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Inspiration Porn: How the Media and Society Objectify Disabled People

Photo via Time.  [image: Florida State football player Travis Rudolph, a Black man with short natural hair, eating pizza in a school cafeteria at a table with a  white boy with very short red hair and glasses, who is seen from behind.] Kit Mead kpagination.wordpress.com A while back, an example of inspiration porn crossed my Twitter feed: a Florida State University college football player sat down and had lunch with an autistic boy in a cafeteria. The story got picked up by the New York Times. I don’t fault the college football player very much, if it all (but I hope he asked the autistic student if the company would be welcome). The football player probably just saw a person likely excluded by classmates. He wanted to make sure the student was not alone. At worst, there is the element of pity involved, but the act itself was not ill-intended. I…

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A Documentary About “Scary” Kids Scares Me—On Behalf of the Kids

One of the families featured in A Dangerous Son (Source: HBO) [image: A white family of four, with two young kids, on a couch together.] Kit Mead kpagination.wordpress.com Content note: Discusses violence and abuse regarding children with mental illness and disability, and the Newtown shootings. I’m not going to watch “A Dangerous Son,” the HBO documentary that tells “a story about families with children who have psychiatric disorders that lead to violent behavior.” I’m going to avoid it mostly because I have already read all of those stories. Again. And again. And again. And I have found them incredibly disturbing each time—on behalf of the children who are being written off and exploited. Especially because, as Mel Baggs points out: Across violent and abusive sets of environments, we—the kids—are the only ones seen as having a violence problem. And those environments are so very often the context for “violent outbursts.” Like…

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Autism and Psychiatric Medication: Caution Advised

Photo © RoseFireRising | Flickr / Creative Commons [image: Mandala made out of different colored and shaped pills, on a dark blue background.] Kit Mead kpagination.wordpress.com [Note: This post discusses anxiety, medications, and chemical restraints. It is meant to caution against overmedication and about risk factors in medication for autistic people, with the understanding that many autistic people rely on psychiatric medication for their health and well-being.] I would need more than two hands to count the psych meds I’ve been given. There are enough that I don’t remember all of them; it started in the first grade. Some were just regular ADHD meds—which I needed—not psychotropic. As years passed, others were anti-anxiety SSRIs, and then antipsychotics; many well before I’d hit the end of middle school (these include Risperdal, Paxil, and Wellbutrin). While I was not diagnosed autistic until I was 14 or 15, the logic under which these…

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Stop Isolating Autistic Adults and Calling It “Community-Based Housing”

Kit Mead  kpagination.wordpress.com Photo: Mike Wilson. Creative Commons license. [image: White paper houses with different colored doors & windows.] Introduction Less than a month after I wrote a blog post on the media misrepresentation of Autistic people like me, I’ve gotten wind of yet another case of journalism that misrepresents Autistic people – and in this case, community living too. The article is courtesy of Rolling Stone and the Atlantic reprinted it. I could link to it, but it’s one of the top results if you google “Rolling Stone autism.” Here are the two main premises of the article: High support autistic people can’t live fully in the community. But group homes cost too much. We should fund farm-based settings instead. The Medicaid settings rule in 2014 that declared most farms and compounds for disabled people segregated settings ruined many parents’ hopes and dreams. So… it’s unethical (because it is…

Re: Autistic boy, 11, kills himself

Kit Mead kpaginatedthoughts.blogspot.com —- Re: Autistic boy, 11, kills himself I phrase it that way. I don’t phrase it the way the article did. Blaming the autism and ADHD for suicide. This was a boy who befriended a locust in a tree. His mother said he felt like the adults at his school didn’t care and could not make connections in his class. Had a gift with animals. *** Isolated and miserable, I managed to find refuge in certain places. The art room, where the art teacher encouraged me to explore with sharpies and gel pens and acrylic paints. The debate room. My 10th grade English teacher’s classroom. The scene shop, where I would frenetically sweep and clean the entire area after school. Unlike Shane Laycock, I had supportive adults in my high school. I don’t know how, considering the story told by so many of us of being shunned…