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Month: January 2019

The Social Model and the Mainstream School

The Social Model and the Mainstream School

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Anyone who reads this blog regularly has probably noticed by now that I spend a lot of time talking about educational placement.  It is a very important topic, because the suitability of an educational placement is going to have a major influence on an individual’s future.  I certainly believe that my successful placement in a distance-learning high school program is responsible for many of my own achievements in adulthood. Basically, my opinion about educational placement is that we need choices. …

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Mental Health and Adult Outcomes

Mental Health and Adult Outcomes

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Today, the community of autistic adults is in a state of crisis.  Many of us are unemployed.  Moreover, those of us who do have jobs tend to have marginal, precarious experiences of employment: we are often hired in under-paying jobs for which we are probably over-qualified, and many of us go from one such job to another in a continuous, revolving door.  Many of us are only able to secure part-time work. Nor are our challenges limited to the domain…

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Neurodiversity and “Levels of Functioning”

Neurodiversity and “Levels of Functioning”

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Many people seem to have adopted a curious middle-ground in the neurodiversity debate: many of us will readily concede that so-called “high-functioning” autistic people should be considered within the neurodiversity paradigm, but will still argue that the pathology paradigm should be applied to so-called “low-functioning” people.  We’ll concede that “high-functioning” autistics represent a valuable form of human diversity and that they should be accepted for who they are, but we’ll keep looking for a “cure” to so-called “low-functioning” autism. I…

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Interoception and Introspection

Interoception and Introspection

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There’s an interesting tension in the autism world between research on interoception and on autistic people’s self-reports, on our introspections. Interoception is our ability to be aware of our own bodies, and some research suggests that interoceptive abilities are reduced in autism (Mul et al., 2018; Palser et al., 2018).  Interoception is believed to be related to alexithymia (Mul et al., 2018; Shah et al., 2016), awareness of one’s own emotional states, which also appears to be reduced in autism…

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