OBAMA NOMINATES ONE OF THE BIGGEST AUTISM ADVOCATES TO THE NATIONAL COUNSEL ON DISABILITY, ARI NE'EMAN

President Obama nominated Ar Ne'eman for the National Counsel on Disability. Maybe 2010 is the year we finally start winning some of our civil rights not only in the workplace, school systems, legal system(which is almost totally blind to Aspergers), but just our right to exist and not have people try to genetically eliminate us. Without autistics a huge portion of the advances we have had in our society would never have happened. This is a man with Apergers Syndrome who started an organization to counteract the negative thinking that is perpetuated about autistics. We don't want to be cured, we want to be accepted into society and especially the workforce. I worked as a highly trained, highly skilled critical care nurse for 23 years until I came to Alaska and was workplace bullied unmercifully until I had complex PTSD. There is no excuse for the ignorance or abuse that goes on in the rural areas of this state in the workplace and with mental health practitioners.

Ari Ne'eman, Nominee for Member, National Council on Disability

Ari Ne’eman is the Founding President of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, where he initiates and directs efforts to increase the representation of autistic individuals in public policy discussions. He is a leading advocate in the neurodiversity movement, frequently briefing policymakers and speaking publicly on disability and autism policy issues. Mr. Ne’eman also serves as Vice Chair of the New Jersey Adults with Autism Task Force, where he represents autistic adults in reviewing the state’s autism services. He also previously served on the New Jersey’s Special Education Review Commission, where he authored a minority report on the topic of aversives, restraint and seclusion. Mr. Ne’eman previously served as the Policy Workgroup Leader for the Youth Advisory Council to the National Council on Disability. He is a board member of TASH and the Autism National Committee. In 2008, he received the HSC Foundation “Advocates in Disability” Award. Mr. Ne’eman is currently an undergraduate at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County where he studies political science and expects to graduate in May 2010. In 2000, Mr. Ne’eman was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
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From NPR:

Ne'em describes Asperger's and autism as disabilities — but with a twist. "We're disabled by society," he says. "What disables us is, for instance, an education system that's only designed to meet the needs of one kind of student, or societal prejudices which say that autistic people will never be able to live in a community."

Autism disorders exist along a spectrum, with great variance from one person to another. Ne'eman argues that his condition is part of his identity, the same way gender or ethnic background might be. "We are proud of who we are," he says. "We are proud of the community that we are building."

Females with Aspergers are also damn tired of being told by health care professionals who use the DSMIV which is a joke anyway, but was designed on research which was done on only males that we don't have Aspergers. Read a journal or a book, I am tired of it. They don't even stop at being uninformed, they then become abusive when given information that shows they are wrong. Medicine is based on science, if they are not able to base their pracitice on science should they be allowed to practice? My old doctor in Washington told me to tell the doctors in Nome to go back to medical school. My respnse was, "Don't you think I alrady have?"

You can bet your neurotypical ass (or possibly neurodiverse ass) I will be writing Ari a letter about my experiences here in Alaska. I do not want anyone else to go through what I have been through. To overcome Aspergers with no help from anyone, work my way through college, and then be subjected to a type of psychological torture called workplace bullying until I had complex PTSD so bad I tried to commit suicide resulting in being charged with crimes was bad enough. Then to have the legal system and even those who were supposed to be providing me with a defense do everything they could to harm me was unbelievable. Part of the reason they did it was my claim of being autistic and my telling them what they needed to do to present a defense. Why would that upset them?  What I did not know then was they don't provide defense. Most PD agency cases end in pleas forced on the client. I now have another stigma, a felony charge.

Dr. Tony Attwood on girls with Aspergers:



 

Yes, healthcare professionals of Alaska female Aspies do migrate towards the helping professions which does include nursing, so please stop using being a nurse to exclude women from diagnosis. AHHHHHHHHHHH!
 
Tony Attwood the world's foremost authority on Aspergers gives this description on his clinic website of Aspies:
 
From my clinical experience I consider that children and adults with Aspergers Syndrome have a different, not defective, way of thinking.



The person usually has a strong desire to seek knowledge, truth and perfection with a different set of priorities than would be expected with other people. There is also a different perception of situations and sensory experiences. The overriding priority may be to solve a problem rather than satisfy the social or emotional needs of others.

The person values being creative rather than co-operative.


The person with Aspergers syndrome may perceive errors that are not apparent to others, giving considerable attention to detail, rather than noticing the “big picture”.


The person is usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind and being honest and determined and having a strong sense of social justice.


The person may actively seek and enjoy solitude, be a loyal friend and have a distinct sense of humour.


However, the person with Aspergers Syndrome can have difficulty with the management and expression of emotions.

Children and adults with Aspergers syndrome may have levels of anxiety, sadness or anger that indicate a secondary mood disorder. There may also be problems expressing the degree of love and affection expected by others. Fortunately, we now have successful psychological treatment programs to help manage and express emotions.

