10 ms·
This is weird for me to read because years ago I met someone like this, and it always puzzled me. He just came up to me downtown one night and started chatting.
This is weird for me to read because years ago I met someone like this, and it always puzzled me. He just came up to me downtown one night and started chatting. He struck me as a little out there, kind of hippy-dippy. Seemed in good spirits. One of my neighbors knew him from a party. We all hung out with a few other people I didn't know. (At which time a middle-aged preacher uppercut a 6'5' drunk fireman so hard his feet left the ground and he landed on his head.) He crashed at my apartment. We hung out again the next day, and then he just disappeared.
I didn't think much of it. I'd 'come up' with a bunch of neurotypical 'transients' with sad family lives who partied and crashed where they could.
A couple of years later I thought maybe I'd look him up. I found a few news articles stating he (an adult) was "missing", autistic, and "ran away" from his "caregiver." Stated that he "functioned at a 12-year-old level." The autism part maybe explained some eccentricity, but I could not square that last part with the person I'd met. He seemed to know what he was doing (?) Based on the articles, he'd run away at least twice. No mention of parents, only a "caregiver."
It was just weird. He was very, very chill, and very chatty. He didn't seem in distress. I suppose one could recast my first impression of rambling free-spiritedness as "functioning at the level of a 12-year-old"...? Just odd. I never did find a way to contact him.
Trigger Warning: Gonna talk about sexual assault and physical abuse below.
"caregiver" is a big red flag for me. I'm on the autistic spectrum. My parents took a different tact and let me become an emancipated minor at 15. I'm not gonna say they did their best or that that was a good thing to do... I cannot as an adult fathom just letting the kid go to the wolves... but I survived.
There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
There are tons of laws and very questionable care giving organizations. The history is brutal. Frequently they are handed over to people who get into the role of caring for these people because they want to beat and rape people who can't complain (see Jimmy Savile). This isn't that dissimilar from the highly publicize Britany Spears conservatorship. There is money in taking care of an adult with "the mind of a 12 year old" also you can beat and rape them if you wanna.
There is an old and "hippie dippie" model for spectrum disorders where they refer to them as indigo children and they claim that kids used to be called that because the baby was replaced by fairies and now speaks truths beyond their years. Look at the classic traits of a vampire. Being scared of water, can count things very fast, maybe has surprising strength and old wisdom.
Autistic people aren't extra wise, they span the range of dipshit to genius like any other category of people. Autistic people do spend a lot of extra energy trying to predict a world that is confusing and hostile to them and when they vocalize how they navigate said world, it creeps people out who have to deal with a society that says lying is wrong but the rule actually is "fuck it, do whatever you can get away with."
If you get hooked up to "caregivers" that take away your agency and you are an outlet of justifiable (to the abuser) sadism for them you can't run far enough. The state will put you back in their arms.
Autism Speaks is a eugenics organization. Autism does not mean a person is unaware of the world around them, actually quite the opposite. Also the messaging that autism can be a super power is the same thing in disguise (see the most recent Predator movie or Baby Driver). It's a sensory disorder. It's not a lack of emotion, it's that overload frequently makes it difficult to respond to people and situations as "normal people" expect so abuse becomes a default mode for "caregivers". There are organizations that are CURRENTLY advocating for electric shock or physical harm to help "correct" autism.
Yeah... (speaking about the perspective of a hypothetical person in a situation of abuse) Change your name, run away, hop trains. RUN if you can because you're autistic enough to see that people will always abuse you in any situation where you're put into the care of the ghouls that own your name. Even the Arc and Autism Self Advocacy Network have some massive problems including putting autistic people with weird abusive special interests into positions to hurt people who just want to live their fucking lives.
