Breakthrough on adult diagnosis in Aberdeen

Aberdeen has been suffering for years a local unjust failure of service re such an important basic as adult access to diagnosis. Doctors have not been available for it, folks have needed to seek access to service from other regions unless they had the means for privately. This affecting such an essential life fairness as employment support.

NAS holding a conference there in 2015 budged nothing, nor even prevented the OSS there (which they ran) closing down! But now the local paper has budged the local NHS, as a follow-on benefit from a campaigning victory on ADHD. It reports this breakthrough in NHS acknowledgement of service duty: NHS Grampian commits to adult autism diagnosis.

Why does it say it is important that folks cease to need to present to mental health service? Of course it's important that autistics are not mental, but that service is long established one of the commonest sources for diagnoses. GP referral to it. If Aberdeen folks have been referrable to mental health, and have been diagnosable by it, then there is no form of words that makes sense, that they could use to reject diagnosing the folks who were not going to stay on the mental health service for something else. Yet that is what the article reads like saying they used to do.

The principle of accessing adult diagnosis is importantly universal everywhere, Aberdeen's experience this far into the autism aware era has been staggering. This is the turning point of their acknowledging this principle for a maltreated place.

yes you can call a cool swaggery comedian sick

It may well be most prudent for the thinking aspie not to go to any Fringe comedies at all. But a few thoughtful ones on worthwhile subjects do happen. It's so chancy, when you see one billed on a subject worth bothering with, whether the billing is true or whether it's just an attention grabbing device for just another rough biting jerk who wants to spend an hour talking about social humiliations and child maltreatment.

Kevin Precious is a particularly bad case of the latter. Revile and avoid his show. It included a joke about having cancer. He is the next show on straight after our annual aspie visitor Paul Wady's show at the same venue.

Precious is a humanist who used to have to schoolteach religious studies. That sounds of interest to anyone anti-school, and the show's billing sets up a prospect of hearing a lot about intellectual conflict with a system.

No that's not what you get at all, He did not suffer any conflict, he was allowed to teach study of religions witbout asserting that any one is right and to tell the parents he had no belief - and that's about all his material on it, 5 minutes' worth. There is no critique of school at al, despite lots of harsh jokes at its miseries, including against the character of PE teachers yet not making the obvious deduction that there should not be any PE. He is a offputtingly blunt voiced earthy macho type, that's visibly why he has no spirituality!

Most of the show is about Jimmy Savile and the same worn out offensiveness that all the satirical comedians have followed in the time of high child abuse awareness - of making lots of purportedly angry political satire about it, that turns THE ABUSE ITSELF into a joke, and an instant audience laugh trigger.

Why is this not deemed an offence and just as unacceptable to the victims as the crime itself?! References that would not be accepted in more serious talking get actively flaunted in comedy to make the comedian cool, and thid has gone on for years endlessly. It's because folks fear sounding uncool if they criticise comedy - the same reason as why no campaigns or child protectors who can do anything against Blackadder's incitement of and siding with bullying, have ever wanted to, in 32 years since that episode was made. But when you say that about Blackadder, serious minded folks get the point perfectly - it works liks the Emperor's New Clothes, just need to say the visible truth that is not getting said.

So it's the same for stand-up and satirical comedy that goes on at great length and detail about child sbuse. It is another offensive exploitation of the affected folks, an exploitation of them, another act of not caring in a socially including way, a compounding of the actual abuse. It merits anger and moral reaction.

Maurice Frank

Vagabonde again

Filmhouse is repeating the Agnes Varda season it did in 2010. Nice to know that demand recurs. It will be social progress to have films not be organised in the way we grew up with TV working, where something in a past you had missed they would just let stay missed for ever.

Yet can such a positive sentiment exist in the same world as could create the circumstances of Vagabonde ?! Time to repost my review of it, written last time they showed it:

The Filmhouse's season on French director Agnes Varda featured a particularly haunting moody film I had last seen 20 years before on Channel 4. Conversion to big screen intensity gave a terrific edge to that shaky feeling when you relive in full a distant memory. Vagabonde (also billed as Sans Toit Ni Loi, without roof or law) is about a young woman fleeing from all bonds with the society around her, and the emotional impact she makes before and by her death in a farm ditch. Compare watching it when the film was new and the story felt recent, to revisiting it now after so long, when the perspective is now even more moving, that the world has moved on without this character who it gave no place to and is oblivious to the dimmed trace that she ever lived. Just like life has been for how many millions of real folks who deserved better?

As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.

She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.

Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.

This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.

Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.

Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.

Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.

Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.

You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.

If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.

Maurice Frank

critical pedagogy in speaking on autism

Critical Pedagogy. Term coined by education liberator Paulo Freire. (Pedagogy is a big word for teaching approach). Local good critical pedagogues the Ragged University were discussing it today. It's when the learner has just as much say as the teacher, on whether they buy what they are hearing, questioning sources, making their own judgment, it's a dialogue. If the teacher wants their view to carry they have to evidence why on its evidential merits. It's a dialogue of critical thinking. Because whenever purported information is given to you, critical thinking on its merits is always the right response. It's part of being careful.

If someone puts on a talk to tell you about autism, critical pedagogy requires that you get a decent go at discussing whatever you need to about it.

