what do you think of temple grandin?

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i highly respect grandin, her career and her immense contribution to autism awareness, though i believe she should not be seen as a flagship, authority or head of the movement.

grandin's life, circumstances and preferences are different from many other people's (on the spectrum).

1. she has no interest in marriage, sex, relationships or romance of any kind.
2. she has no interest in assimilating with nuerotypicals
3. she is a doctorate, academic, household name, and millionaire.
4. she was able to avoid social interaction in her work and solely focus on her inventions.

many aspies and auties differ from her on this. that's why i, personally, see her as respectable but not a role model.

I also respect and appreciate all the things that she's done for the Autistic Community. She's a trailblazer for us all and I like how she's able to be true to herself, instead of trying to fit in with the NT idea of society. She's been able to have a career that's centred around her special interests. She's also a great advocate and activist. I really like her.

I think she is absolutely wonderful. But I am not her. That is why there is the spectrum. In response to your points above:

(1) I don't have much interest in sex but I am married. Maybe been over six months...
(2) I am me and I don't care what NT's think. I can get along in business with some behavior changes but I don't want to assimilate.
(3) I am a CPA & CGMA, well educated in my field but no millionaire. I also have an extensive back ground in Philosophy and I have attended six Universities with several credentials but no PhD.
(4) I work in a nice class A office space on the 25th floor over looking the city. I have my own private office with beautiful cherry furniture. I keep my door closed most of the time and I can focus on my accounting. I eat lunch in there by myself. Social interaction with those I supervise is at my discretion.

So while there are many similarities I am not her but I have made my way in the world and I am successful like John Elder Robinson. Just in my own way. Not better or worse. But happy.

B

i guess i'm going in the different direction.

i'm part of the wing of the autistic spectrum who appreciates their uniqueness, but wants to be versatile and able to engage with the other 98% just as well. maximizing on one's strengths, but at the same time recognizing social weaknesses and working on them to be able to assimilate with NT's and expand one's opportunities.

i've been criticized so much for this viewpoint and misrepresented as anti-autism, but i guess it depends on who you are.

are you seeking employment in a place where there will be social interaction?
are you interested in dating/romance with the opposite sex?
are you interested in a larger support network of friends?
and plenty more

While I could admire such a person from afar, I doubt that I could use her as a role-model without first meeting her in person and getting to know her as a friend.

As if that could ever happen ...

Well--I disagree with her on some of her ideas about animals; she's very good with prey, but not so good with predators. But in general I think she is quite competent. I wonder sometimes though whether she would be nearly as famous if she weren't autistic. If she weren't autistic, she would simply be known in her own field as someone who thought of some useful innovations, a skilled professional. But because she's autistic there's all this crap about her having "overcome autism", and her work is called amazing, as though nobody ever expects anybody autistic to do what she's done--as though it's surprising and remarkable that an autistic person could ever be a talented animal behaviorist. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve credit for her innovations; just that I wish people wouldn't think it was so highly unusual for an autistic person to become a respected professional like that. It's not; but the media really do seem to love to make it look dramatic, like she's unusual just for making useful contributions to her field, because you shouldn't expect an autistic person to do anything more sophisticated than perhaps learning not to drool, or something.

As for whether she should be a "role model"; well, I don't really like the idea of role models to begin with. Why should you model yourself on someone else, when everyone has inside themselves an idea of who they ought to be--an ideal self to strive toward? Learn from others, sure, but don't try to turn into someone else. Is she someone to learn from? Sure. Some of the tricks she learned and the observations she's made can be very useful to other autistics; and because of that I'm glad she wrote down those observations in her books and got them published for others to read. But to see her as a role model... well, if I had an autistic child, I'd rather they picked a mentor that they could see and talk to in their daily lives, someone they could trust and interact with, rather than a far-away writer/animal-behaviorist whom they'll probably never meet more than briefly.