I recently saw this video by a fellow I really relate to where he lays out all the things I say in a fit some times but... yeah. They lay it all out. The history of helping the disabled is pretty wrought with not checking in with the disabled. Also, I think they are a hilarious humorist and the rest of their stuff is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlEjWaejAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlEjWaejAw - You Don't Seem Autistic - or - How I Learned to Love the Meritocracy _ Woohooligan Comedy
Ha! This video is what I needed right now for a few reasons. Thanks. Yes, I am on the spectrum, and so is my brother, and so is my father. I wasn't diagnosed until my late 30s, but 1) I had plenty of other things to blame, and 2) I more or less 'knew' since my teens, but autism was not widely discussed then, and I didn't identify with that label at all. Internally I simply identified as a space alien from another planet sent here to observe humans. It helped me explain to myself my need to study people very carefully to form a theory of their words and actions. I just studied people silently for years, never saying much. After high school I found some friends who appreciated me enough to bring me into situations where I could imitate them and slowly begin to practice masking.
My father was not very involved because my mother didn't want him to be. To this day she is enraged that she was suckered into marrying a defective person because she felt sorry for him. She booted me out the house at 18. I was quasi-homeless for the next few years, sleeping in my car, at friends', sometimes at my grandparents'. Nothing permanent. I'm going to cut this story short because it doesn't really go anywhere. 2006-2012 were pretty good for me, and by conventional measures too.
I've been entangled with the mental health system too many times to list. It's a fraught fucking thing. A real mind-fuck. We didn't have the word 'gaslighting' in those days.
I've had very little interaction in life with people I relate to, other than my brother. That's why this video is ... relieving, or something like that.
If you ever wanna talk, hit me up! Community is important! Kindness is infectious. Check my profile if you feel like you wanna reach out. I've been kind of working on an internet generative pen and paper style role playing chat gizmo (who isn't right?) but also... Yeah man, that family stuff is typical honestly and it sounds like your mother and father had a lot of hurt because they couldn't connect. We have the luxury of doing better because we can know different things because internet.
No matter what, guard your grill with your fam but they did what they could and are flawed like the rest of us. Tigers won't change their stripes. Be who you gotta be and try to share some comfort and kindness where you can. Also give Whooligan a like and follow if you think of it. They don't have a lot of attention and I think they do solid effort and deserve more.
I detect a very familiar kind of traumatic shock in this story here. I currently experience manic terror masked by what looks like jokey beats told rapidly on loop for what I suspect are similar reasons. Who failed you doesn't have to define you though. They will probably still fail you but, probably they don't want to and don't know how to be different and wish they could be. Not your problem to fix. Because you're human and talking to me right now I think I can say with very strong confidence that your chosen family needs you to slow down the tape enough to share your light.
It makes me pretty happy that this video resonated with you. Find your people, be kind, know yourself. Guard your grill because the world is getting weirder. You're a goldmine and ghouls wanna deplete you. Surround yourself with folks that value your modes and can help you with the parts you don't get that well and you can trust to tell you the truth. Rinse, repeat.
I'm sorry if that's preachy sounding, but everything feels like hell to me today. I very much feel for your struggle how you explained it friend.
Tbh most adults I meet function at a 12 year old level. Have you ever tried to see an adult do math? I’m talking about adults who aren’t engineers, doctors, etc.
To NT people not conforming to or recognizing/acknowledging social structures anchors your cognition at an adolescent level where that type of behavior is acceptable. Teens are expected to conform and some people on the spectrum can be completely “normal” in every other way, but if you asked that person to show up to a job at 8am every day or to do X socially expected thing, they’d probably just go find someone else to talk to, hence the “functioning at a 12 year old level.” I consider this to be oppressive social pressure and I’m lucky I was privilege enough to live this way without being shamed or tormented by my family. We should all function at the level of a 12 year old.
I couldn’t agree more.
I get your point but I wouldn’t consider things like not being able to show up at work “functioning at a 12 year old level”, and i don’t think society would either.
Plenty of “neurotypical” adults suck at showing up to things on time, especially at 8am. Plenty of adults throw full-on tantrums or otherwise act like children in certain situations. Plenty of college students don’t know how to do simple things like wash their clothes or cook or keep their dorm clean. Honestly a lot of people can barely function alone and keep their shit together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that person was one of them, but we don’t look at them like 12-year olds.
I agree - I was using a specific example but in practice I think it's a number of a class of things like this that pile on and look a lot like executive dysfunction, and the label is put on these people by NTs, not by themselves. I had no problem showing up to work every day at 11am, fwiw, and was lucky enough to have a lot of jobs that didn't think too hard about schedules, but for folks not so lucky, not fitting the average in a number of ways will get you very crude labels. Those labels are to give their caretakers power over them in the eyes of society/legally.
4y ago
Thanks for your trigger warning. I did not read your message. I am replying notwithstanding. I actually had to write this in a different application because when I tried replying to your comment, I couldn't actually hide it from view, and I saw the words 'special interests' and others, couldn't resize the window right, so opened another app to write.
Dude so in Chile, most of the world, a guardian can pay a shrink (a malpracticing psychiatrist, that's what that means) $400.000 (like $500) and he or she will 100% accuse him of any condition desired. Will. In United States the price is higher, depends on the state, basically on the chance of getting caught, and good psychs will just refuse. But they won't turn the guardian in, the good psychs are not in charge, the shrinks are in charge (like the Sacklers, being a shrink can make you a billionaire[1]). But a shrink can diagnose bipolar, schizophrenia, cannot take care of himself, retardation[2], what are the others...autism...paranoia...early-onset dementia...um...I read so many books about these things, why am I having a hard time rattling them all off...but at any rate, these are not diagnoses. They are also accusations. If false and public, they are slander. They justify harm, you can justify brain surgery, like a lobotomy but with better marketing. Same as an accusation can justify harm, putting someone in prison. And turns out, they all make the pretense of being scientific, but none of them are falsifiable (you have no way of proving them false), so why bother calling psychs who use them doctors if they're not even scientists? (Psychs is a more neutral term than shrink, psychiatrist is too big a word, takes too long to say, and means 'attendant of the soul' which is innacurate.)
And there are some great psychs. Just a minority by design.
[1] If you actually do the math, the three Sackler brothers are each a trillionaire debtor because that's the poverty value of the suffering they inflicted. Thousands of 13th amendment violations, making people addicts means making them slaves, they made hundreds of thousands of Americans slaves. Just through psychiatric malpractice, by definition being a shrink.
[2] This one is dangerous because if you diagnose retardation and the retard gets the best score in the country on the SAT, you might not look so smart yourself.
So my mother did this to me once. She didn't pay him - he was a friend from her church. He committed me as a favor to her. I was actually in a pretty good place at that time mood-wise. 100% not a danger to self / others. But she thought it a clever way to get me gone without the guilt of putting me on the street. Neither said a word beforehand. Surprise! The feeling of betrayal was indescribable.
They held me for a miserable month. The justification given by the hospital doc was I "Didn't have a plan." That last bit can be good or bad depending on their assessment of your plans.
yes, I'm fortunate to have a very good doc now. I've had a few decent ones. Most could be replaced by a kiosk - take a quiz, dispense Big Pharma pills.
> The justification given by the hospital doc was I "Didn't have a plan."
Can you give more context? Generally if someone is suicidal, “having a plan” is not a good thing, because it is beyond a vague intent, and it is a very strong signal of danger. Depressed people are queried about plans to help judge the possibility of suicide: you imply that was the risk that your mother was worried about.
A plan for where I would go after and how I would support myself. I wasn’t suicidal.
My mother was annoyed that I was living at home without a job.
As for why she didn’t want me around, I’ll let Alanis Morrissette explain:
“You reminded her so much of your father, so you were banished. And you wonder why you’re so hypersensitive and why you can’t trust anyone but us.”
That's the chink in the armor right there, you're being super assumptive about his mother saying she was worried when obviously "you" have never met her. He's known her his whole life you get your impression of her from him and you think you know more about her than he does? Most charitable interpretation of what you said: her soul can be compressed down to a hundred bytes. That says everything.
Yeah good docs aren't as incredibly rare as they seem from the wards, which they're not allowed into under "fuck the law" terms. Weird that they exist, I've had so many.
Of course a good psych is like finding a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk, whereas a shrink is getting mugged. They don't have the same absolute value.
> and good psychs will just refuse. But they won't turn the guardian in
This. And then they'll just try another one.
Eventually one accepts the bribe and then it's set in stone because EVERY other professional will demand to read the previous "diagnosis" and they'll almost never deviate.
Just imagine if when you went for a second opinion on your radiology exams the new doctor demanded to know the previous diagnosis before making his own.
You'd laugh out loud because of the bias.
In psych fields it's considered the default and not doing it might actually be considered malpractice.
Yeah so the shrinks, like Ximena Rojas Núñez, who verbally apologized for malpractice when caught (I just can't protect the guilty if it's easier to name them than not, some are actually worth some respect, not her, she was just embarrassingly stupid), so her, from the very beginning was informing about me looking for a second opinion, like fucking Daniel Cussen twitter. Had to show a different, superior doctor like ten pages of confessions for him to consider I was in the right.
And that's why I talk about this all publicly, I care a lot about my privacy and THEREFORE I share this, so that it isn't known exclusively by the people I hate the most, by traitors of patients. Privacy isn't nobody knowing your secrets, well obviously it is but at this point that's a fantasy. Says right on the box cryptography is about forcing the government [or anybody else] to torture you. Beyond that point? Cryptography is useless. In fact I used 1Password diligently before, during and after getting tortured, back in 2009. Really liked the app, good placebo. Didn't add up to shit, and it's not their fault. I voided the warranty.
So you divulge. If the worst people know your secrets, share your secrets. That actually increases your privacy. And it's the perviest thing, they think slandering me will ensure my silence, well it did for a long time, but come on. What is the solution? Literal Daniel Cussen twitter.
Thanks, Stuntkite! That's really kind of you...
I ... my childhood was fucking weird... I thankfully never dealt with malicious caregivers, but I know now that both of my parents were autistic and undiagnosed. My care was mostly severe neglect... I say it was bizarre, because I went to an expensive summer camp like $6k/yr if I remember correctly, but that was the only time I knew support and community as a child. Back at home, while my parents were millionaires (not anymore), I lived alone with my mom in a hoarding house with multiple holes in the roof and infested with both racoons and rats. So yeah... a distinct lack of socializing experience didn't help me.
Let me know if I can help with anything. I'm datafaucet on twitter http://twitter.com/datafaucet http://twitter.com/datafaucet
You responded to my youtube comment with that "let me know if I can help with anything" when I first watched your video and gushed a bit. I gather that you decided to do that because you're an internet professional and because of the things you talked about in that video. It was shocking, and where I can determine it's context appropriate I've been applying it.
I'm going to take you up on that. I want to get you to look at my sort of janky WebRTC+XMPP+Unity3D remote D&D... not game... more like puppet show... thing. heh. It is NOT my day job.
I've got a contingent of computer professionals and people I've played D&D with not working on it but playing along while I sort it out. I've got a really pretty OK chat bot foundation for it that is like the old BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon with forrest fights and stuff... but it's backed by a well groomed and totally NOT distributable database a friend made of the Pathfinder SRD and a pretty cool magic item and name generator I made. It's a containerized django project originally running an IRC bot that I have now ported to Discord... which I dislike but am ... whatever. Anyway.
Come look at my chat bot and meet my nerd friends (it's like six of us on a good day) and look at the 3D broken puppet show I put on top of it please. I would really like that.