The corrupt and inept public defender agency hired a psychiatrist to do a report on me. They had long been angry at my claims of being autistic which was fueled by misinformation from their buddies, the two serial bullies and others at the hospital. All of which don't have a clue what they are talking about on most subjects, inlcuding Aspergers. They advertised this so called psychiatrist to me as being an expert on Aspergers. He claimed to have a son with Aspergers(Knowing about males does no equate with knowing about females). I doubt either claim is true. He clarified that he is a confabulator by putting about 25 pieces of information in the report about me which were totally fictitious. The worst was that my father sexually abused me, which never happened nor did I tell him it did. His conclusions were so far off I thought the report was on someone else. Yet, the PD I had at that time wanted to use the report anyway. Attorneys don't like to let the truth get in the way of any case. I would not allow anything except the truth in my case (I had no control of the lies on the other side) and that is one reason she hated me. I am calling that chapter in my book: The Besotted Public Defender and the Sociopathic Psychiatrist..
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In the Guardian Amelia Hill posted this article in April:

Doctors are failing to diagnose thousands of girls who have Asperger's syndrome, according to one of the world's leading experts. Dr Judith Gould has accused the medical world of missing and overlooking girls with the condition, condemning them to lives of such misery that many resort to extreme self-harm and anorexia.

Gould, who is director of the National Autistic Society's Lorna Wing centre for autism and co-founder of the Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, said: "We're failing girls at the moment. We are doing many thousands of them a great disservice. They are either not being picked up in the first place, but if they ask for help they are being turned away. Even if they are referred for diagnosis, they are commonly rejected."                                                                                
                                                                                         

Often they already know they have Aspergers and are treated abusively by mental health practitioners when they reveal this information. A personality disorder is used as a label or they are diagnosed with something like bipolar disease and put on inappropriate medication.

"Girls are not being picked up because there is still a stereotyped view of what Asperger's is, which is based entirely on how boys present with the condition," she said. "Professionals are not up to speed in knowing how girls present. We are working with the government to ensure they highlight this concern in their upcoming consultation. We are hoping to convince them to target this much under-investigated but vitally important issue."

This is an article about the U.K., their knowledge and ability to diagnose is actually way ahead of ours.



Tony Attwood, founder of the first diagnostic and treatment clinic for children and adults with Asperger's, and author of The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, agreed with Gould's estimation of a 2.5:1 ratio of boys to girls. "The bottom line is that we understand far too little about girls with ASDs because we diagnose autism based on a male conceptualisation of the condition. We need a complete paradigm shift," he said.


"We need to draw up a female version of Asperger's that identifies girls on the basis of the way they present, and we need to do this as a matter of urgency: undiagnosed Asperger's can create devastatingly low self-esteem in girls. In my experience, up to 20% of female anorexics have undiagnosed Asperger's."

He did not even mention the high rate of suicide.

Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. "Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they're good, their differences will not be noticed," he said. "Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script."


Girls also escape diagnosis, said Attwood, because they are more social than boys with the condition. Their symptoms can also be missed because it is the intensity of their interests that is unusual, and not the oddity of what they do.


"The impairments to their social life or interests tend not to stand out in the same way as boys' do," he said. "They might have one friend, while boys with the condition won't have any. Also, boys hyperfocus on facts and certain interests, such as trains or weather. Girls escape into fiction. They have imaginary friends, live in another world with fairies and witches, obsessively watch soap operas or become intensely interested in celebrities."

Some Aspie girls can also behave a lot like the boys in many respects, such as being fact oriented, obsessed with certain subjects, or holding people hostage with information. Aspie girls will line their dolls and stuffed animals in a row. Female Aspies sometimes prefer men as friends because they relate to them better. Females also are said to be more like "philosophers" than "little professors". Females on the spectrum are vulnerable to sexual predators. Neurotypical men often like female Aspies as mates due to less social manipulation and blunt honesty.


 Professor David Skuse, head of the behavioural and brain sciences unit at the Institute of Child Health, teaches clinicians to diagnose the condition. "Increasingly fewer girls are diagnosed as their IQ reaches 100, the population average," he said. "Some people maintain this is because girls simply don't have Asperger's, but I would argue that brighter girls, especially those who are more verbal, are able to mask and compensate for their condition. I make sure I emphasise the difference in the ways boys and girls present when I train clinicians, because I am certain that girls are being failed by the system, especially those with higher IQs," he added. "My belief is that, if we can prove the ratio of boys to girls is as high as many of us suspect, it would be as significant a milestone in this field as the discovery that the condition is on a spectrum."
Emphasis added by myself.

This is a picture of me from a poster created by autistics which was used as a fund raiser several years ago. It was entitled, THE AUTISTIC LIBERATION FRONT. I would have to ask the whole group for permission to show the whole poster, so I just showed myself and Miss Behavin (the cat killed by the state of Alaska), both wearing antlers. All cats are autistic, BTW. It was made as a joke in response to MSM monitoring our message boards and taking what we were talking about out of context and writing articles(NYT, the Telegraph) about how militant we were getting. We were wearing silly outfits. They had no idea how militant we could get.