What would you do if government stopped covering AS support?

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I'm moving to Saipan where I can live on an island with Asian people without a passport for like $200 rent a month. I'll sell cheap mp3 players I buy from China at flea markets or something.

I'm not on SSI, I'm currently working with a disability agency in my state government to try to find job placement first, and if that doesn't work, it could be a possibility.

But if not, move to some other country and be a baller, and have my social problems be less noticeable because I'm a foreigner.

Not only that, if you're reasonably cute (and ideally very light-skinned and blond), it's easy to attach yourself to a young woman in some cultures as a social guide who will explain all the unwritten rules explicitly and correct you explicitly when you mess up. China is one such place -- where I learned tons of unwritten rules even lost on most foreign NT's. Maybe Saipan is similar. It's basically learning social rules from the best of the best (the equivalent of "mean girls"). The best don't want anything to do with me in the U.S., so I'm stuck with friends who themselves have social problems.

The unwritten rules in many Asian countries have also been around so long that they are much more formalized than the unwritten social rules in Western cultures. I think this formalization is much, much easier on the aspie brain. Parents and teachers also do a much better job explicitly teaching children these rules than, particularly, the "sensitive" PC white upper middle class suburbanites do in the U.S. (who think corporal punishment is something horrifying, rather than totally necessary, especially for autistic children), so all children in Asian cultures have an easier time learning social rules. Contrary to popular stereotype of Asians as "indirect," friends in China are pretty blunt with each other about social rules, much more so than in the U.S. I have observed many interactions in Chinese high schools and so know this first hand. When you're forced to be around certain people all the time, as is the case in most authoritarian systems, you can't simply form your own group of people you like, so the group forces conformity on everyone, which, I think, is a much better system for children with Aspergers since only idiots who actively resist come up short. Just going with the flow and doing what you're told will get you quite far.

It could be that one reason for the recent increase in Aspergers diagnosis (as well as ADHD) in the U.S. is the removal of corporal punishment from schools in the 1980's.

The only reason I am successful professionally is because of the strict corporal punishment I received as a kid.

The reason for the increase in AS diagnoses in the 1990s has nothing to do with corporeal punishment and everything to do with the fact that AS was not a diagnosis in the US before 1994 and the publication of the DSM-IV. Similarly, the criteria for ADHD were changed in the DSM-IV over what was present in the DSM-III, which also led to increased awareness and diagnosis. Corporeal punishment does nothing to treat either ADHD or autism.

As far as corporeal punishment goes, all it really teaches children is how to avoid beatings. Also, corporeal punishment is implicated in an increased chance to development of mental illness later in life:

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/0 ... sd0713.htm

Sure, I'm not going to dismiss science, but it's valid only so far as it goes. Who knows? It appears the study is flawed because it only adjusted for two variables. It does not really adjust for other aspects of home environment. Multiple studies have been done on this subject, and they have reached completely different conclusions, perhaps based on the bias of the researcher: http://humansciences.okstate.edu/facult ... ere02.html

"Since World War II, “serious assaults committed by juveniles” have increased by 700%. From the 1980s to the 1990s alone, juvenile arrests for violent offenses increased by over 50%, and the rate of homicide by youths increased by 168%.
Now American teens murder about 2300 people every year." http://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/1820605.pdf.

Funny how all this antisocial behavior by teens started as corporal punishment went out of favor. It's no wonder so many high-functioning autistic children have trouble learning proper social skills. In the early 20th Century, they would have learned all these things when they were young and probably not had any disability as adults!! I know if I had grown up in a typical American home, I probably would never have been able to work and would never have acquired independent living skills. It's a gentle, slow death that many HFA's suffer in white upper middle class homes in the U.S, as they go through life getting the brutal silent treatment for not picking up on unwritten social rules, transgressions of which could have been spanked out of them as children.

For my personal life, I can only rely on my own experience and what I've observed living abroad working in schools of other cultures that practice corporal punishment.

What's most telling is that the study you cited does not deal with autistic children at all. Other studies have shown corporal punishment to be effective as part of a regimen that turned multiple LFA's into HFA's and, in some cases, NT's. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1 ... 35,1448111.

