Aspies For Freedom

Missing persons

    * 03 June 2006
    * Michelle Dawson, No Autistics Allowed Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Vilayanur Ramachandran and Lindsay Oberman are hot on the trail of why autistic people aren't, well, people (13 May, p 48). They are not the only researchers who are sure that autistics have no personhood. We are simply not there. They are frantically searching for our missing persons.

Other researchers and parent-advocates have gone beyond removing our personhood to declaring us more or less dead. The respected epidemiologist Walter Spitzer has described autistic people as being dead souls in live bodies, and autism as a terminal disease - we just don't know we are dead yet. The massively popular parent author Catherine Maurice calls autism a "death in life", and Bryna Seigel, an influential autism expert, informs us that autism is a "living death".

Does it take electro and magnetoencephalography to discover that interacting or conversing with people who see you as not there, or not having personhood, or in fact being dead, can be difficult, if not impossible?

From issue 2554 of New Scientist magazine, 03 June 2006, page 22

Attitudes such as this are frightening. Soon we may be declared non-persons and have all our rights taken away.

I have never seen the opinions of these people, personally I would not want to give their ridiculous views the oxygen of publicity.

There are much more common views that we see every day that need dispelling.

why are they calling us dead?

just more reason for them to take our rights away.

Does that mean those researchers are hallucinating? After all, they're talking to dead people....   :lol:

Damn I was just reading this thread and was just about to write something very similar myself but then I saw you beat me to it, Well put though

ok, that quote also made my day.... and they say auties have no sense of humor!?! obviously never gone on this site!

Obviously never talked to us, either!  They seem never to have considered the possibility that perhaps we don't WANT to talk to them because they are boring little NTs who won't listen to what we have to say anyway.

As Mark Twain once said: "the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Alison

That is perhaps the most negitive thing that I've yet read about autistics (and I've read alot).

lol, must be something extremely potent.

is there anything potent enough?

I just wonder why an ex-reputable magazine lets this stuff slip through... Then I remember why I stopped reading it... :roll:

maybe thease people have had a lobotomy, or the people they have spoken to have... it was comon place in the 20's, and i guess that was how long this reaserch was done :razz:

maybe they will learn... but then again, they believe that we're already dead... how can we loose when they follow that logic? hell, we have a new saying!

you can only die once! (unless your an aspie!)

That's interesting: scientists have found where the "soul" is!  I wonder which gene it's located on?  And what is it's function?  Shouldn't this be headline news around the world?

I'd love to have a discussion with Mr (Dr?) Spitoui about this.  Oh, that's right, I can't talk, I'm not really alive, am I?  Silly me, all this breathing, eating, cogitating etc can really make a person think they're alive! :roll:
Alison

//Pikachu sticks his head in a large bucket and throws up for a while\\

Now that makes me feel sick, who are they to say that we are dead?  :evil:

Now obvoiusly the people that did that research are, well, lacking in the brain cell department, we are most certainly not dead, in fact we are very much alive.

Indeed it is

How utterly ridiculous - autistic people are dead people because they do not communicate with others.  ????   The Spiritualist religion teaches that the dead do communicate with the living.  

After some people start taking medication for their "mental illness" they do become like zombies.

I'm wondering where exactly in Ramachandran's work that Dawson has identified the assumption that autistics are not fully human. I think I'll have to go back and read the original article before I can comment about whether Dawson has made a fair criticism.

I would agree that some scientistis do appear to have the belief that autistics are sub-human. In New Scientist over the years that I've been a reader there have been many references to psychological, social or communication "skills" that are supposed to define humanity, but which the scientists allege autistics are incapable of, and they sometime go on to explain how chimps can do stuff that autistics can't, just to place us even further down the "evolutionary ladder".

I have also consistently observed some prejudicial attitudes towards autistics in an eminent research associate of Ramachandran's, I won't mention any names ...