ahead of some curves

In Germany, we have learned from a contact, telling an employer you are aspie is still a no-no, thing to avoid doing. There is still a judgmentality towards conditions that can be read as a weakness in the worker. Yes there is a support scene working on it: but it has not got as far as here with planting an ethic for society to listen to it.

So even after Brexit there will still be pros and cons in favour of either country, and not a one-way case for which is more progressive. In minority needs for workers, we still are. Much as we must look out for erosions of it, and it works more by the motive of good appearances than by any formal fear of employment tribunals, which have already been given legal cost dangers to intentionally weight them against the worker.

Employment coaching in Germany: might help the worker from behind the scenes without the employer being aware of it, or might act as personal development coaches explaining what post will best match the worker's personal needs as they have seen them to be. Workers having such coaches is a thing that seems more familiar in the culture there than here, partly balancing the picture out.

a famous aspie does not mean all is right for us.

Let's see. You've come for a look at what aspies are all about because you heard the news about Susan Boyle? Splendid: here's what the media should be telling you. Are they?

• Our heightened physical sensitivities, including to fabric and heat, are biologically incompatible with dress codes and make them an assault on our physical wellbeing. Our existence abolishes all work dress codes and school uniforms. This has been known for years and the big charities have not been choosing to push it.
• Because some aspies find it easier to focus on the written word than the spoken, there is a correlation between aspies and child authors. There is a succession of books by aspie child authors, and there is a child cruelty offence done in long history of big charities' total avoidance and failiure to publicise that there are WRONGED child authors, like me, whose chance to write was destroyed by harmful school pressures and homework.
• With the big charities' big failings to speak for us where needed, you can see how seriously we have needed the voice developed for us, to contribute into professional awareness and policymaking, by the AUTISM NETWORK SCOTLAND, developed out of Strathclyde University and now a part of the national strategy. It's invaluable, and its creation is the great success of the scene in Scotland. So IT NEEDS COPYING IN EVERY COUNTRY. If you are outside Scotland do you think your aspies deserve not to have any ANS?
• The NAS is to be complimented on attending properly to striking off its contact list a bent autism legal service that advised me to surrender in a dispute with a council tax malpractice where I was in the right by statute law and won. There needs to be a media consumer exposee of bent services that will prey on their clients instead of stand up to councils - you want to know more, you need it publicised.
• Likewise you want to know that aspies' local groups can't be corrupted and seized control of by malpractisers bent on hushing up emotional abuses, as happened to a group near us, defunct since stood up to by an earlier post on this blog describing its malpractises: 28 Feb 2011, Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us.
• It's only the same common sense that all the details should be published of the ways we have been harmed by schools and by child psychiatry. Aspie kids not safe until these things stopped, and how do you stop them unless you have heard widely what they are? In a safely non-deletable way on paper: for it's no good putting them in an Amazon e-book where the site's lawyers reserve a power to turn round and say, no no no, delete to be on the safe side. So the media are turning their backs on child safety unless they read this and chase after these things' publishing.
• Where competitive jobsearch utterly has never worked for us, the approach that works is to have aspie employment services who talk through both our strengths and our limitations with an employer to work out a working niche for us. But more ethical accountability upon these services is needed, to prevent the malpractice of them turning round and claiming that a third party problem that arises after you are in a job is not in their remit to deal with. By obvious definition, a remit to support employment automatically includes any problem that affects the work's doability or the work environment's justice in any way. This an item I am holding Edinburgh's new local Autism Plan responsible to put right locally.

Maurice Frank

stressing me

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal strengths that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank