Month: August 2017

It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
  
“Nope.”
 
“Pardon?”
  
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
  
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
  
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
  
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
  
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett (via cat-sophia)
Source: cat-sophia

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

redmagus77:

kaylapocalypse:

thatadult:

The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…

My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”

“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment

The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.

But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.

alliecat-person:

Hi, autistic tumblr. 

I’ve noticed that some of you are telling other people with disabilities that they shouldn’t use the term “special interests” to describe their personal experiences.

This is not a good look. It’s especially bad when you’re telling this to @actuallyadhd. A few facts about the blog’s moderator:

-She has AD/HD (duh).

-She has been involved with the autistic advocacy community as an ally and “cousin” for literally decades. (If you don’t know what a cousin is, read up on some of the earlier history. Our community has been around for a while!)

-She volunteers her time to answering questions from people with AD/HD, a population that includes many autistic people.

Yet some have you have chosen to fill her inbox with complaints and mark her as an enemy because she holds the autistic community’s historic position: that the words autistic people use to describe our experiences can be used by everyone. By doing so, autism becomes less stigmatized and medicalized.

Can you stop, maybe?

Yesterday an ADHD ask blog i follow said that special interest is for anybody to use, and it isn’t autism exclusive. They use it in place of hyperfixation every time, even when referring to other people who have already used the word hyperfixation to describe their interest. I told them it isn’t okay since they’re allistic and they told me that i’m wrong and it isn’t autism exclusive but i thought that the term special interest IS autism exclusive!! am i wrong???

karalianne:

k-pagination:

chavisory:

autism-asks:

Special Interest is exclusive to autistic people as we have been pathologized for our special interests.

Hyperfixation is the community wide term, and was coined specifically so people with ADHD could talk about the shared experiences around having hyperfixations/special interests without appropriating special interests.

– Os

That “special interest” is autism-specific and people with ADHD should say “hyperfixation” instead is not a consensus of the autistic community, and the human brain is not actually configured according to our political distinctions in terminology.

My opinion is that the ADHD blog (whose author I know personally) was correct, and autism-asks is incorrect.

Neurodivergent people should be able to use the words that accurately describe what we are experiencing.  (FWIW, I am autistic, I do not have ADHD.)  Some people with ADHD experience interests or passions in a way that isn’t substantially distinguishable from the way in which autistic people experience this phenomenon.  They may not be pathologized for it in exactly the same way, but that isn’t what determines whether the experience itself is pretty much the same thing.

And like a LOT of people are diagnosed with ADHD (whether correctly or not) before they’re diagnosed with autism (whether instead of or in addition to ADHD).  Their “hyperfixations” do not suddenly become “special interests” when their diagnosis changes.

And a lot of people who don’t qualify for any specific diagnosis experience isolated features of autism, because autism is caused by the combined effects of lots of common genes.  90% of mothers of autistic kids, whether they’re autistic themselves or not, experience some kind of sensory processing anomaly.

They deserve to be able to call those experiences what they are, in a way that enables them to make themselves understood.  Nobody is helped by falsely separating out the allowed language for who is experiencing what, if they are substantially the same thing.

I do not know how things got this way, but I think some folks could stand to…learn to appreciate that some neighborhoods of the autistic and ADHD communities think of these topics a little differently than they do.  People with ADHD who subscribe to this way of talking about them are not in the wrong.

(And some of us with autism hate the term “special interest.”  Honestly, ADHD’ers can have it for all I care.)

I am kind of done with gatekeeping tbh going on like… My opinion is to agree that the ADHD blog was correct. I’m autistic and have ADHD so like… Hi, yes, defs not a consensus in all parts of the autistic community!

Also, “hyperfixation” means exactly the same thing as “special interest” (just look at what it’s been used for in the psych literature. And “hyperfixation” was proposed as an umbrella term by a Tumblrite in 2015, so people could use it in place of hyperfocus, special interest, obsession, etc. My problem with that is that it is not accurate, and can lead to some misunderstandings. If you write about your “hyperfixation,” do you mean your current special interest or the thing you’re hyperfocusing on right now? They are two different things. Your special interest isn’t necessarily the thing you are hyperfocusing on, though it’s more likely than not. But even so, talking about “breaking hyperfixation” could mean breaking out of hyperfocus OR it could mean changing your special interest.

I like accuracy. Umbrella terms don’t help with accuracy.

Yesterday an ADHD ask blog i follow said that special interest is for anybody to use, and it isn’t autism exclusive. They use it in place of hyperfixation every time, even when referring to other people who have already used the word hyperfixation to describe their interest. I told them it isn’t okay since they’re allistic and they told me that i’m wrong and it isn’t autism exclusive but i thought that the term special interest IS autism exclusive!! am i wrong???

alliecat-person:

chavisory:

autism-asks:

Special Interest is exclusive to autistic people as we have been pathologized for our special interests.

Hyperfixation is the community wide term, and was coined specifically so people with ADHD could talk about the shared experiences around having hyperfixations/special interests without appropriating special interests.

– Os

That “special interest” is autism-specific and people with ADHD should say “hyperfixation” instead is not a consensus of the autistic community, and the human brain is not actually configured according to our political distinctions in terminology.

My opinion is that the ADHD blog (whose author I know personally) was correct, and autism-asks is incorrect.

Neurodivergent people should be able to use the words that accurately describe what we are experiencing.  (FWIW, I am autistic, I do not have ADHD.)  Some people with ADHD experience interests or passions in a way that isn’t substantially distinguishable from the way in which autistic people experience this phenomenon.  They may not be pathologized for it in exactly the same way, but that isn’t what determines whether the experience itself is pretty much the same thing.

And like a LOT of people are diagnosed with ADHD (whether correctly or not) before they’re diagnosed with autism (whether instead of or in addition to ADHD).  Their “hyperfixations” do not suddenly become “special interests” when their diagnosis changes.

And a lot of people who don’t qualify for any specific diagnosis experience isolated features of autism, because autism is caused by the combined effects of lots of common genes.  90% of mothers of autistic kids, whether they’re autistic themselves or not, experience some kind of sensory processing anomaly.

They deserve to be able to call those experiences what they are, in a way that enables them to make themselves understood.  Nobody is helped by falsely separating out the allowed language for who is experiencing what, if they are substantially the same thing.

I do not know how things got this way, but I think some folks could stand to…learn to appreciate that some neighborhoods of the autistic and ADHD communities think of these topics a little differently than they do.  People with ADHD who subscribe to this way of talking about them are not in the wrong.

(And some of us with autism hate the term “special interest.”  Honestly, ADHD’ers can have it for all I care.)

Hi, autism-asks. Are you familiar with the history of the autistic community, particularly our inclusion of Autistic Cousins (ACs), which includes many people with AD/HD?

I’d like to reiterate that the person who runs the blog in question has long-standing involvement with the autistic community. 

Many parts of the autistic community dislike this kind of language policing because it needlessly separates our experiences from other people, including other disabled people. This does not advance our interests of de-pathologizing autism.

You are entitled to your opinion, but you don’t speak for every autistic person and you don’t have the right to tell people with longstanding community involvement that they are wrong to use certain words.