Understanding Autism Quotes

In a noisy place I can’t understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise.

He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.

The Tragedy isn't Autism - The Tragedy is the lack of understanding of Autism, Lack of resources, Interventions not being met with the person in mind and Assumptions being made about the person.

Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.

It’s wondering … always wondering and never understanding: how can I be so smart and still feel so stupid?

A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.

It’s true, though, others won’t understand me. I know that. I’m still an alien in the American Christian subculture. Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels. It's not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it's a respite.

I never know what people are thinking. It's like visiting a country where you don't speak the language and you're trying so hard to understand but no matter how many times you ask for juice, they keep bringing you milk.

Autism, as far as I understand it, is about not being given the rule book at birth.

Though she has trouble deciphering other people's facial expressions, her face is an open book and no one would ever have trouble understanding hers.

The closer we come to understanding the challenges of autism, the better we are placed to accommodate and educate without risking removing that individuality we all love.

Diagnosis (of autism) is such a clinical word to describe a moment in which your humanity is so deeply affirmed, understood, and valued.

One of the problems in understanding sensory issues is that sensory sensitivities are very variable, among individuals and within the same individual. A person can be hyper-sensitive in one area (like hearing) and hypo-sensitive in another (like touch). One

Would I ever have the courage to tell Wills the truth? That he wasn't just imagining the world was a more difficult place for him to understand than for some of his buddies - that it was, in fact, more difficult for him. That he'd been dealt a rotten hand in that regard, but only in that one regard. Because I wouldn't change one freckle, one misunderstood moment, one tiny piece of him for anything in the world. I would change myself. I would change the things other people said or thought out of ignorance or fear. I would change so many things, but I would absolutely never, in a million years, change him.

People can only understand their own pain. Even a genuine desire to help a person with a disability can become a burden or a discouragement for the person on the receiving end. It is important for helpers and therapists to ask themselves, If I was the person I’m helping … ? It would be useful also if they double-checked that the assistance they’re offering is of real relevance to the person with special needs, and not about gratifying their own desire to care.

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms -- it's to frighten off extroverts.

And don’t ever, EVER compare yourself to a neurotypical (NT) girl or woman. They are a different species and you’ll only feel inadequate and bad about yourself. Find your tribe – online, in groups at comic conventions. Find people who are delighted that you are you. And you should be delighted that you are you too because when you’re 70, you’ll still be skateboarding, you’ll look amazing (from all those years of not ruining your skin with make-up) and you’ll realise that all those things you worried about don’t matter at all.

There are many things we don’t understand, and many ways to unlock the brain and maximize function. Don’t ever let anybody tell you it can’t be done.

My ears work. My brain understands. Can't you see I am a REAL PERSON?

If I tried to describe what it’s like to be nonverbal in the World of the Verbal in a single word, I’d choose this one: agony. And yet, this is also true: if we know there is even a single person who understands what it’s like for us, that’s solace enough to give us hope.

I ask this question a lot—Does that make sense?—usually to my family, because I appreciate clarity and assume others do as well... we just assume other people understand what we are talking about. That we are, as the idiom goes, on the same wavelength. In my experience, we are not.

Adults tend to be more understanding and accepting of differences than teenagers. The important thing is to find a group that your adult child is personally interested in being a part of, and then acting on the assumption that he has the right to be there and that he will fit right in.

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful.

Try to understand how they feel - put yourselves in their place. Imagine you are in a foreign country with no money, possessions or friends. You cannot speak the language; the culture is completely different to your normal environment; isolated and helpless. You would be dependent on someone supporting you. Think of that when you next meet someone who is autistic...

The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives. As Singer rightly observed, neurodiversity isn’t actually about having a specific, catalogued “defect” that the psychiatric establishment has an explanation for. It’s about being different in a way others struggle to understand or refuse to accept.

What I wish to say is this: the value of a person shouldn’t be fixed solely by his or her skills and talents—or lack of them. It’s how you strive to live well that allows others to understand your awesomeness as a human being. This miraculous quality touches people. Via this “how,” people consider the sanctity and validity of everyone’s life, whether special needs are involved or not.