Critical pedagogy shows why it's no good to have a public talk on autism given one-sidedly, with just a few quick single questions at the end, by a set only of articulate and economically successful 20s-30s aged aspie speakers, telling their audience "autistics do this", "autistics do that", with no sources cited, no other evidence than that they personally are autistic and say so. As if they could speak for the entire spectrum, with its breadth of ability range, which clearly they can't. That type of autism promotion is not critical thinking nor subjected to critical thinking.

So watch critically the form and nature of events billed as public descriptions of autism, if you choose to go to any.

Maurice Frank

We disown Autistic Pride Day it has abusive origins

ARGH, Autism Rights Group Highland, was several years ago a partner of ELAS, in the failed venture Autistic Voice. ARGH's leaders threw Autistic Voice away, by taking a huff with anyone who said that differences of need between autistics with or without learning disabilities should ever be stated or admitted to exist! Anyone who wanted any different needs to be stated, they called a wicked "aspie supremacist" + "ableist".

In a SPECTRUM of needs, it's unworkable to say we must always say we all have identical needs, when we obviously don't all have identical strong and weak points. As an objector wrote, ""how do we explain to providers who the people attending particular events are likely to be so that they can provide what is likely to be a good mix of support in the widest sense? "Well, there's this group of people and also there's another group of people and I can't tell you what the difference is.""

Now, ARGH has acted unilaterally, without a word either to ELAS or to the forum + writing group at ANS, + who know how many other grassroots groups - when disastrously + selfishly it has persuaded Scottish government to fly the flag of Autistic Pride Day on its hq tomorrow.

Just a stunt without building up any services: but Autistic Pride Day is evil. It was invented by a cult ruled by purge and terror of disfavour, Aspies For Freedom. They could do it for the UN's World Autism Awareness Day instead.

AFF was created, and run as a dictatorship, by one couple, in Wales, who made a bid to be the world leadership of aspies. They were very ban-happy and turned on many folks in an instant, they even threw out both of the folks who tried to start local AFF groups: one in New York just for naming himself in the credit for a fundraiser he organised, and one in Townsville Australia just for inadvertently asking the couple something they were secretive about. Also, AFF was founded taking a line against medical drugs for us, but within a year its site was proudly announcing connections made with professors who lecture in favour of drugging autistics. Again, just like the pigs in the ending to Animal Farm, when they become indistinguishable from the farmers.

AFF in its original membership form thankfully collapsed in 2013 under its tyranny's own unworkability. But its leaders are still around seeking influence, including through claiming the credit for Autistic Pride Day. Everyone trying to act ethically for any autistics who have ever been socially vulnerable or hurt, has a duty to disown Autistic Pride Day, and through the suicide danger to those folks, the protection principle enforces this.

IT IS A PROTECTION LAW RESPONSIBILITY AGAINST ABUSE TO DISOWN AUTISTIC PRIDE DAY. IT IS ALSO A PROTECTION LAW RESPONSIBILITY AGAINST ABUSE TO BE COMMITTAL NOT NONCOMMITTAL.

be ANGRY for our lost generation

Anthony Hopkins and the suffering caused by unrecognized Asperger’s condition

An angry story on how the news of his diagnosis in his seventies highlights "there are currently many adults with the condition who have never been diagnosed either during childhood or as adults. Many have had, and continue to have difficulties in coping with effects of Asperger's on their daily lives."

Given that lost generations must make any reasoning person angry, hear evidence of a cause of the loss and become angry at a terrible evil idea with a long history. The idea of letting go. The idea, sold by religions to oppressed people for 3000 years in the service of power, that it's psychologically good to live in placid passive acceptance of your life injustices and one-sidedly forgive, and bad to fight back and avenge.

I was diagnosed at 35, in 2003, after aspieness was brought to my awareness by passionately following the anti-school cause, hence reading about causes of school troubles. After my school troubles in the 80s, narrowly still pre-awareness! had resulted in a teenage psychiatry political prisoner experience leaving me in long term fear of and potential threat from that system, I was unsafe ever to go anywhere near doctors about anything psychological. So I would never have been found aspie that way. SO I WOULD BE ONE OF THE UNJUSTLY MISSED, IF I HAD LET GO FORGIVEN AND ACCEPTED.

It is entirely thanks to rejecting the evil of those ideas and believing in anger and fighting back, that I am a found aspie at all. Anger and fighting back, which many evil theorists of mental health still argue against, gave me the total life transformation of aspieness's vindication of my nature and all my school age oppressors' wrongness, protection from any more bad expectations, and much speaking out achieved and noticed.

Maurice Frank

the hounders of men don't know autism

Just mailed to the radio news World At One:

《 Someone you had discussing MeToo said that we can all read non-verbal cues, and have a duty to. She even called this part of being humans not animals.
In effect she has called autistics animals, she has shown a key failure of awareness for us. Inability to read non-verbal cues, or to assume signals, is an explicitly degined part of autism. We can only follow the information we are told explicitly.
What would, or did, her attitude do to justice processes for unrealised autistics before modern autism awareness? What has she shown could still happen where an autistic person under accusation is not articulate about this, or not yet diagnosed, and the lawyers all lack awareness? 》

They had broadcast a discussion of grassroots feelings on the MeToo campaign, asking the very necessary question has it gone too far. Which it always inevitably would - its gender one-sidedness, assuming men are never harrassment victims and should be collectively addressed as villains, always went too far. See this on guilt by accusation.

One of the speakers on its side had said these things, on the abilities to be assumed from everyone showing no knowledge of autism at all. Relative to her, autism has just stayed in its own box and the details of it have never mainstreamed, still. She shows this is dangerous.

Maurice Frank