Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: Photo of a teen wearing a jacket and baseball cap, seen from behind, far ahead on an oaken hillside trail.] Shannon Des Roches Rosa @shannonrosa When I was in physical therapy to rehabilitate a busted knee, the kind, competent therapists tended to make small talk—which invariably meant fielding […]
Hyperverbal expression, whether it is verbalized or experienced internally, is autism and it is a disability. It has less to do with the volume of words expressed and more to do with the processing style that is common to some autistic people.
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part I explores autistic interiority and neurology. Part III explores Setting, Plot, and Character Growth. In Part I, I talked about how neurological differences affect autistic people’s internal experiences and strategies, and how we change over time as a result. Today, I’ll talk about variation in autistic
Elizabeth Bartmess elizabethbartmess.com This is a three-part series. Part II explores Diversity in Autistic Characteristics and Demographics. Part III explores Setting, Plot, and Character Growth. “A lot of writers and actors seem to be able to get their heads around what autism basically is, in terms of language, sensory, and social communication difficulties. But then
M. Kelter theinvisiblestrings.com Photo by Boudewijn Berends, used under a Creative Commons license [image: head and shoulders of a person wearing glasses backlit by partially-lighted fog and clouds.] When it comes to online discussions about autism issues, I regularly interact with two realms. The first realm is one we’re all familiar with: the day-to-day articles
Lydia Wayman autisticspeaks.wordpress.com I take in a gulp of air and shut my eyes tight before I plunge beneath the surface. One, two, three… It starts to feel like my brain is tingling from the inside. Four, five, six… I’m not counting in seconds, not in minutes, but in hours. Seven, eight, nine… I search
Adam Thometz angryautie.wordpress.com I recently came across a post by Lydia Brown at Autistic Hoya, one of my favorite autism/disability blogs, in which she creates a glossary of ableist vocabulary. The reason for including some of the words should be immediately apparent to anyone with their head in this century (eg. “retard,” “mongoloid,” “suffers from
Jaden Walker about.me/jaden.walker A few days ago, congress held a panel on the rising prevalence of autism. As I worried, a great portion of the debate devolved into the long debunked connection between autism, vaccines, and mercury. To put it mildly, I spent a lot of it with my palm firmly attached to my face.
Meg Evans megevans.com I met you last weekend when I was leaving a crowded shopping center. Your son, who might have been about ten years old, suddenly did a cartwheel in front of me while I was walking to my car. You took hold of your son’s hand and then glanced toward me and apologized
Emily Willingham www.emilywillinghamphd.com When news broke that the autism spectrum categories of Asperger’s disorder and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) would get subsumed into the wider maw of a general “autism disorder,” people worried. They worried about autistic people who are quite verbal or who have typical cognitive skills. What would happen to individuals