When we feel either understimulated or overstimulated, we physically cannot reason, listen, or think about anything else. We can’t just ignore it. We can’t learn. We can’t be spontaneous or fun. We can’t rationalize well. And we can’t hear others’ needs, let alone be certain we understand our own. It’s like trying to see your own reflection in a pot of boiling water. Nothing is clear.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need whatsoever to “practice being bullied.” Acquiring superpowers of endurance is not something children need to be learning before they enter society at large. It is only the person being bullied who understands the true cost of what they suffer. People with no experience of being bullied have no idea how miserable it is to grow up being picked on the whole time.

One of the first effects of this hyper-democratization of data was to unmoor information from the context required to understand it. On the Internet, facts float about freely and are recombined more according to the preferences of intuition than the rules of cognition:

Diagnoses —such as ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, an autism spectrum disorder, reactive attachment disorder, the newly coined disruptive mood regulation disorder, or any other disorder—can be helpful in some ways. They “validate” that there’s something different about your kid, for example. But they can also be counterproductive in that they can cause caregivers to focus more on a child’s challenging behaviors rather than on the lagging skills and unsolved problems giving rise to those behaviors. Also, diagnoses suggest that the problem resides within the child and that it’s the child who needs to be fixed. The reality is that it takes two to tango. Let there be no doubt, there’s something different about your child. But you are part of the mix as well. How you understand and respond to the hand you’ve been dealt is essential to helping your child.

Autistic people are born with the mask of neurotypicality pressed against our faces. All people are assumed to think, socialize, feel, express emotion, process sensory information, and communicate in more or less the same ways. We’re all expected to play along with the rules of our home culture, and blend into it seamlessly. Those of us who need alternate tools for self-expression and self-understanding are denied them. Our first experience of ourselves as a person in the world, therefore, is one of being othered and confused. We only get the opportunity to take our masks off when we realize other ways of being exist.

[...] nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to ‘interact with his peer group‘, might not be all that crazy, and might even have arrived at an understandable response to the world in which we lived.

The more frantic and desperate I become, the more I punch myself: by now, it’s no longer about punishing my brain, it’s about punishing myself for having lost the plot so woefully. If, however, people don’t flip out at the sight of me and understand next time you see someone like me in mid-meltdown, I’d ask you to conduct yourself with this knowledge.

Each one of us is different, but one thing that is true; Each one of us is wonderfully made, and so, my dear, are you!

Among those women questioned, art and English topped the list of favourite subjects at school.

the hope is that laying out what we understand about essential differences in the minds of men and women may lead to grater acceptance and respect of difference.

Someone else's lack of understanding isn't your weight to carry.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me feel less broken over the years, particularly every friend who has extended me grace when I didn’t understand myself or how to relate to other people.

auditory processing issues: difficulty understanding spoken language, often experienced as a delay between hearing spoken words and being able to process those audio sounds into recognizable words .

Seeking to eliminate behavior without fully understanding its purpose is not only unhelpful; it also shows a lack of respect for the individual. Worse, it can make life more difficult for the person with autism.

For Autistic self-disclosure to really have an impact on someone, you need a mutually respectful, trusting relationship. They need to be willing to keep learning and revise their understanding of what Autism is as they go along.

The most significant trust-related challenge for people with autism is trusting other people. Most of us are neurologically hardwired with the ability to predict the behavior of others—to read body language intuitively and make subconscious judgments based on how relaxed a person’s body is, on how a person looks at other people, or by the social context. But that is often more difficult for people with autism. Ros Blackburn explains that she lives every day trying to understand people’s intentions when they approach her. “Because I find it so difficult to predict the behavior of other people,” Ros explains, “what they do often comes across as very sudden and threatening to me.

I taught myself to be as fluent as possible in nonverbal languages because it's the only way to understand what people aren't saying, to carve out your space and claim it. It's the only way I can feel like I know what's going on.

Firing the question back is a way of sifting through our memories to pick up clues about what the questioner is asking. We understand the question okay, but we can’t answer it until we fish out the right “memory picture” in our heads.

The real irony of all this talk about muted sense of self is that the very word autism comes from the Greek root autos, meaning “self” (as in “autograph” and “automobile”). We are self-referenced, certainly. It is so hard to understand others’ experiences of the world that being able to distinguish our wants, desires, and thoughts from anyone else’s is almost impossible. Our minds feel transparent. Not because we have so much sense of self. But because we have so little.

