Another autistic child killed by a parent. "Not surpris

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Ahem. No one -- exactly no one -- is either condoning or supporting the murder of autistic or any other children. Please not to get carried away.

Actually, they are. I posted a comment that says it. Apparently you like to act like it's not happening, but it is. Please refrain from acting like I'm getting "carried away" when it's people like me who are the ones who are getting murdered. I also don't need that condescending "ahem", either.

Vicky, I feel like people insist that we prevent our own murders by somehow being less disabled. Now, I understand what you are saying about your friend. You know, it really disgusts me how people complain about people going crazy as caregivers but when they are doing the work and in silence about how much pain they are in, people isolate them. They need societies support, too. I just don't like how some people imply justification for these murders, which is what I see in a lot of comments and by the way people talk. A good question would be: What do you want us autistic people to do to help these caregivers? I'm actually all ears. If there is something besides money I can give (time), I would be willing. I don't know how to get in contact with these families, though. If you have suggestions, please send them my way.

The way to solve this problem is not by giving more sympathy to the person who murdered, but it's helping them before getting to that point. If I were to say it's understandable how someone being bullied could shoot up a school, my heart might be in the right place, but it doesn't help solve the issue, and is of little help to the families of those who are murdered.

The real problem I see is society giving a lack of support because they believe us autistics are a burden to only be carried by the mothers who take care of them. I see too much emphasis on only one part of the equation.


XFilesGeek, I've rethought about telling people about my diagnosis now. My own grandmother was silent and then changed the subject. It leaves a hole in my heart knowing that people speak in disturbing ways like this.

[for bleh12345]

I thought I'd left a long post about the difficulties involved in knowing who someone is when they're unable to communicate, and the problems that makes for telling their stories. The journalist will have a dickens of a time trying to tell the story of someone who isn't known, and who can't be known through activities, friends, the usual sources writers go to when the person's own voice is missing. It's a real and serious problem and it's why I suggested that in stories about severely, non-verbal autistic people, there be more frequent inclusion of voices like KingdomOfRats'. People cannot know who or how conscious another person is without a voice of some sort, demonstration of some sort.

In other words, you're assuming that people are just massively unsympathetic to autists, maybe hate them and think they should die. And you're basing that assumption on the absence of sympathetic depictions of them in, of all things, newspapers (which aren't usually written by terrific writers in the first place). But you've got the wrong end of the stick: the problem is in knowing how to write about people who give no sign as to who they are. You, or someone, will have to be able to show who the severe autist is if there's none of the usual character-making-on-the-page stuff available. No voice, no girlfriend, no activities, no teammates to say "he was an awesome kid", no teachers to describe the things he loved doing, no diary, no facebook page, no happy photos, none of this.

So maybe you'd ask: Why isn't it enough that he's a human being? And the answer is that stories don't work that way. Stories are about recognizable characters. A better writer (and, again, you won't find many of those at newspapers) would notice that on one hand she's got the mother (a recognizable character) and the son (unknown and unknowable) and either dig harder for details about the son or be aware of the narrative inequity, and make the point that it was not possible to know these things about the son, and make the reader aware of the uncertainty over who the boy was, what his life and murder were like for him.

Also, I still do not think you see the difference between sympathy for a person and support of an act. If what you want is for the public to see the mother as vile and unredeemed, I don't think that's going to happen. There is too much understanding of the kind of hardship she lived with. But I still don't think you'll find support for what she did.

You've got it wrong too about the NYT writer, and again have read in something that isn't there -- for all I know you'll insist it's "heavily implied", but it isn't; you'd be heavily inferring it. Please go and read that story. He didn't find his son "worth valuing as a human being" only when he could communicate -- he wasn't able to know who his son was without the communication, even though he tried desperately to engage and know his son. He was in fact the guy who figured out how to use his son's obsession to communicate with him, and to find a way of giving his son a voice.

As for the quote from the brother -- the brother, categorically, did not say that his autistic brother deserved to be killed (and wasn't, as far as I know). Yes, he had unpleasant things to say about his brother, and if his brother's breaking his parents' bones and leaving them to live in fear, I can certainly see why he wouldn't be all sweetness and light about it.

What I'm trying to show you is that -- horrible as your own childhood was, horrible as your own mother was, and right as you are about the horror and inexcusability of the murder -- I think you've way overshot in how you're reading people's reactions to this story and failing to understand both why it was written this way and why sympathy for the mother (though not the murder) exists.

I'd hope some of the public would see the mom as being a bit vile, having killed her own child....but that's just me, otherwise they have no business calling someone like James Holmes vile for shooting all those people oh but when a murderer targets a few normal people. Its all about how everyone with said mental condition is a potnetial mass shooter ect, we should lock such people up and use forced treatment lest they end up shooting someone and how evil they where to do that regardless of what desperation or factors might have brought them to that breaking point.....but when it comes to an autistic child its all 'oh poor murderer'. What a double standard.

People view autism as one of the worst things that a person can be "burdened" with, so they think they are putting their child out of their misery. If these people truly are mentally ill, that's all the more reason to be careful how you empathize. There is a point where people are then rationalizing a murder by a mentally ill person, which is irrational if you are to believe these parents aren't in the right state of mind. Also, I used to think you had to be mentally ill in order to do something like this. I realized it was just hard to come to terms with the disturbing idea that some people may not be sick and still do these things.