08-04-2005, 04:11 PM
from http://www.parl.gc.ca/38/1/parlbus/commb...e.htm?Lang
MONTREAL, Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technlogy met this day at 9 a.m. to examine issues concerning mental health and mental illness.
[..]
Ms. Michelle Dawson, As an individual: I probably will ask for a little more time than my original presentation. I think it will save a lot of questions later on to make everything clear at the outset.
My presentation is called “The Word is Out About Autism: Canada in the Era of Autism Advocacy.” I am a diagnosed autistic and a researcher affiliated with Laurent Mottron's autism research group here in Montreal. Dr. Mottron is a University of Montréal Professor of Psychiatry, as well as a CIHR-funded researcher, and the director of a busy autism clinic. I also work with the highly respected American experimental psychologist, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, who recently was voted President Elect of the American Psychological Society. I am interested in many areas in autism, including cognition, ethics, epidemiology, human rights, behaviour interventions, self-injury and self-care.
I have an atypical organization called “No Autistics Allowed,” to which many autistics and non-autistics contribute.
In addition, I have done a lot of legal work, including successfully intervening in Auton v. British Columbia at the Supreme Court of Canada, where I was the only intervener who opposed the unscientific and unethical positions taken by both sides, as well as the only intervenor mentioned in the court's decision. More recently, I became the first person to have an autism-related complaint referred to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for a hearing.
Recently, I set a different kind of precedent by losing three cases at the Quebec Human Rights Commission. Here it was ruled three times that autistic people are, in fact, a plague, and that describing us this way is not harmful to us, but is truly beneficial and a sign that non-autistics with good intentions are helping us. Indeed, autistics should be grateful to have such dedicated advocates raising public awareness of our plague-like nature on our behalf.
The legal situation of autistics in Canada is unique. For no other group, have the rights guaranteed for all other Canadians been so thoroughly obliterated. This situation is the direct consequence of the ongoing era of autism advocacy. Finding a jurisdiction which is still able to consider us as human beings with human rights verges on the impossible. Canadians have rights imbuing them with worth and dignity, and protecting them from being demeaned and coerced, but autistic Canadians do not. Autism advocates, or those who call themselves autism advocates, some of whom this committee has heard from, have successfully argued that for autistics there should only be one right, the right to what the advocates advertise as “effective” autism treatment.
In the course of arguing for this one right, autism advocacy groups such as families for early autism treatment, FEAT, groups and autism societies have argued that autistics inherently have no possibility of dignity, integrity, health, liberty, worth, learning, security, et cetera, or even of life itself. In short, we are inherently too defective to have Charter rights.
For example, FEAT Ontario argued at the Supreme Court of Canada that autistics are less than half living, and they have insisted that autistics belong not in families or in society, but in institutions. Autistics have been portrayed by autism advocates in the most dire and horrific terms. We destroy ourselves, our families, and the economy, and there are promises that we will shortly ruin the entire country, so long as we are not expensively fixed. Our continued existence, as ourselves, as autistics, is held to be an affront to the whole idea of Canada.
At the same time, autism advocates claim that this impending national catastrophe can be averted if there is unlimited funding for intensive interventions based on applied behaviour analysis, ABA, Lovaas-type or otherwise, for autistics of all ages. It should not surprise you that the premise of these comprehensive interventions, designed to occupy most of the waking hours of an autistic, is that autistics inherently lack humanity and personhood. As human beings, we are write-offs. Autistic abilities and traits are assumed to be non-existent or destructive, useless, and wrong. There is everything to gain and nothing to lose if our lives are dedicated to striving every minute to be normal, that is, non-autistic. The goal of this kind of intervention, Ivar Lovaas has repeatedly written, is to build a person where none exists.
The nature of the treatment itself, along with the way it has been demanded by autism advocates in the health care system and elsewhere, has resulted in autistics having a less than human status in Canada. Governments and opposition parties, federal and provincial, have utterly failed in their duty to recognize autistics as human beings with rights, interests and worth. To the contrary, politicians of all stripes have expediently heaped creative insults on their autistic constituents, while the current federal government boasts about opulent funding for preventing our existence altogether.
Provincial human rights commissions have similarly failed to accord autistics any worth, whatsoever. Ontario's Human Rights Commission told me that autism is cancer — another prominent idea promoted by autism advocates — and that my only right is to get rid of it. As an autistic, I now have no other rights.
When I expressed dismay that the Ontario Ombudsman had, among many other insults to disabled people, persistently associated violence with disability, I was informed by this ombudsman's office that autistic people are, indeed, violent. I had previously thought that associating violence with disability was no different from, or more acceptable than, associating violence with race. However, the word is out about autism, and I was put firmly in my place.
A few words about these hearings: Senator Kirby, who is not here, as far as I can tell, has, in these hearings, misrepresented and mocked the polite request by an autistic person that autism be portrayed accurately in these hearings. “What an absurd request,” he is on the record as saying.
How strange, how nearly offensive it is for a person who is autistic to point out that misrepresenting, sensationalizing, and demonizing autistics is harmful to us. This is on the heels of this entire committee's decision to highlight and distribute, among other misleading and harmful views of autism, a statement by an Autism Society Canada board member that autism is worse than cancer, because autism is not fatal.
As with my cases presented to the Quebec Human Rights Commission in which I objected to the existence of autistics being called a plague, I was informed that portraying autism as more dreadful than cancer was helpful to autistics, if I would only understand. This committee seems sure that promoting fear, dread, and hatred of autism and autistic people will help us.
I do not think I should have to explain why we are not helped by hate speech, and other gross violations and denials of our rights.
Because autism advocates have had nothing good to say about autistics in these hearings, I am providing a short list of some autistic characteristics found in the scientific literature. Most of these findings are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals: one is in press, many of them have been replicated and a few of them are presented at recent major research conferences and have not yet been published. Here they are.
Empirically documented autistic strengths include the following: enhanced visual search abilities; enhanced visual discrimination; superior ability in disembedding figures; enhanced auditory pitch memory; pitch labelling and pitch disembedding; superior speed of processing; superior performance in detecting and responding to visual, social and non-social cues; faster sentence comprehension; superior performance in detecting changes in pitch; enhanced memory of semantic and visual stimuli with less susceptibility to false memories; superior pitch discrimination and categorization; superior accuracy in graphic cued recall; superior phonological processing; superiority in maintaining shape constancy; faster grammatical computation; superior numerical estimation; enhanced perception of static first order visual stimuli; superior recognition of faces with a one feature prime; and superior individual feature processing.
In this list, which is not comprehensive, I have not included superior abilities in specific intelligence tests. Neither have I added in the great susceptibility of autistics to develop savant abilities, and our extraordinary ability to learn well in ways non-autistics do not learn well. These are also in the science. In the case of learning, it is Dr. Lovaas who so routinely observed autistic learning, which he admits happens in the absence of either teaching or reinforcement, that he had to invent a name for this phenomenon. However, he continued to deny that this was real learning because it is not how normal people learn. He deployed the full undeniable power of ABA to extinguish this learning, including extinguishing savant abilities or genius behaviours, which he considered abnormal and unwanted.
Autistics should not have to justify our existence by providing a list of strengths which may then result, if we are lucky, in our being authorized to live. We are most reliably defined by our innate autistic strengths which exist in all autistics, regardless of how our level of functioning is judged. As with all innate characteristics, like left-handedness and homosexuality, removing autistic strengths is hard work. This is one reason ABA programs are so expensive and arduous. Our tenacious and intractable strengths get in the way of any attempt to make us resemble normal people.
This is my second to last point, and then I will make recommendations. This is a short exploration of the recent Wynberg decision. In the Wynberg case, parents took on the Ontario government over funding for ABA for school-aged autistic children. As a result of this decision — which, in the words of Mary Eberts, is “the law of the land,” children who are in ABA programs have human dignity, they have Charter rights. However, this decision also states that autistics who are not fully engaged in striving to be normal via ABA programs do not have dignity. Autistics are ruled to be unable to learn any other way, or towards any other goal, or to have any other possibilities. Either we strive to be normal through ABA, or we lack human dignity and worth, are not welcome to participate in society, and are judged not to have what it takes for “membership in the human community.” That is a quote directly from the decision.
I have exactly the characteristics now enshrined in “the law of the land” as useless, maladaptive and wrong, and I lack many of the skills now legally defined as qualifications for human dignity and “membership in the human community.”
On one hand, you should not be surprised that autism advocates roundly applauded this decision, which has the effect of requiring disadvantaged groups to qualify for Charter rights, and indeed, for humanity itself, by sufficiently becoming normal, which, in this case, means non-autistic. On the other hand, you should be surprised that the same autism advocates who insist that autism is cancer and that ABA is a medically necessary treatment that must be provided in the health care system, declared Wynberg a wonderful victory.
But Wynberg, like the similarly celebrated Bettencourt decision, entirely denies that autism is a health care issue and that ABA is a medical treatment. Indeed, all the experts for both sides in Wynberg, and as is typical in these supposedly adversarial procedures, both sides provided only evidence supporting ABA. Both sides agreed that ABA is not medical in nature, and is not at all a medical treatment. The successful lawyers for the parents in the earlier Bettencourt case stated that the key to this victory was their position that autism is not a health issue, at all.
Decisions made about the nature and needs of autistics in Canada are inevitably made according to the nature and needs of people who are not autistic. There is no consideration of who autistics might be and what we might need. Either we are horribly sick or we are not, depending on what non-autistics need. Autism advocates claiming to represent us characterize us as devastating burdens and cannot contemplate that we need anything except to become non-autistic. They have no concept of autistics succeeding as autistic people. They have shown no interest in actually helping autistics: in obtaining for us the respect, acceptance and assistance we need to succeed as autistics.
Wynberg also documented that children in ABA programs learn that autism is a very bad thing. They learn that it is important not only that they, themselves, get rid of every bit of their autism, but that every bit of autism in all people must be gotten rid of. These children are lavishly reinforced for all incremental progress towards the ideal of being normal, and are discouraged, ignored and shunned for in any way being autistic. Having learned intensively through most of their waking hours for many years that being autistic is wrong, many of these children — as reported by autism advocates and in cases like Bettencourt — “disintegrate,” become distressed and out of control, and cannot function at all when there is any reduction of the reinforcement that they depend on.
While I do not have time to challenge all the unscientific autism statistics which have been rampant in these hearings, any objective examination of the extravagant claims made here by autism advocates will demolish any notion that these advocates are at all concerned with science, research, ethics, or evidence. Critical thinking is required. For example, anyone proposing that there is an explosion, epidemic, or otherwise staggering increase in the prevalence of autism does so without a scientific leg to stand on. You should notice that every attempt is made by autism advocates to make everyone terrified of autism and autistic people, and you should notice that there is no factual or ethical foundation for this relentless campaign of fear and intolerance. You should notice that autism advocates, with the full cooperation of people like yourselves, are working hard to ensure that autistics will never receive the help we need to succeed as autistic people. Unless you reconsider, you are standing alongside autism advocates and ensuring that Canadians will never find out what autistics can achieve in a society where it is okay to be autistic.
The Deputy Chairman: Michelle, I would ask you to make your important points because I have to leave time for the other two witnesses.
Ms. Dawson: I have recommendations if you want to hear them.
The Deputy Chairman: Okay.
Ms. Dawson: The first recommendation for this committee is that this committee and the Senate, as a whole, apologize to autistic Canadians for using your power and resources to promote and distribute false and pejorative information about autistics which is likely to be damaging and dangerous for us.
Second, further, that this committee include this apology in their final report arising from these hearings, and that this final report should exclude all false, pejorative, damaging and dangerous portrayals of autism and autistic people.
Third, that the above-mentioned final report make it clear that autism is not a mental illness, that autism is receiving a great deal of attention due to the efforts of autism advocates, and that this attention, because it arises from factually false and ethically indefensible portrayals of autistic people, has harmed and damaged us.
Fourth, and last, that the same report acknowledge that autistics, like non-autistics, can suffer from mental illnesses, but that autistics, due to living in a society which demeans and disrespects us, and accords us no rights, has specific problems with situational depression, self-hate, lack of any sense of worth, and suicidal ideation or suicide. This is not, in any way, due to being autistic, but due to constant messages from our society and its leaders that we are worthless, wrong, and an appalling burden on everyone.
The Deputy Chairman: Michelle, I will interrupt you there and ask you to file the rest of your recommendations with us, and we may have time in the question period to get through them.
Ms. Dawson: Okay.
[..]
MONTREAL, Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technlogy met this day at 9 a.m. to examine issues concerning mental health and mental illness.
[..]
Ms. Michelle Dawson, As an individual: I probably will ask for a little more time than my original presentation. I think it will save a lot of questions later on to make everything clear at the outset.
My presentation is called “The Word is Out About Autism: Canada in the Era of Autism Advocacy.” I am a diagnosed autistic and a researcher affiliated with Laurent Mottron's autism research group here in Montreal. Dr. Mottron is a University of Montréal Professor of Psychiatry, as well as a CIHR-funded researcher, and the director of a busy autism clinic. I also work with the highly respected American experimental psychologist, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, who recently was voted President Elect of the American Psychological Society. I am interested in many areas in autism, including cognition, ethics, epidemiology, human rights, behaviour interventions, self-injury and self-care.
I have an atypical organization called “No Autistics Allowed,” to which many autistics and non-autistics contribute.
In addition, I have done a lot of legal work, including successfully intervening in Auton v. British Columbia at the Supreme Court of Canada, where I was the only intervener who opposed the unscientific and unethical positions taken by both sides, as well as the only intervenor mentioned in the court's decision. More recently, I became the first person to have an autism-related complaint referred to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for a hearing.
Recently, I set a different kind of precedent by losing three cases at the Quebec Human Rights Commission. Here it was ruled three times that autistic people are, in fact, a plague, and that describing us this way is not harmful to us, but is truly beneficial and a sign that non-autistics with good intentions are helping us. Indeed, autistics should be grateful to have such dedicated advocates raising public awareness of our plague-like nature on our behalf.
The legal situation of autistics in Canada is unique. For no other group, have the rights guaranteed for all other Canadians been so thoroughly obliterated. This situation is the direct consequence of the ongoing era of autism advocacy. Finding a jurisdiction which is still able to consider us as human beings with human rights verges on the impossible. Canadians have rights imbuing them with worth and dignity, and protecting them from being demeaned and coerced, but autistic Canadians do not. Autism advocates, or those who call themselves autism advocates, some of whom this committee has heard from, have successfully argued that for autistics there should only be one right, the right to what the advocates advertise as “effective” autism treatment.
In the course of arguing for this one right, autism advocacy groups such as families for early autism treatment, FEAT, groups and autism societies have argued that autistics inherently have no possibility of dignity, integrity, health, liberty, worth, learning, security, et cetera, or even of life itself. In short, we are inherently too defective to have Charter rights.
For example, FEAT Ontario argued at the Supreme Court of Canada that autistics are less than half living, and they have insisted that autistics belong not in families or in society, but in institutions. Autistics have been portrayed by autism advocates in the most dire and horrific terms. We destroy ourselves, our families, and the economy, and there are promises that we will shortly ruin the entire country, so long as we are not expensively fixed. Our continued existence, as ourselves, as autistics, is held to be an affront to the whole idea of Canada.
At the same time, autism advocates claim that this impending national catastrophe can be averted if there is unlimited funding for intensive interventions based on applied behaviour analysis, ABA, Lovaas-type or otherwise, for autistics of all ages. It should not surprise you that the premise of these comprehensive interventions, designed to occupy most of the waking hours of an autistic, is that autistics inherently lack humanity and personhood. As human beings, we are write-offs. Autistic abilities and traits are assumed to be non-existent or destructive, useless, and wrong. There is everything to gain and nothing to lose if our lives are dedicated to striving every minute to be normal, that is, non-autistic. The goal of this kind of intervention, Ivar Lovaas has repeatedly written, is to build a person where none exists.
The nature of the treatment itself, along with the way it has been demanded by autism advocates in the health care system and elsewhere, has resulted in autistics having a less than human status in Canada. Governments and opposition parties, federal and provincial, have utterly failed in their duty to recognize autistics as human beings with rights, interests and worth. To the contrary, politicians of all stripes have expediently heaped creative insults on their autistic constituents, while the current federal government boasts about opulent funding for preventing our existence altogether.
Provincial human rights commissions have similarly failed to accord autistics any worth, whatsoever. Ontario's Human Rights Commission told me that autism is cancer — another prominent idea promoted by autism advocates — and that my only right is to get rid of it. As an autistic, I now have no other rights.
When I expressed dismay that the Ontario Ombudsman had, among many other insults to disabled people, persistently associated violence with disability, I was informed by this ombudsman's office that autistic people are, indeed, violent. I had previously thought that associating violence with disability was no different from, or more acceptable than, associating violence with race. However, the word is out about autism, and I was put firmly in my place.
A few words about these hearings: Senator Kirby, who is not here, as far as I can tell, has, in these hearings, misrepresented and mocked the polite request by an autistic person that autism be portrayed accurately in these hearings. “What an absurd request,” he is on the record as saying.
How strange, how nearly offensive it is for a person who is autistic to point out that misrepresenting, sensationalizing, and demonizing autistics is harmful to us. This is on the heels of this entire committee's decision to highlight and distribute, among other misleading and harmful views of autism, a statement by an Autism Society Canada board member that autism is worse than cancer, because autism is not fatal.
As with my cases presented to the Quebec Human Rights Commission in which I objected to the existence of autistics being called a plague, I was informed that portraying autism as more dreadful than cancer was helpful to autistics, if I would only understand. This committee seems sure that promoting fear, dread, and hatred of autism and autistic people will help us.
I do not think I should have to explain why we are not helped by hate speech, and other gross violations and denials of our rights.
Because autism advocates have had nothing good to say about autistics in these hearings, I am providing a short list of some autistic characteristics found in the scientific literature. Most of these findings are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals: one is in press, many of them have been replicated and a few of them are presented at recent major research conferences and have not yet been published. Here they are.
Empirically documented autistic strengths include the following: enhanced visual search abilities; enhanced visual discrimination; superior ability in disembedding figures; enhanced auditory pitch memory; pitch labelling and pitch disembedding; superior speed of processing; superior performance in detecting and responding to visual, social and non-social cues; faster sentence comprehension; superior performance in detecting changes in pitch; enhanced memory of semantic and visual stimuli with less susceptibility to false memories; superior pitch discrimination and categorization; superior accuracy in graphic cued recall; superior phonological processing; superiority in maintaining shape constancy; faster grammatical computation; superior numerical estimation; enhanced perception of static first order visual stimuli; superior recognition of faces with a one feature prime; and superior individual feature processing.
In this list, which is not comprehensive, I have not included superior abilities in specific intelligence tests. Neither have I added in the great susceptibility of autistics to develop savant abilities, and our extraordinary ability to learn well in ways non-autistics do not learn well. These are also in the science. In the case of learning, it is Dr. Lovaas who so routinely observed autistic learning, which he admits happens in the absence of either teaching or reinforcement, that he had to invent a name for this phenomenon. However, he continued to deny that this was real learning because it is not how normal people learn. He deployed the full undeniable power of ABA to extinguish this learning, including extinguishing savant abilities or genius behaviours, which he considered abnormal and unwanted.
Autistics should not have to justify our existence by providing a list of strengths which may then result, if we are lucky, in our being authorized to live. We are most reliably defined by our innate autistic strengths which exist in all autistics, regardless of how our level of functioning is judged. As with all innate characteristics, like left-handedness and homosexuality, removing autistic strengths is hard work. This is one reason ABA programs are so expensive and arduous. Our tenacious and intractable strengths get in the way of any attempt to make us resemble normal people.
This is my second to last point, and then I will make recommendations. This is a short exploration of the recent Wynberg decision. In the Wynberg case, parents took on the Ontario government over funding for ABA for school-aged autistic children. As a result of this decision — which, in the words of Mary Eberts, is “the law of the land,” children who are in ABA programs have human dignity, they have Charter rights. However, this decision also states that autistics who are not fully engaged in striving to be normal via ABA programs do not have dignity. Autistics are ruled to be unable to learn any other way, or towards any other goal, or to have any other possibilities. Either we strive to be normal through ABA, or we lack human dignity and worth, are not welcome to participate in society, and are judged not to have what it takes for “membership in the human community.” That is a quote directly from the decision.
I have exactly the characteristics now enshrined in “the law of the land” as useless, maladaptive and wrong, and I lack many of the skills now legally defined as qualifications for human dignity and “membership in the human community.”