Children with disabilities might, to your eyes, look stuck in a perpetual childhood, but our thoughts and sensibilities evolve constantly. So, using vocabulary the child understands, please show them how they can live their lives to the full.

This is cool I have my Autism profile (information processing - visual, verbal, auditory, body, context blindnesses/deafnesses etc) and my Personhood which is Idiosyncratic/Solitary/Emotional personality traits these come from different places but "hold hands" personhood and Autism are different entities and can be separated in terms of context, understanding (differences between ASD and Personality) but they're within one person and I would always want to seen as someone for their personhood rather than my Autism.

The ‘buzzy’ head mentioned by younger girls seems to persist for some older women. The need to ‘file’ and process the day that has passed and to anticipate the one to come appears to prevent easy rest. Difficulty in getting to sleep was most commonly mentioned.

People often said to me what I couldn't do things when I was younger such as sports, writing, mathematics, geography, science etc - I pathway can always be tailored can change and that change itself is possible what did I excel in well art was one of those things of have gone BACK to to move FORWARD and have taken up poetry and creativity something that occupies my mind in way that creates happy thoughts, happy feelings, and happiness all round really. To invest in your strengths and understand but not over-define yourself by your deficits is something that has worked for me over the years and this year in particular (the ethos was always there instilled that I am human being first like anyone else by my parents and family but it has been tenderly and quite rightly reaffirmed by a friend also) it has made me a more balanced person whom has healthy acknowledgment of my autism who but also wants to be known as a person first - see me first, see that I have a personality first. I say this not in anger or bitterness but as a healthy optimistic realisation and as a message of hope for people out there.

The most common hit I get is the cringeworthy “You’re autistic? Well, you must be very high-functioning.” Sigh. I understand what they’re trying to say. Really, I do. They mean to be kind. The implication is “I don’t see many—if any—of the clearly debilitating characteristics I associate with autism when I talk to you. So, good on you. You’re not bad off!” Only that’s not a compliment at all. It’s a comparison based on the premise that “autistic” is an insult. A stigma. Or at least a bad thing. Because the only reason someone thinks of me as “high-functioning” is by holding me up to someone who is no more or less autistic—just more obviously challenged—and deciding that they are “lower-functioning.” Really, it’s no different than saying, “Oh! Well, good for you. You’re not too ugly. That gal over there? She’s royally ugly.” Lack of understanding tied up with a bow of condescension.

I would either head to the playground alone or sit beside her and read—which she said “looked weird.” Though she couldn’t know, those words hurt more than anything else. Feeling that we have let down our parents is a pain anyone can understand. But feeling that one’s innate self is a letdown just slays you.

have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.

I wish people could understand that masking is so much more than biting your tongue and forcing yourself to be as average as possible. It's about supressing basic physiological needs. It's about hiding the parts of yourself that come naturally, so they don't seem unnatural to others. It's physical. It's insidious.

I didn't cry out and I didn't weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner in his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don't hear us, don't speak to us, even though they're neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, not smiling at them because every one of their senses would be assaulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our hearts. Probably he'll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can pronounce the world poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time. He won't know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible. Already, I am defeated, stripped bare, beaten down.

There are a few things that need to occur for our loved ones to have more relationships. First, they must learn some social skills and competencies -- especially so for those who are independent and often on their own, so that they will not become victimized by others and can make some connections. Second, for those who require it, they need to have support staff who understand movement differences and sensory challenges and how to include a nonverbal person who uses alternative means of communication. Last, but not least, for friendship to occur, people need to have an open mind, be more flexible, and be more accepting of people with differences.

I fear depression - intensely. It is by far the most painful ailment I have ever faced. It is the thing that slammed into me, ran me over repeatedly, and then kicked me in the head when I was down. I struggled for change, for understanding, to figure out what was "wrong" with me - no one knew. Or at least, they didn't guess correctly.

science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation.

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand. "It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted.