I will ping you on twitter. I don't want to cross this account with the one I'm going to send you contact from on twitter... I guess since you asked if you could help, check my profile and shoot me a hello via email so I can confirm my identity easily. Please. If you don't get to doing that, we can do that later. I don't wanna be a chore.
Cheers. I really, really appreciate your work. It's effervescent. I've sent it to a dozen people personally and a few of them that are NT actually watched it and they enjoyed it but really, more importantly, you put things into place for them that I'm talking about but they don't get when it's just coming from me and it's made my life a lot easier in some places.
Also, can I buy you a new microphone? I would like to do that. I don't think it needs to be anything extravagant, but I'm an audio professional and your audio quality muddles the message and can be over stimulating at times even though I know what you said at source was great. Your video editing is tops. Let me buy you a mic. We can chat about what works for you in your setup and I'll find the perfect one.
EDIT: This is kind of the forum for I'd guess a lot of people on the spectrum or however we say it. I did not expect this to blow up but I really can't express how happy it makes me that so many the people discussing things here are talking about how much your video connected with them. That was a hard video to make. I think what you put together is going to help so many people and I really see it here. To type this gets my face all twisted and crylike which isn't my thing. Really. Thank you.
Oh, that's awesome that it helped your NT friends understand! :D
That was my goal with the video, even though I thought it was somewhat "lofty". lol
This is the first time I've been on the ycombinator forum. I created the account just to respond to this thread. I'm happy to reply here, although I may be slower to reply here than on Twitter.
I forgot to mention earlier that my lapel mic died in the middle of filming and I had to replace it... so some of that audio distortion on the video is likely because the original mic was failing at the time.
Ever notice how black people can rap and sing about the N word, and say it to each other with at least 5 different meanings communicated just with verbal inflection, but it has exactly one meaning when a white person says it to a black person?
So that's why I still like Hacker News, dude your suffering has worth, they didn't respect you, your rights, nothing, and it was wrong. Well maybe show don't tell, I have a letter that talks about my stay in a psych ward, 75 days, which seemed like 45 days because of the amnestic drugs, and the exact mistake was talking about it like they didn't want me to know to say it was "coercion", that I was being kept in "some kind of prison." But it's crazy, the "fuck the law" false incarceration doesn't end with just the act of it, and the refusal to allow even a Bible into the ward, it goes farther, like making me blind to lawyer advertisements I would love to reply to if only I could read them, they gave me banner blindness specifically for lawyer ads, like they didn't register until yesterday, at any rate, the "fuck the law" means they can keep you out of the courtroom forever. Forever. And nobody wants to look at your evidence, or hear your testimony, look at confessions, the level to which they treat your problem as unworthy of human attention is unreal. No wonder brain surgeons never get sued for malpractice by their own patients, they see it coming and they lobotimize them before they make it to the courtroom. I got lobotomized for precisely that reason, and it works like a charm, I have no idea how I'll ever get a lawyer to talk to me for more than an hour (it's not enough time), or being unable to tell the fact chronologically (again because I was conditioned to behave erratically in the presence of lawyers). I will say I am coherent in the presence of judges, so I did great in small claims, like the curse they put on me had a loophole they didn't think of, what if I write a letter to a judge? Can't figure out how to do that either. And I keep track of what was deleted, like knowledge of lobotomies, amnestic drugs, the words "torture" and "abduction", the definition of the Sapir-Whorf thesis (which must therefore be called a law, it applies to itself, and it was proven true as I recovered from this lobotomy), they also erased the words "personal injury lawyer" and "malpractice".
It's like the only thing they care about really is that you never reach the courtroom and sue.
Yeah, I do, the last few days, just in my comments. You know what? You came up with a terrific idea, I'll just post stories. I'll need to remove the char limit on my posts though. It's quite relevant to Hacker News I believe, I was super into this forum then, dead set on dropping out of Stanford to do Y Combinator, visited HN every time I had access to the computers, and maybe it can refresh memories.
You can read my stuff at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen