Showing posts with label Abelism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abelism. Show all posts

Sunday, July 9, 2017

AutisticWhileBlack: Saving Mr. Reginald Cornelius Neli Latson

Image of a framed photo of handsome young African-American Autistic male in a white t-shirt and plaid shirt, smiling at
the camera. the photo is cradled in the hands of his mother. Photo of Neli Latson, credit Washington Post
Some Autism organizations have gained mileage, prestige, status, and accolades from the suffering of young Mr. Reginald Cornelius 'Neli' Latson. Although I silently witnessed a great many self-congratulatory pats on one another's backs in the aftermath of Governor Terry McAuliffe's conditional pardon,  I continue to remind myself each day that while everyone else has moved on to the next national headline, Neli Latson is in the mental health institutional equivalent of a prison, a particular institution with a long history of abuse without proper accountability when he should never have been placed in any prison at all.

We, the community who should be following up his case, who should be demanding a less restrictive environment and pushing for a plan of Trauma Informed Care, have benefitted from his tragedy, abandoned him to his fate, and moved on.

It is only a cruel twist of fate that Arnaldo Rios Soto, whose only misfortune was being the witness to the police shooting his trusted support staff member while that Black professional lay flat on the ground with his hands up, is also now housed in the same inappropriate facility in Florida. Are the only autistic lives that matter those that make the evening news?

If Neli was your son, would you forget him in some psychiatric hell hole after he suffered years of being restrained, pepper sprayed, shot with a Taser, bound in a restraint chair for hours, placed in solitary confinement, and criminalized all for having a mental health crisis during a catastrophic encounter with a police officer.?

The truth of the matter is particularly now, with an Attorney General more interested in reversing the previous administration's criminal justice efforts than taking any human rights violation cases to trial, any autistic child, teen or adult, can end up in Neli's situation, regardless of race. It may happen more frequently to nonwhite families, but these injustices will surely arrive at every home. Like Edgar Allen Poe's Red Death, this type of injustice eventually comes for all.

Do you wish to save Neli Latson? Imagine he's your son and make him matter! Ask Autism and disability organizations why they have not followed up on his case. Ask if Neli is being treated for the trauma induced by putting him in solitary confinement, an act that is considered a form a torture and causes permanent harm to especially the brains of children and teenagers. Demand that organizations follow up on all cases like Neli's and give members updates on whether Trauma Informed Care is part of a recovery plan for Neli, Arnaldo, and others like them. Lobby for Trauma Informed Care to be the standard of care in every institutional setting and group home in your state.

Our community organizations should be following up on every case like Neli's. If they aren't, how can they say they are advocating for our children?

What is Trauma Informed Care?
Per Kenneth Huckshorn and JaniceLebel, "Trauma informed care is grounded in and directed by a thorough understanding of the neurological, biological, psychological, and social effects of trauma and the prevalence of these experiences in persons who seek and receive mental health service."  I first heard of this from an activist friend and colleague, Savannah Nicole Logsdon-Breakstone, who blogs on MH, DD, ASD, and Disability Advocacy on Crack Mirror In Shalott. Savannah also referred me to her mother, who trained in Trauma Informed Care. TIC is something everyone in the Autism community should know about and champion. Here is a short introduction, quoting Alameda County's Trauma Specific Interventions page:

Trauma informed care is about creating a culture built on six core principles:
1. Trauma Understanding: through knowledge and understanding trauma and stress we can act compassionately and take well-informed steps towards wellness.
2. Safety & Security: increasing stability in our daily lives and having core physical and emotional safety needs met can minimize our stress reactions and allow us to focus our resources on wellness.
3. Cultural Humility & Responsiveness – when we are open to understanding cultural differences and respond to them sensitively, we make each other feel understood and wellness is enhanced.
4. Compassion & Dependability – when we experience compassionate and dependable relationships, we re-establish trusting connections with others that fosters mutual wellness.
5. Collaboration& Empowerment – when we are prepared for and given real opportunities to make choices for ourselves and our care, we feel empowered and can promote our own wellness.
6. Resilience & Recovery – when we focus on our strengths and clear steps we can take toward wellness, we are more likely to be resilient and recover.
Our community does not have Trauma informed care models specifically for trauma commonly suffered by autistic children and adults. No one has developed one specifically for autistics and the tragedy of this is the lack of said models result in institutional settings like the Judge Rotenberg Center further traumatizing autistic youth they are supposed to be helping.  The difference between having Trauma informed care systems and not having them, again from Alameda County's excellent page on this:



Systems without Trauma Sensitivity

Misuse or overuse displays of power – keys, security, etc.
Higher rates of staff turnover and low morale
Disempowering and devaluing consumers
Consumers are labeled and pathologized
Focused on what’s wrong with you

Systems with Trauma Informed Care

Recognition that coercive interventions cause trauma and re-traumatization
Awareness/training on re-traumatization and vicarious trauma
Value consumer voice in all aspects of care
All inclusive of survivor’s perspective and recognition of person as a whole
Focus on what has happened to you

The supposed goal of any mental institution is healing. If a place like the JRC and Neli's present placement in an AdvoServ facility are using methods that are effective, then those housed there would improve, and there would be a constant movement to less restrictive environments. This is not the case, and client abuse, high staff turnover, and patients housed for years with no improvement are the reality. So something is not working, and that means better, more humane, more inclusive methods of healing trauma must happen.

Please speak up and step up. Start emailing and calling organizations and reaching out to Neli's family. Don't forget him because the media has and he is now used as a symbolic object to show proof of success in advocacy.

I haven't.

Save Mr. Reginald Corneliaus Neli Latson, #AutisticWhileBlack.  #FreeNeli. Give him back what quality of life he has left.

He could be your son.