Before I knew I was Autistic, I was profoundly alienated in every possible sense. I was at odds with myself, unable to understand why normal life felt so perplexing and imprisoning to me. I was detached from the world, with no trust in others or in my own potential to connect and be understood. Because I was so alone, my identity was also completely unmoored. I had no community to anchor myself within.

I do believe that we (autistic individuals such as myself) are very susceptible to suicidal thinking for multiple reasons that include: chronic high levels of anxiety, tendency to fixate on or get stuck on negative disturbing thoughts, low self-worth, inability to have significant or intimate relationships with others, replaying over and over again negative statements that others have said to us, feeling unable to be understood, lack [of] a solid self-identity, difficulty with expressing self to others, feelings of great isolation, feeling that you are or may be a burden to others, feeling unable to contribute to society or the greater good, etc […] I do believe that the most important thing that someone else can do for a struggling autistic individual is to affirm their self-worth, recognise and validate their struggles and affirm the things that they do that are greatly valued by others. The worst thing to do for an autistic individual, or any struggling individual for that matter, is to not believe them or to deny the validity of their struggles. My greatest and deepest hurt is that doctors, family members and important others did not believe me in my struggles, particularly when I was younger, before my diagnosis at the age of 35 years. This has been the strongest impetus for my feelings of unworthiness and suicidal thoughts. (Woman with autism)

The autistic form of life does not conform to assumed social normativity and does not easily extend outward into the social, leading to a 'double empathy problem' between people of diverse dispositions, that is, both parties struggle to understand and relate to one another. Such differences in presentation can lead to dyspathic reactions and stigma, often leading to ill-fated attempts at normalisation and a continuing vicious cycle of psycho-emotional disablement.

For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest for self-understanding and self-improvement. I am driven to figure myself and other people out. I have analysed myself as far back as I can remember, reanalysed myself, been to many psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and psychics. I love self-help books, courses, anything to improve myself. My special interest is self-improvement, quantum physics, medicine, anything to do with bettering oneself and self-help.

Many of the women and girls who participated in this book were precocious early talkers, often with extensive vocabularies. This does not mean that learning came/comes easily to them, on account of the neurotypical system they were/are expected to adhere to. We must not forget that, even in a learning environment, social requirements are always present, which means that our girl with ASD has to work doubly hard to make sense of both the social and the academic elements.

There are strong similarities in the way horses and those with autism see the world. Horses are often born into an environment they don't understand, with overwhelming sights, sounds, and smells, and a sense that no one understands them. And when they see someone with autism, who has much the same background, and who knows them, and knows what they need - there is a connection. Since the two share the same experiences, they both relax, and seem to talk and understand each other.

Rather than lacking a theory of mind, it is argued here that due to differences in the way autistic people process info, they are not socialised into the same shared ethno as neurotypical people, and thus breaches in understanding happen all the time, leaving both in a state of confusion. The difference is that the neurotypical person can repair the breach, by the reassuring belief that ~99 out of 100 people still think and act like they do, and remind themselves that they are the normal ones.

I feel intensely. I smell mold and bad food before others. I hear fluorescent lights. Clothing hurts, noises invade, colors take my breath away. My daily reality is governed by too much sensation and not enough sensation. Patterns are soothing because they create order in what feels like chaos. Sometimes I shut down and I lose language. Other times I get overloaded and act it out in ways that get me in trouble. My world is intense, rich, real, sometimes painful and definitely different. Understand

I hate it when people change plans, but I never let it show because I’m supposed to be flexible. This leads people to think that I can handle anything. I tell them it’s fine, but it’s not fine. It’s never fine. When they have gone my head hurts with the effort of making sense of why they couldn’t do what they said they were going to do, what it will mean for me to have to reconfigure everything to take into account the new situation and what bad things I can wish upon them for being so unreliable.

The main and frustration this boy must have endured his whole life. having thoughts and words he desperately wants to express but couldn't, fearing this might continue for the rest of his life. Whether you're an immigrant, you stutter, or have autism, aphasia/dyspraxia, Angelman syndrome---there are so many reasons why you might have trouble speaking, unrelated to the quality of your thoughts. ...our society's deeply ingrained assumption that oral fluency is equivalent to intelligence. Just because you can't speak doesn't mean you can't think or understand.

