You pass on the word

See, I want wronged child authors publicised, circulated more into public knowledge as an issue. Exposed as an issue. The world is still too oblivious, and that is a further abuse of every victim.

There is a site on youth mental health, with health links on it, that I have succeeded in getting to remove their link to Luke Jackson's notorious F+G. I had put to them the damage and emotional wrong done to abuse survivors if any book attributed to a child author is publicised without publicising that wronged child authors exist.

I say attributed because the Times of 16 Aug 2002, among other profiles, revealed that it was not an unaided child author work at all, as it was structured into a book by his mother and would not exist without that.

Getting the link wiped is better than not doing anything, it's a success to count as necessary - but it's not what I actually wanted. What I wanted was to get wronged child authorship mentioned on their site, publicised to a further audience. They had an obvious logical duty to do that after they had had the Jackson book link on their site for some finite period. They could have kept the link so long as they told about wronged child authors.

Instead: "I’m sorry for any anguish this has caused by including this link on our website. At the time of producing the content for this page we were linking to information and resources we thought would be useful for our audiences. Following your concerns this information has now been removed so as not to cause any further distress."

Kindly put, but - this is more of that terrible human problem of avoiding responsibility for facts, avoiding taking positions. They have chosen avoidance of the whole thing, instead of the act of compassionate help to hurt wronged oppressed kids, the action of actually passing on the word about wronged child authors.

You pass on the word.

Maurice Frank

Something not right

Idea. Should we try writing the words "Something not right" in autistic spectrum sites? In hope that folks searching on the idea of something not right will find autism info, which they would never have thought to search for. Try it out here.

This comes from a conversation with an aspie of my age, but of much more recent diagnosis even than me, and I found 35 an unjustly late age for it, and more accidentally discovered than me too. At least I have always known that my strongly felt anti-school cause led rationally to discovering aspieness, from its impact on school problems, at the tipping point of 2002-3 when there emerged a self-organised aspie scene no longer under the medical umbrella.

It is screamingly unjust frustrating and upsetting, that in unknown numbers there are unknown aspies out there, who have heard of autism, can't miss all media that mention it, but no connecting of it to themselves has occurred to tbem. Some of whom will eventually discover it by chance, e.g. from someone else's reaction to a problem, maddeningly late in life, and with all the baggage of relief and vindication and self-explanation. The implication of the chanciness all caring aspies will choke on. That some who would feel the relief and the liberation from unfair social challenges, who would welcome the aspie scene's support and join in it keenly, never will, because the chance will never come and they will live out their lives with social unfairness and withdrawal without ever knowing about aspieness. If we pass them in the library or on the train we can't know it.

We must do anything we can think of about it. It's a key reason why the hidden disabilities need maximum banging on about. Conditions you may not at a glance notice exist, or notice in yourself as a familiar condition you have heard of or that carries any bodily difference: just as society for long missed that they exist, you can miss having them. So you need prompting to contemplate whether any hidden disability matches with personal problems you are aware of. But not a mass screening of everyone by doctors, we can't want that because not everyone would accept it or answer the questions and it would be too connected to sinister mental health screening. Indeed it's important to have the aspie scene supportive of your grounds for diagnosis before you go to the doctor, in case they are too little autism aware and want to see it as mental health instead.

In his long life of missing it, tbe aspie I spoke to mentioned he had a feeling of "something not right". I realise I have often heard a sentiment like that - though I never felt that way, because it was so obvious that school and unthinking laddish characters were what was not right, not me. But social frustrations and difference to the cool kids can often make folks feel not right. It is clearly a sentiment in the lives of many undiscovered aspies at risk of remaining missed for life. So might some of them search on the concept of "not quite right", as part of exploring their feelings and trying to understand life and their feeling? It must surely be fair to try to make that search lead to learning about being aspie.

Maurice Frank

where was the late Dr Wing for 20 years?

This Daily Telegraph obituary to the recently deceased inventor of the term Asperger Syndrome, Lorna Wing is staggering and baffling, quite angering. It quotes her claiming that her first use of the term in a scientific paper in 1981 opened a Pandora's Box. Over the next 20 years there were 900 published papers on it, including the first diagnostic criteria proposed in 1989 by Stephen Gillberg.

If Wing an academic voice with such effective impact as this, why couldn't she stop it taking 20 years for the condition to become widely known of? It is a too shattering thought to cope with. In the meantime, we were still living out lives not knowing of it, without the back-up and fellowship of an aspie scene, missing out utterly and tragically if we died during that time, and getting into avoidable life troubles including getting into poverty in the right wing neocon economy. Adolescent psychiatry was missing AS and still wrecking lives applying oppressive conformist agendas of personal change that AS proves wrong, and by it leading to neocon economy troubles too. The Enyclopaedia Britannica was still describing autism as Kanner autism with 80% of subjects learning disabled, I remember that from the period when I was beginning to notice the was attention on autism linked to childhood problems, in the years before I discovered modern aspie awareness in 2002.

Where were you left in the neocon world of 1989 if you heard nothing of what Gillberg was doing, and you would never cross the path of a fortuitously well informed and open minded psychiatrist after an adolescent service had already in 1983 acted totally obliviously to autism towards your school crisis?

Wing's experience in the world of academic papers does not match at all the experience of real society and real aspies outside it. She must rationally have realised there were many unreached all through those unbearable lost 20 years, when she made that comment. Why never give us the support of being more angry about that? An urgent social change should just progress with ever so slow effete composure through doctors and the cases that chance across their paths?

Maurice Frank