbols, flags, and meanings… one of many musings

Not too long ago, I posted an entry that divided its time semi-equally between the injustice of a vigilantist idea of justice and my agreement with another author about how much the puzzle piece symbol sucks. This, to my pleasant surprise, brought about a visit from its author and some commentary about the symbol issue. In my own reply (I am compulsive about replying to everything, with some exceptions), I promised that I would explore symbols and their meanings a little bit further in a future entry. Or rather, I thanked him for giving me that idea, because to be brutally honest, when you churn out three or four entries a day at peak times, your stock of new ideas does sometimes run a tiny bit dry.

PTSD, child abuse, and autism. A reflection.

By now, people who read this journal will know that like many autistic thirty-somethings, I was abused in a few ways as a child and adolescent. In previous entries, I have made references to physical abuse and psychosexual abuse. So that we are all on the same page with this, I will offer educated-guess definitions of both phrases. The latter being something that people do not hear often, I will spend a little more time on that.

Speaking of names…

By now, I am sure at least someone who has read my ramblings will have asked “what is with that title?”. I will try to keep this one brief. When I say brief, I mean brief by my standards, not yours.

The name of this journal is a quote from the New Order song Blue Monday. You know, the one where the words “how does it feel… to treat me like you do?” are remembered by most who have listened. Well, a little further into the song, the vocalist states, “I still find it so hard… to say what I need to say. But I’m quite sure that you’d tell me… just how I should feel today”. This song and the quotations reflect directly how I feel about certain people who are still in my life in spite of my having wanted them to get out since I was seventeen or so.

Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I came under the purview of what was supposedly a respected psychiatrist in this country. There followed a lot of pain and fear, but the most frustrating thing was that even as an adolescent, I felt I was perpetually engaging in a game of finding the right words to say to this woman in order to get her to pursue the course of action that would benefit me. If you think services for autistic children often miss the point today, then all I have to say to you, normie parents, is that at least they have the virtue of being there at all.

Add to that the fact that the people at the service she was a part of liked to correct every word coming out of a person’s mouth even when they were seventeen. Hence, “I still find it so hard… to say what I need to say. But I’m quite sure that you’d tell me… just how I should feel today” is a very appropriate source for a title.

The psychiatrist in question. Let me put it this way. I could not have gotten less subtle about it if I had walked into her office with the words “I am autistic” tattooed into my forehead. That it took another ten years after my last meeting with this… person… to get an accurate diagnosis is something that Australians, and indeed the entire world, should hang their heads in shame about. And communicating with people about what I need done is still a very difficult exercise that makes me want to neck myself after every attempt.

As I said to the ghost of William Shakespeare, then. What is in a name? Quite a hell of a lot, actually.

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A new first time post…

Allow us to get the introductory stuff out of the way. My name is Dean McIntosh (more on this anon), I was born in the late 1970s, and I am autistic.