We may assume that the socialising aspect of play settings is beneficial to the child. This is an almost universally held belief, particularly in the case of girls. The child with ASD may disagree. It may be that for some children with ASD there really is no point or functional benefit in them attending a group play setting and that the distress caused outweighs any possible benefit gained. This notion is difficult for many parents to acknowledge as they believe that being alone cannot be good for the child; but for many children and adults with ASD, being alone is the best thing of all.

I think in the ever growing diversity of the distinct and person-centred presentations of autism it is important to know and acknowledge the crucial differences between Autism & Asperger's Syndrome. Both are which are forms of autism but have different "mechanics" that drive them. I have Autism (as opposed to Asperger's Syndrome) I live in a world before the literal, words tumble in my mind into sounds I love tone, melody and beats they brings my world alive. I live in world world where visuals hold no significance fragmented and not in my "mind's eye" and need to be touched in order to be "seen". I like elevated gesture and tone when people speak dead words wander alive into my mind and give them meaning and circumstance. Where a sense of "self" is not wanting to be exposed by the directness of people but at the same time I want to understand "other" even if I struggle to at times. I am empathic young man and this not through lack of care nor wanting. I care deeply. Logic and literalism are not the name of the game for me to "decode" the word around me it's sensing, patterning and feeling to gain an "understanding". I am using a different part of my brain. So as with AS Autism has many different presentations too this is mine. I think it is important to know differences it has helped me so much to know that.

I’ve noticed a communication pattern among autistics, myself included—we often try to express solidarity through similarity. “I’ve been through something like that” is the most natural way for me to tell someone that I support and sympathize with them. Unfortunately, this pattern contributes to the false stereotype that autistic people lack empathy, because it can make people feel like we’re minimizing their struggles by turning the focus on ourselves. For me, though, sharing an analogous story is an expression of empathy—a tangible proof to back up my claim that I can understand how someone feels. It’s also an invitation for them to compare and contrast, telling me how their experience differs, so that I can understand them better.

Women receiving late diagnosis often share the same sense of relief and self-acceptance as men, but perhaps to an even greater degree, due to the way in which they have needed to manage their autism – often through bending to fit to what’s expected of them in terms of gender expectations through camouflaging (which autistic men are seen as less prone to and/or able to do). Feeling justified or vindicated by diagnosis is the strong response of many of the women I have spoken to: a sense of having the right to be yourself established – for the first time – in a world that doesn’t always welcome or appreciate that self. These are women who are exhausted and angry at having tried so hard to make everything make sense, while presuming that they were to blame for not getting it in the first place: women who feel they have had to put on a persona of social acceptability in order to be tolerated.

Internally, I was fractured, a series of faked personalities and protective shields that kept people at a distance. I could only drop the shield when I was alone, but even in my solitude I was miserable and confused. I was all defense mechanisms, with nothing left inside worth defending. When a masked Autistic person lacks self-knowledge or any kind of broad social acceptance, they are often forced to conceive of themselves as compartmentalized, inconsistent parts. Here is the person I have to be at work, and the person I must be at home. These are the things I fantasize about doing but can’t tell anybody about. Here are the drugs that keep my energy levels up, and the lies I tell to be entertaining at parties. These are the tension-defusing distractions I’ll deploy when someone begins to suspect there’s something off about me. We don’t get the chance to come together into a unified whole that we can name or understand, or that others can see and love. Some sides of us go unacknowledged entirely, because they don’t serve our broader goal of remaining as inoffensive and safe as possible.

