In my last post, I compared my Asperger's son with my severely autistic little guy and said I don't find many similarities. Eric is brilliant, handsome, very talented if a bit quirky. He'll go far in life. Ryan, on the other hand, has a number of comorbidities with his autism. He is ill.
I want to thank Sugah over at The Thinking Mom's Revolution for putting this video up. I have had words with folks in the neurodiversity crowd who talk about what a "gift" autism is and how saying we want a cure is saying we want to be rid of them. Those who I am able to have a respectful discussion with tell me my son's autism is not a tragedy, he "probably isn't in as much pain" as I think, and they have overcome so much having autism.
These high-functioning people are the folks you see testifying at Congressional Hearings...the result being ill-informed people saying we want to label our kids to get services, that they're just a little odd socially, that autism has always been with us in these numbers, but it's just diagnosed better. We know better than that, don't we?
I don't want to make light of Asperger's. I realize many Aspies have been bullied, mistreated, abused and have had a harder path than us NT folks. But it is not the same struggle as these kids you'll see in the video. They are in very real pain.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is the case, a video must be a thousand times that. Autism is different from Asperger's...there is room for both on the DSM-V. Watch the video below if you don't believe me.
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