A Slightly Lighthearted Yet Bitter Rant

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Something has been bugging me again which has been triggered by a conversation I had with a peer. I mentioned having special needs and how my college can accomodate for me and he implied that I was using excuses. It reminded me of all the BS people spout about autism.

I am sick to death of people bitching on about how mental disorders are a fad and everyone but the stereotypes are faking it or are lazy or stupid or undisciplined and they boil down the rise in diagnosis in X condition with explanations like "people want to get benefits" or "people want an explanation for their kids stupidity/laziness/etc" or even something as crazy as "DOCTORS WANT UR MONEY!" and they even go as far as to deny the existence of high functioning autism or milder variants of other mental disorders. Now I know I have ranted and raved about this sooo many times before, but it gets so exhausting when you have to repeatedly meet ignorant a**holes who think if you "look ret*d" (as they might say) then you actually have a mental disorder and if you don't look like a stereotype, you are a faker.

And you know how some aspies talk about their condition on youtube? I see a fuckload of a**holes trying to "undiagnose" those people based on a few minutes of heavily edited footage which consists of some kind of scripped speech. I mean, is it really that esy to be a doctor? Just watching two minutes of footage on a seemingly normal kid? It took me quite a while to get diagnosed (FAR from a few days, never mind a few minutes). It also gets to me when people treat the autism spectrum like it's the olympics You know, the whole "my child is more autistic than yours" pissing contest? Here's what I have to say to people who do that s**t: quit it! Who the f**k do you think you are measuring the severity of SOMEONE ELSES' CHILD'S MENTAL DISORDER!?

Well I believe this whole high functioning autism denial is a fad in itself. I cannot escape from idiots who think they're being smart by saying "ADHD isn't real; aspergers isn't real; dyslexia isn't real; depression isn't real, etc" and going off into some tangent that it's Big Pharma trying to f**k with us by calling common idiosyncracies mental disorders (and if you're that ignorant, you should be shot).

"Asperger-Deniers" should be mocked as brutally as we mock creationists, holocaust deniers and anti-vaxxers because anyone who says "This didn't exist when I was a lad" probably didn't realise that a lot of thing that happen today didn't happen/weren't discovered yet when he was a lad. It's called science, b***h!

Sorry about this disjointed, pointless message. I just hear this s**t too much.

I agree. I just got into a stupid argument with some woman on an AS page on Facebook - her poor partner has AS and she calls us "brats" and says we get "big bucks" and then says, "I love my crazy aspie!" Oh, it's OK, I reported her, came off it, left it alone. Facebook - load of crap anyway. Sick of everything tonight.

I'm only here tonight because I used to talk via email at this hour to someone else who has Asperger's, though he isn't diagnosed and the bare suggestion he might have it made him meltdown. We had an exchange of vile, vile, vile emails and on Wed he shouted in my face when I tried to approach him to make amends. The cause of this was his agreeing to meet me and not turning up, and emailing, too late, a lame excuse. Seems he wanted me to be a friend in highly specific ways: 1. via email and 2. at the drop-in centre we both attend and NOWHERE ELSE, despite asking to come out with me and some other people in the past. I feel so alone at this hour now. We used to talk like this several night a week, swapping emails, and sometimes he'd say goodnight, and it was like I had someone here with me. I live alone, and I want to live alone. But I never felt lonely before and now I do, terribly.

He won't talk about it, he'd literally run away. Seriously. Seen him do it in the past. And he won't answer my emails any more and he was furious on top of his original fury when I phoned him.

So bye bye, friend. And it's bleeding easy for us lot to make friends, isn't it? Ten a penny.

Oh, it's going to take forever to get over this.

My favourite line from Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

There is more to the world, Horatio, then is dreamt of in your philosophy"

(I might be butchering the Bard, but I read the play 20 years ago - so forgive if I misquoted slightly).

The point is - just because you haven't heard of it, you don't understand it or you don't know someone close to you who is dealing with it - doesn't mean that it isn't real.

It would be like me saying that someone's pain is not real. Actually, in medicine and nursing - it is specifically taught that "pain is what the patient says it is - not what you think that it should be". For a long, long time, medical personnel determined the level of pain medication for a patient based on what they thought should be adequate. Bad medicine and bad nursing care.

Anyways, I don't know where people get off thinking that modifications in environment are my special way of attention seeking. If I can do better at workshops if I'm sitting near the front of the room/near an exit, have done pre-reading and have a clear agenda for the session - how the heck is this "attention seeking" If my own young son needs to have a squishy toy so that he has something to stim with - how is this attention seeking.

Attention seeking is when I say "Hey, check out my new dress!! !!" and twirling around so the skirt part flares out.

My needing a few minor modifications so that I can function is everyday life and part of my daily routine.

AS, ADHD, Depression, Dyslexia, etc are real.

However I'm still of the opinion that many psychiatrists/psychologists, etc are too quick to jump to a diagnosis sometimes.

And I do feel that some parents do have unrealistic expectations of how their children should act, and do improperly medicate them sometimes.

And, I do feel that many of those who think they have something like AS, or OCD actually don't....

But that doesn't mean they don't have issues that they are struggling with. That doesn't mean they don't have an underlying neurological condition causing those issues.

I would not exclude someone with social difficulties from my company just because they have something other than AS, and I think all with social difficulties should be welcome here.

I would also like to add that I find the general public's idea of stereotypical behavior to be quite inaccurate sometimes.

This is due to three factors.

1. General ignorance.
2. The tendency for people to default to simplistic understandings of complex subjects.
3. The habit of Hollywood of grossly exaggerating everything.