I had a hard time reading her material because she expressed issues around impulse control and is total opposite to my experience. My mother had those problems however where it also wasn't tempered or disciplined out of her as Temple ascribes to and it just triggered me too much. My mother also has a learning disability. There are different kinds of learning disabilities and mine differs. I was the classic little professor. The only form of communication I was able to do was memorization or mimicking and that was all. My education was taken away from me and I was then left with very limited ability to communicate. I still have a lot of trouble with everyday communication. There are cognitive deficiencies in my case but that has improved over time. My mother was a slow learner but very abrasive, quick witted, sarcastic and cruel. I couldn't read on as soon as she ascribed impulse control issues with autism. That doesn't mean it isn't an issue for people with autism but just not something I wanted to relate to after my experiences and just didn't apply at all to me or was anything I could relate to. I was very studious and my mother was very much out of control with her impulse control problems.

Last edited by eigerpere on 29 Feb 2012, 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

she is brillaint.

Yes, I think she is wonderful, and a good activist, and advocate. I have many of the same traits, but I am not her, and not a success. I am however, able to keep myself occupied, which keeps my chronic lifelong depression tamped way down, so I can function, just not well enough, along with my other health problems, to work any longer in the outside world.

Autism/Asperger's really is best described as a kind of spectrum. We tend to have various traits, and problems in common, but not always to the same extent, and not always in the same combination, so no two cases are exactly alike.

Some of us are able to make a success of ourselves, but others not so much, and still others make little or no success of themselves, due to their individual circumstances.

Although I am not one of the successful ones, and wish I were, I am not bent out of shape over it because I understand that my spectrum problems and my other health issues prevent me from doing better. But at least I am keeping the depression at bay. That has not always been the case, and I don't want to go back to having the depression taking up a lot of space in my life. Keeping myself distracted and occupied really has helped, along with living alone, and with qualifying for SSI, so I can pay my bills.

I am always glad to hear that someone on the spectrum is doing good, because I don't wish the opposite for anyone. Been there and done that, so I know what it feels like to not be doing well, and I don't like it.

Even if you can't manage to be a successful member of the spectrum, at least you can keep distracted and occupied. It helps a lot.

Nobel Prize For advancements in her field of study AND Autism activism


TheSunAlsoRises

I did get to meet her (although rather briefly) after she spoke at a public engagement. She is very down to earth, says it like it is, doesn't belief in being consumed in self-pity and is equally respectful to everyone.

I can think of worse roll models (think Hollywood)...

I think its not only that she's autistic, but also that she's female. She was quite unusual in what she was doing when she started simply by being female, even without the autistic part.

So while there's so much about "overcoming autism", I do think she would have been known as slightly more than a skilled professional because of the female thing. Of course, the idea that a female couldn't be successful in a work environment has its own version of the same problems.

I was thinking about this the other day.

I was listening to some of her interviews, she seems to have come a long way even in the last few years.

I like her, I wish she would some more speaking or something but I understand that she's very dedicated to her work.

I am a fan of Temple Grandin... before I really looked into "am I related to autistic traits" at all (which I didn't start doing until later when I watched ingenious minds) I saw the HBO movie of her, which it seems she mostly approves of, and was impressed about her abilities as a process improvement professional...

Not as an autistic PI pro, but as a PI pro... I didn't even realize that she would say that being autistic gave her the ability to think like animals or any of the other silly things she said... Instead I saw that she was a visual thinker, that she could run through an issue and see the problems and come up with solutions that whether a bunch of idiots believed her or not were right the first time without even testing... To her it was common sense...

For me, I was much less impared from the start... I had a mom, that much like Temple's pushed me constantly in areas that were appropriate to be pushed and would let me have my drawbacks in areas that I could not improve. To her, she saw me as quirky and somewhat inept but could see the ways that there was also an intelligence contrast.

I liked her stuff on autism somewhat... sure interesting... but I am a fan of Temple for her amazing work in the Quality field and Process Improvement.

Would she be famous outside of her field if she wasn't autistic... absolutely not. Without the HBO movie, there is no reason for her to have mainstream fame. However, within the field of farming and animal stuff, she would still be a big name... The work she has done is significant and was not supported by her impairments... So while maybe the public at large might be like "omg! she is brilliant and has autism how amazing!", the truth is there were people before she was famous in the industry who probably didn't even know that she was autistic that knew of her as an authority.

I see her as a role model. I don't get why she has be like the majority of autistics to be considered a role model.

Isn't that sorta how neurotypicals think?

I don't.