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

IN AN obscure journal, an article by Professor Tzvi Lamm of the Hebrew University charges that Israel has lost touch with reality.* Lamm’s view is that although the Zionist idea in its early stages seemed more dreamlike than practical, it was soberly realistic. Its leaders knew just how much power they had—or had not—and adhered closely to their goals. They were not hypnotized and paralyzed by their own slogans. Jewish leadership, and with it Israel as a whole, later became “autistic.” Autism is defined by Lamm as “the rejection of actual reality and its replacement by a reality which is a product of wish-fulfillment.” The victory of 1967 was the principal cause of this autism. Israelis began to speak of the West Bank of the Jordan as “liberated” territory. “The capture of lands aroused … a deep, sincere, emotional response to the territories … and to the historical events that took place in them: the graves of our patriarchs and matriarchs, paths along which the prophets once trod, hills for which the kings fought. But feelings cut off from present reality do not serve as a faithful guideline to a confused policy. This break with reality did not necessarily blind men to the fact that the territories were populated by Arabs, but it kept them from understanding that our settlement and taking possession of the territories would turn our existence as a state into a powerful pressure that would unite the Arab world and aggravate our insecure situation in a way previously unknown in our history.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to feel some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something else that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. Empathy involves both processes, and while they operate independently of one another, there is some overlap. A graphical representation of empathy might involve a Venn diagram—two circles, one for the affective component and one for the cognitive, slightly overlapping, with me standing well outside of both circles talking incessantly about the weather during a funeral. In people with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum conditions, these mechanisms of understanding are much less reliable and productive than in neurotypicals. Those of us living within the parameters of an autism spectrum condition simply can’t engage the empathic processes that allow for social reasoning and emotional awareness. Furthermore, we have difficulty separating ourselves from our own perspectives (the word autism comes from the Greek word autos, meaning “self”), so we can’t easily understand or even access the perspectives and feelings of others.

Many sufferers at the mild end of autism live undiagnosed, their behavior defined as eccentric, strange, atypical. Socially they find themselves in a difficult situation because they exist on the border of social understanding, isolated despite often exceptional levels of skill and creativity. Indeed, in spite of these skills, those from the mild end of autism tend to have problems fitting in within mass educational institutions. They are perceived as DIFFERENT.

When you know that your kid wants to speak with you, when you know that he’s taking in his surroundings every bit as attentively as your nonautistic daughter, whatever the evidence to the contrary, then you can be ten times more patient, willing, understanding and communicative; and ten times better able to help his development

That the spectrum is linear couldn’t be further from the truth. To get a more accurate perspective, I met Dr. Judith Gould at the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism. Judith is a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than forty years’ experience. She specializes in autism-spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. In the 1970s, with the late Dr. Lorna Wing, Judith came up with the term autism spectrum. Judith believes the key point to understand is that autism is a spectrum not because it is linear but because any factor can be present at any point. She said, “[In our study] we saw the classic autistic aloof person with repetitive rituals and elaborate routines. But we also saw children with aspects of social difficulties, communication difficulties, and imagination difficulties who didn’t fit in with [earlier] precise criteria. “These traits tended to be seen together, but you could have anything on the dimension: anything on the communication dimension, anything on the imagination dimension, and so on. At first we called it the autism continuum. Continuum implied severity from high to low, but that’s not what we meant. The spectrum would look like a rainbow because anything can happen at any point. The colors merge. “In terms of communication, people can come anywhere on the spectrum. There are those who only communicate their needs, and there are those who don’t realize the person they are with may be getting bored when they talk about special interests. Then you’ve got those with a highly intellectual, formal, little-professor communication style.

It has helped me to see more clearly how, as politically incorrect as it may sound, our understanding of “normal” behavior for children has become feminized. We tend to judge boys using standards of behavior applicable to the average girl, not the average boy.

C18: A child is autistic or has Asperger's syndrome. Should we use one language only with the child? Children diagnosed with a specific autism spectrum disorder have a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour, with delays in social and emotional development. Such children use language in restricted ways, expecting much consistency in language and communication, and are less likely to learn through language. However, such children may experience the social and cultural benefits of bilingualism when living in a dual language environment. For example, such children may understand and speak two languages of the local community at their own level. Like many parents of children with language impairment, bilingualism was frequently blamed by teachers and other professionals for the early signs of Asperger's, and a move to monolingualism was frequently regarded as an essential relief from the challenges. There is almost no research on autism and bilingualism or on Asperger's syndrome and bilingualism. However, a study by Susan Rubinyi of her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, provides insights. Someone with the challenge of Asperger's also has gifts and exceptional talents, including in language. Her son, Ben, became bilingual in English and French using the one parent–one language approach (OPOL). Susan Rubinyi sees definite advantages for a child who has challenges with flexibility and understanding the existence of different perspectives. Merely the fact that there are two different ways to describe the same object or concept in each language, enlarges the perception of the possible. Since a bilingual learns culture as well as language, the child sees alternative ways of approaching multiple areas of life (eating, recreation, transportation etc.) (p. 20). She argues that, because of bilingualism, her son's brain had a chance to partly rewire itself even before Asperger's syndrome became obvious. Also, the intense focus of Asperger's meant that Ben absorbed vocabulary at a very fast rate, with almost perfect native speaker intonation. Further Reading: Rubinyi, S. (2006) Natural Genius: The Gifts of Asperger's Syndrome . Philadelphia & London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

If I could, I would ask the world to make me skates so that I could find its frozen water and set myself free to smile, laugh, dance and cheer. I'd see the boundaries that would be in a world frozen in its place and they would keep me safe, away from where the waters warm, away from the stares, away from the thoughts that melt and tear. I would ask the world to skate with me, looking at the gladness I had found, knowing, really knowing, there was nothing left to fear. I think then we would be free to live life as we could, with more in common than apart, the fog would lift, the confusion would end and true understanding would hold us dear.

An additional problem occurs when people may infer they have synesthesia when they really do not, or they may pretend to have it when they don't. These people can actually harm diagnosed autistics and diagnosed autistic synesthetes, because they blur, cloud, and distort the common understanding of what real autism and what real synesthesia is.   One

What these autistic rights groups also fail to understand, is that every time funding increases -or a law is passed- while that funding may allow for greater freedoms -or the law may give someone greater rights (or validate their right to have them)- the same funding can limit someone else's funding -and the same law can limit someone else's, rights and freedoms.

They anti-treatment faction will argue -truthfully- that treatments can be painful, or inhumane, and will even suggest that some treatments are a violation of human rights. While there is some basis for this last argument, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities addresses that last point. I am paraphrasing here, but as I understand it, “degrading” medical treatments are not to be given to patients, nor shall patients undergo experimental treatments without consenting, or, if the patients are incapable of consenting, then treatments may not be given without a guardian's consent.   3.

There are three categories of criteria that an individual must meet in order to be diagnosed with ASD. The categories are listed below along with the typical traits, which may indicate whether the individual needs further assessment: 1.Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays: lack of friends and social life friends often much older or younger mumbling and not completing sentences issues with social rules (such as staring at other people) inability to understand jokes and the benefit of ‘small talk’ introverted (shy) and socially awkward inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings uncomfortable in large crowds and noisy places detached and emotionally inexpressive. 2.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: obsession with ‘special interests’ collecting objects (such as stamps and coins) attachment to routines and rituals ability to focus on a single task for long periods eccentric or unorthodox behaviour non-conformist and distrusting of authority difficulty following illogical conventions attracted to foreign cultures affinity with nature and animals support for victims of injustice, underdogs and scapegoats. 3.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: inappropriate emotional responses victimised or bullied at school, work and home overthinking and constant logical analysis spending much time alone strange laugh or cackle inability to make direct eye contact when talking highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, smell and touch uncoordinated and clumsy with poor posture difficulty coping with change adept at abstract thinking ability to process data sets logically and notice patterns or trends truthful, naïve and often gullible slow mental processing and vulnerable to mental exhaustion intellectual and ungrounded rather than intuitive and instinctive problems with anxiety and sleeping visual memory.

Mindset 1 embraces the idea that every child is more than autism. This mindset recognizes that while diagnostic labels serve purposes, they can also lead to errors in perception. There are predictable ways that humans try to make sense of each other, especially when behaviors are outside the norm. Parents, educators, and clinicians working with autistic children are not immune from these false narratives. Recognizing and fighting against them, as well as battling unconscious images we may have gleaned from media, leads to more accurate understanding of each child and to more successful interventions.

Working independently also allows them to ‘drop the mask.’ This is another reason why school-aged children don’t like working in groups and why they work much better on their own.

You'd have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She's a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don't just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We're dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk..." "I'll pass." "Bad experiences?" "Sort of." "What happened?" I shrug. "It took a long time to diagnose me." "From what I understand, autistic girls often don't run into trouble until a later age." I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labelled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet. When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It's funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spend half my childhood worrying I'd end up institutionalized. At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, just like I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn't only Black, but a Black girl, it's like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider them.