On one hand, you should not be surprised that autism advocates roundly applauded this decision, which has the effect of requiring disadvantaged groups to qualify for Charter rights, and indeed, for humanity itself, by sufficiently becoming normal, which, in this case, means non-autistic. On the other hand, you should be surprised that the same autism advocates who insist that autism is cancer and that ABA is a medically necessary treatment that must be provided in the health care system, declared Wynberg a wonderful victory.
But Wynberg, like the similarly celebrated Bettencourt decision, entirely denies that autism is a health care issue and that ABA is a medical treatment. Indeed, all the experts for both sides in Wynberg, and as is typical in these supposedly adversarial procedures, both sides provided only evidence supporting ABA. Both sides agreed that ABA is not medical in nature, and is not at all a medical treatment. The successful lawyers for the parents in the earlier Bettencourt case stated that the key to this victory was their position that autism is not a health issue, at all.
Decisions made about the nature and needs of autistics in Canada are inevitably made according to the nature and needs of people who are not autistic. There is no consideration of who autistics might be and what we might need. Either we are horribly sick or we are not, depending on what non-autistics need. Autism advocates claiming to represent us characterize us as devastating burdens and cannot contemplate that we need anything except to become non-autistic. They have no concept of autistics succeeding as autistic people. They have shown no interest in actually helping autistics: in obtaining for us the respect, acceptance and assistance we need to succeed as autistics.
Wynberg also documented that children in ABA programs learn that autism is a very bad thing. They learn that it is important not only that they, themselves, get rid of every bit of their autism, but that every bit of autism in all people must be gotten rid of. These children are lavishly reinforced for all incremental progress towards the ideal of being normal, and are discouraged, ignored and shunned for in any way being autistic. Having learned intensively through most of their waking hours for many years that being autistic is wrong, many of these children — as reported by autism advocates and in cases like Bettencourt — “disintegrate,” become distressed and out of control, and cannot function at all when there is any reduction of the reinforcement that they depend on.
While I do not have time to challenge all the unscientific autism statistics which have been rampant in these hearings, any objective examination of the extravagant claims made here by autism advocates will demolish any notion that these advocates are at all concerned with science, research, ethics, or evidence. Critical thinking is required. For example, anyone proposing that there is an explosion, epidemic, or otherwise staggering increase in the prevalence of autism does so without a scientific leg to stand on. You should notice that every attempt is made by autism advocates to make everyone terrified of autism and autistic people, and you should notice that there is no factual or ethical foundation for this relentless campaign of fear and intolerance. You should notice that autism advocates, with the full cooperation of people like yourselves, are working hard to ensure that autistics will never receive the help we need to succeed as autistic people. Unless you reconsider, you are standing alongside autism advocates and ensuring that Canadians will never find out what autistics can achieve in a society where it is okay to be autistic.
The Deputy Chairman: Michelle, I would ask you to make your important points because I have to leave time for the other two witnesses.
Ms. Dawson: I have recommendations if you want to hear them.
The Deputy Chairman: Okay.
Ms. Dawson: The first recommendation for this committee is that this committee and the Senate, as a whole, apologize to autistic Canadians for using your power and resources to promote and distribute false and pejorative information about autistics which is likely to be damaging and dangerous for us.
Second, further, that this committee include this apology in their final report arising from these hearings, and that this final report should exclude all false, pejorative, damaging and dangerous portrayals of autism and autistic people.
Third, that the above-mentioned final report make it clear that autism is not a mental illness, that autism is receiving a great deal of attention due to the efforts of autism advocates, and that this attention, because it arises from factually false and ethically indefensible portrayals of autistic people, has harmed and damaged us.
Fourth, and last, that the same report acknowledge that autistics, like non-autistics, can suffer from mental illnesses, but that autistics, due to living in a society which demeans and disrespects us, and accords us no rights, has specific problems with situational depression, self-hate, lack of any sense of worth, and suicidal ideation or suicide. This is not, in any way, due to being autistic, but due to constant messages from our society and its leaders that we are worthless, wrong, and an appalling burden on everyone.
The Deputy Chairman: Michelle, I will interrupt you there and ask you to file the rest of your recommendations with us, and we may have time in the question period to get through them.
Ms. Dawson: Okay.
[..]