The myth of autism, Sami Timimi

[Beyond_Ideologies]

So, I have mentioned a book entitled "The Myth of Autism", by Michael J. Goldberg. This guy is saying that Autism is caused by a virus. In my opinion, this could even be a crank book. So I am going to discount it.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr...t=relevancerank

But now we also have:

http://www.amazon.com/Challenging-Myths-...=myth+of+autism

But what I am actually reading is the book reference obtained from WrongPlanet

The myth of autism : medicalising men's and boys' social and emotional competence / Sami Timimi, Neil Gardner, and Brian McCabe
Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Autism-Medicalising-Emotional-Competence/dp/0230545262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423857743&sr=8-1&keywords=The+myth+of+autism+%3A+medicalising+men%27s+and+boys%27+social+and+emotional+competence

I have also been continuing to read John E. Robison's third book, "Raising Cubby", it is fascinating, eventhough I don't agree with any of it. But John Robison is someone it would be very hard not to like.


BO

Jeff Beck Group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6dFeVos3X0

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Timimi, Gardner, and McCabe make their position clear, "there is no such thing as autism and the label should be abolished.

Both Gardner and McCabe have been previously diagnosed with autism, and they reject this.

This book references Foucault, R. D. Laing, and Peter Breggin, but none of the works of Alice Miller.

It looks like maybe they do not even go along with the Refrigerator Mother theory, or with other ideas about emotional coldness or emotional deprivation. After all, if the condition does not exist, then there are no causes for it. Rather, it is for us to look at what it is which might be causing us to believe it exists.

I still say though it is Alice Miller who got it right. It is not just coldness, or lack of emotional empathy. Talking like this is misleading. It is volitional, directly embedded in this so called "nurturing". It is the inflicting of a narcissistic wound, by the way the child is being used. And of course it is a direct expression of why the parent decided to have children in the first place. This is the strength of the Alice Miller, this is why I was so deeply touched by her first book. And it goes further in each of her following books.

Timimi is part of The Critical Psychiatry Network.
http://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk/

Gardner has a website.
http://outsider-insight.org.uk/

and of course Wrong Planet
http://wrongplanet.net/

I do plan to talk more about Nick Dubin and John Robison in the future too.

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Reply to someone who's brother has been diagnosed as "autistic", and has "very real disabilities and handicaps and obstacles".

But how can we determine what the cause of such disabilities and handicaps actually is? And then of course, how many such disabilities and handicaps are just judgments being made about what is expected of people?

Unfortunately, if someone is being bullied in school, then it is likely that that person will end up getting judged as suffering from some sort of a problem or deficiency. It is easier for the system to do this, than to even consider that there is something wrong about the school and the people who run it.

Likewise, if someone doesn't seem to be communicative, can we really understand why this is? They may have had to adopt such a strategy in order to protect themselves under very adverse circumstances.

I do not go along with most of the Autism Advocates. And this includes Alex Plank and Wrong Planet. I think everyone is unique. No one should have to live by saying that they are different, and then asking for pity. Rather, they should live by banding together and standing up for themselves.

Lots of people talk about how we need to learn to nurture our own inner child. I've never gone along with this. I think this nurturing is just liberal pedagogy. It is a way to legitimate the parents and give them a way to covertly control and manipulate the child. So if someone is nurturing their own inner child, they are not really championing that inner child. Instead they are trying to manipulate it.

So I don't do that. I protect and defend my inner child, because I am an Apache Brave. Some day my inner child might even make Medicine Man. But no matter what, anyone who tries to mess around with my inner child lives to regret it. And more than anyone else, this applies to psychotherapists.

I think those who are displaying behaviors which get them labled with Autism / Aspergers need to find comrades and band together and start standing up for themselves.

I posted before about a kid, C., when I was in high school. He was getting teased, bullied, and harassed something terrible. The parents could have found a psychiatrist in the yellow pages. Or worse yet, the school district could have sent him to one of their psychiatrists. Then of course, C. would have been diagnosed with something.

But fortunately the parents started at the front of the yellow pages, with Attorneys. Soon the school board received a letter reminding them that hazing is illegal, and that they would not be receiving another warning.

All of a sudden teachers who were completely impotent when it came to doing anything, were now able to be all places at all times. Nothing escaped their view.

The bully kids were given a serious talking to. But mostly it was the teachers and administrators who had to change.

I continue to read John Elder Robison's third book, "Raising Cubby". This son Cubby would go on to be diagnosed with Asperger's.

John explains in great detail how the boy's mother was day after day after day trying to make Cubby play patty cake with her. He wouldn't repeat the words.

And we know that she had gotten this idea from a baby book.

So John Robison uses this as evidence that there was something not right about Cubby.

John explains about how Cubby was in elementary school for a few years and was not learning to read. So they had him tested at this special lab at Yale. He seemed to be totally unable to read.

So the mother read to him the first three of the Harry Potter books. And they listened over and over to unabridged tapes of them being read. She was always stopping on words and trying to make Cubby say the word. He wouldn't. He seemed completely unable to.

So he went for a few weeks to a Boy Scouts summer camp. They gave him the new 4th Harry Potter book.

So he apparently figured out how to read it, and did so very quickly and all by himself. Over that one summer he moved from zero reading ability to being able to read very close to grade level. And then during the next three months he moved to being able to read at college level.

Now John Robison says that this was due to the peer pressure at the Boy Scout summer camp. Muggles are like this.

But I just can't help but notice that when Cubby learned to read, he was out of the view of his parents, and that they had been probing and prodding him just like Harry Harlow had been experimenting with his monkeys, from day 1.

This kind of an idea is not quite the same as Bruno Bettelheim's idea about the Refrigerator Mother. It is a more subtle but also further reaching matter. It is what Alice Miller calls the Narcissistic Wound. She describes it as the mother expecting the child to mirror her facial expressions, instead of being willing to mirror the child's. And as I read these accounts of children diagnosed with Autism / Asperger's, I am always finding this.

So of course the reason Cubby's mother is doing this is that she is looking to the child for some sort of an affirmation of herself. Miller pretty much lays it out in the first book and then continues to develop it in the later books. People are having children because they want to be able to use them to legitimate themselves. So of course it will show up in thousands of other ways as well. It is the basis of their entire relationship with the child.

Cubby's mother, Little Bear, has also been diagnosed with Asperger's. Now I don't go along with this, any more than I do with Cubby or John's diagnoses. But that Little Bear carried this diagnosis, and that she probably did display varieties of behavior which led to this, indicates that she was most probably also wounded in the same manner.

So John Robison describes how much she felt that she needed to have a child, even though the economics of their situation were extremely difficult. John writes of all the baby books and magazines. These are what Alice Miller calls pedagogy manuals. They market parenthood. People read the liberal versions of these, believing that this will make them completely different from their own parents. In my day it was Benjamin Spock. But what these manuals really do is contribute to the parent's own fear and their need to use the child to prove something to themselves and about themselves.

Little Bear had undoubtedly grown up in an abusive and marginalizing environment. So she was frightened that there was something wrong about her. So she was reading these books, and then having a child and treating that child as an experimental laboratory animal. And this was all wrapped and packed as "nurturing".

BO