To my knowledge, no longitudinal studies have been done specifically on autistic "bloomers" such as myself to see if corporal punishment (or any other environmental factor) played a role in their rapid teenage development.

That study does not appear to mention corporeal punishment. It does mention ABA (which is itself problematic for many reasons - including the fact that its proponents have insisted that ethical concerns must be set aside because treating autistic children is of foremost importance). ABA is not all bad, either, but the 80s were decades past the use of electric shock to stop stimming. That is,with the exception of the Judge Rotenberg Center, which is probably a good place to look to see just how successful intense corporeal punishment really is... at traumatizing children no matter what their neurology.

Your personal experiences are anecdotal. That is whatever you personally experienced or what you may have observed.

As far as picking the study apart, it should be noted that the methodology was such that they looked at people who experienced corporeal punishment and those who did not. Those who did had a greater chance to develop mental illness. Girls are more likely to develop eating disorders because the cultural image of ideal womanhood is, among other things, extremely thin. The pressure to fit that image is fairly intense, and often damaging. There are other correlations with eating disorders, such as being autistic, but I believe that cultural pressure is the primary cause for most.

You're never going to successfully beat someone out of being autistic or ADHD because beatings don't work that way and neurology doesn't work that way. Further, the use of corporeal punishment in ABA is not really recommended or endorsed:

http://www.abainternational.org/Press/FAQs.pdf

And no such study will ever be done because such a study would be unethical. At best you will see studies involving adults and their histories, such as the one I linked.

Corporal punishment was used as part of that study but only as part of a larger training regimen. It's in the second paragraph, I believe.

It sounds like the ABA does endorse some mild corporal punishment. Mild electric shock is much worse than a swat on the leg. So you go and criticize the ABA. I guess we both have our biases, don't we?

I don't agree with corporal punishment for stims, but for social transgressions, you're not going to teach them anything with any gentle, non-obvious treatment. Mild corporal punishment can be used on the spot and is much less unwieldy than things like grounding. So, for example, you can punish multiple social transgressions without isolating the child from others. Most white upper middle class forms of punishment involve isolating the child for a single transgression, which is a very inefficient way to correct multiple social transgressions, and regardless, isolating an autistic child for any reason is never a good thing. As for taking away privileges? I know as a child I would never have understood the connection between learning not to take my clothes off in public and loss of a privilege. But a swat? Sure.

I do not know how I missed this paragraph the first time, but:

“Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.” - Socrates

This is the same argument about children's behavior that has been made over and over throughout centuries of human civilization.

As far as corporeal punishment goes, I experienced a lot of it growing up and it didn't help me at all. I think that people have a tendency to try to make factors they can't control into factors they can control, so that when you have someone who is unable to work or function socially, someone has to be at fault, someone has to be the perpetrator, whether it's that person who is supposedly lazy or their parents didn't beat them often enough or some other volitional factor that could perhaps have changed things.

The difference between you and autistic people who have significant difficulty with work and education may be a matter of actual neurology, it may be a matter of co-morbids. It may be any number of things that were simply under no one's control and may not have been predicted in the first place. There is no "cure all" that will give or could have given everyone a better life.

"A mild swat on the butt" are the exact words used.



Yes, although I am glad I can say that my biases do not lead to endorsing child abuse.

I have never received support and I am not sure if I have ASD and I most likely have NVLD.

Considering the USA doesn't cover ASD.. nothing will change as I can't get coverage in the first place!!
Autism is an automatic no for SSI/DI unless there is a most serious case for it with extensive history from childhood and generally requires other side effect disorders in addition.

Now with recent changes they deny even more people with even classic Autism let alone less severe cases, so not to sound like I am shooting anyone down as I am in the same situation but good frakking luck getting anywhere to begin with. Heck lawyers never even contact me back or say they are to busy.

I have plans to move and become a citizen in either the UK, Canada or Australia because there it's the opposite from what I've hear.
A country should be judged on how well it takes care of it's people, the USA fails so bad at these things, so far behind other nations due to bureaucracy that's gone mad. >.>