The experiment takes place in a social setting created by and according to the standards of neurotypical people. That will inherently affect the results. Analysis of video recordings shows that the researchers don’t pick up on certain non-verbal signals displayed by the autistic children4. This causes the children to doubt themselves and adjust their answers. Children with autism are often taught not to trust their own feelings, so I’m not surprised they say what the researcher appears to want to hear. The interpretation of the results is littered with neurotypical assumptions as well. But a researcher who thinks that someone who doesn’t answer questions according to neurotypical standards has a problem, is the one with a lack of understanding, in my opinion.

Autism should no longer be seen as a negative label,’ she says. ‘Autistic people are necessary for the development of our society. To show possibility and the ways we can make a different world with more understanding and opportunities.

Around this time, I was again tested for partial deafness, for although I could speak I often didn't use language in the same way as others and often got no meaning out of what was said to me. Although words are symbols, it would be misleading to say that I did not understand symbols. I had a whole system of relating that I considered "my language." It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I meant. I developed a language of my own. Everything I did, from holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning, usually to do with reassuring myself that I was in control and no one could reach me, wherever the hell I was. Sometimes it had to do with telling people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or simply taken to be some new quirk that "mad Donna" had thought up.

Around this time, I was again tested for partial deafness, for although I could speak I often didn't use language in the same way as others and often got no meaning out of what was said to me. Although words are symbols, it would be misleading to say that I did not understand symbols. I had a whole system of relating that I considered "my language." It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I meant. I developed a language of my own. Everything I did, from holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning, usually to do with reassuring myself that I was in control and no one could reach me, wherever the hell I was. Sometimes it had to do with telling people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or simply taken to be some new quirk that "mad Donna" had thought up.

Around this time, I was again tested for partial deafness, for although I could speak I often didn't use language in the same way as others and often got no meaning out of what was said to me. Although words are symbols, it would be misleading to say that I did not understand symbols. I had a whole system of relating that I considered "my language." It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I meant. I developed a language of my own. Everything I did, from holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning, usually to do with reassuring myself that I was in control and no one could reach me, wherever the hell I was. Sometimes it had to do with telling people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or simply taken to be some new quirk that "mad Donna" had thought up.

For example, a parent might say, “The trash is getting pretty full.” For the parent, a large part of this communication is the emotional load—the suggestion of disapproval that it’s full, the implied idea that something should be done about it, and a hint of urgency because it’s being spoken aloud and action should take place soon.

On the other hand, the person on the spectrum may explicitly notice that they did not include in the statement “And I’d like you to take it out” or “It’s making me unhappy,” and assume that because they could have said these things and didn’t, they must not be trying to communicate these ideas.

He sat on the couch, talking to the charming and captivating character who sat there masquerading as his sister. I had switched to "automatic pilot," and watched myself from outside my own body as I responded openly and effortlessly to the brother I had never had any desire to get to know. It seemed to him that he had found a friend who was almost made to order. Fortunately, his sister had changed. This girl had no longing look for understanding, and spoke casually and amusingly without any of the distrust or cautiousness he had known in his sister. He liked her, and decided to come around more often. It was as though I had been watching a play, although I was simultaneously in the audience and on the stage. But as my older brother continued to visit, Carol began to falter, finding it increasingly difficult to communicate. Donna had reverted to "talking in poetry" evasively.

It is so important that the general public and the hiring companies understand this group of people. Many will fall through the cracks due to their “odd” behaviors. Many have so much to contribute if given the chance.

A common source of disappointment and frustration for parents is the letdown that happens soon after diagnosis. Parents seek diagnostic evaluations both to better understand their child and also to have that child be eligile for services. Many, if not most, parents are not aware that it can take months to find and secure these resources and to get an actual appointment. Additionally, the cost of these services is often far greater than anticipated. One parent, who participated in in-depth interviews by researchers interested in the partnership between parents and providers, had this to say, "It felt like you were being taken to the edge of a cliff. You've been given the diagnosis, you got shoved off the end, and then it was, 'Oh by the way, we haven't got the parachute. You'll need to get that for yourself.' You feel like you finally got there, and you're quite happy, you're ready to fly - but then all the sudden you don't have the rest of the equipment you need to fly with.