==================
Resources
The Story of Neli Latson:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-in-virginia-a-cruel-and-unusual-punishment-for-autism/2014/11/14/9d7f6108-6c3b-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html?utm_term=.fdda40a8442e
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2014/11/making-neli-latson-matter-invisible.html
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2014/12/on-ruth-marcuss-latest-op-ed-on-neli.html
https://storify.com/kerima_cevik/freeneli-1
https://www.change.org/p/terry-mcauliffe-grant-a-pardon-to-reginald-cornelius-neli-latson

 On the horrors of Solitary Confinement:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-solitary-confinement-hurts-the-teenage-brain/373002/
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/serendipupdate/lonely-madness-effects-solitary-confinement-and-social-isolation-mental-and-emotional
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole
https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/06/29/solitary-confinement-crushes-any-chance-of-true-recovery/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/what-does-solitary-confinement-do-to-your-mind/
http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=mjlr

Unjust Incarceration and Solitary Confinement While Black:
On Trauma Informed Care:

Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone's Blog

On Abusive Institutional Methods - The Judge Rotenberg Center

Via Shain Neumeier, esq & AutisticHoya
S.Neumeier via ASAN:
S. Neumeier
S. Neumeier
For Your Own Good: Coercive Care In the Lives of Marginalized People
AutisticHoya
NBC News

On Abuses In AdvoServ Centers in Florida and Maryland
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Monday, July 3, 2017

Why Don't You Accept Your Child's Autism? Yes, But....

"Why Don't You ... Yes, But" is a mind game listed in Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Bernie, MD. It is a transactional interaction that is in effect an equivocation where one party begins a sentence with "Why don't you____ and the respondent answers "Yes, but....."

 Waiting for genuine Autism acceptance is like waiting for Godot. If I shouted "Why don't you accept autism?" into the grand canyon of predominantly white, well-to-do autism parents whose voices dominate this conversation, the echoed response would instead be "Yes, but..."

Book cover for Games People Play the
Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis,
showing two black chess pieces, a queen an
a pawn in black. The book is red with  the
title and author's name in white lettering.
 lettering. Image credit: Google books
A few months ago I saw a parent who commands quite a following among special needs parents launch into her latest effort to "cure or reduce" her adult son's autism. Her son speaks, but she has ensured he has very little say in the matter of "fixing"  his own state of being. 

 Speaking for her son and about him without him, she declares that neurodiversity is a fine thing for other autistics but her son needs the autism "fixed."  I take this to mean, in translation, that how she really feels is that there have always been parts of her son's visible disability she cannot cope with, therefore she despises autism and wants the autism parts "fixed." Her plan in this instance involves resolving his "gut" issues. I read the entire online lament, and shook my head.

This is in part an indication of the failure of Steve Silberman efforts through his book NeuroTribes to actually positively change public perception of autism. The book was not just supposed to make a profit. It was meant to explain the history of autism as a disability, properly define the often misused term neurodiversity, define autism's place in an inclusive society, and highlight how acceptance of that disability opens the door to accommodations and supports that allow autistic people to navigate a more justly designed and therefore more inclusive society.

Because the book is in large part an expansion of his "Geek Syndrome" essay the history told and the characters in those histories are limited to what will enhance the historical narrative for his predominantly white, higher income, target audience. Despite its popularity, with very few exceptions, it failed to connect with that intended target audience beyond parents like the one I've described in the previous paragraph. 

 These parents simply misconstrue the terms acceptance and neurodiversity without changing their view of autism as a disability. Upper middle class to wealthy parents continue the same medical model narrative of excluding their autistic loved ones from the neurodivergent label or at best, making a compartmentalized adhoc acceptance of neurodiversity as they redefine it. It is the "neurodiversity is great, but those autistics are..."  the "not like my child," trope's latest variant.

Unaware of their own ableism and fiercely defensive when called out about how ablelist and boundary crossing the broadcasting of a disabled offspring's health concerns or their opinions of how much they choose to accept their offspring are,  they actually believe they understand neurodivergence and acceptance when they clearly do not. There is no qualifier in acceptance of the entirety of a loved one's disability. 
Book cover of NeuroTribes red
and black lettering with the book title
and author's name in read an subtile
except the word Autism in black.
Image of a leafy plant with birds and
butterflies of various colors and varies
on or around it. Image credit Goodreads
Many parents believe that the blame for anxiety disorders should be placed at autism's door. In fact, anxiety develops in part in reaction to parental intolerance of stimming and other self-soothing behaviors whose purpose is to overcome a hostile environment. Stimming is short for self-stimulatory behavior. 

 What I find saddest about these parents is that to them the solution is never found in first ensuring that they aren't triggering issues in their own children, everything that goes wrong must be autism. While is it fine to set goals and presume competence, gaslighting your autistic loved one into conforming to a parent's expectation of what would be the most acceptable version of their autistic child for their own lack of embarrassment and comfort levels isn't the point. 

The primary requirement for autism acceptance is not saying things like "I accept my child but I don't accept his autism." Acceptance means the totality of a disability is accepted. Then challenges that are actually the result of the disability can be looked at and solutions can be sought to address these challenges. If a parent said to their child who lost a leg in a car accident that they loved them but not their body with a missing leg, everyone around them would be horrified. But no one makes a sound when a mother laments that neurodiversity is a fine thing but now she needs to continue working on her son's gut problem, which may cure him.

 when  I ask, do you accept that your child's neurodivergence is a disability? The answer should never be the equivocation game "Yes, But..."

Did Mr. Silberman's book have a positive impact on its target audience? Look around. Are there any sharp increases in parent allies against ableism understanding the key to lifetime improvements in the quality of life for their autistic offspring requires less time trying to cure their guts and more time fighting for their civil liberties and rights to access and accommodation in society? I'll help you out. No, there are not.

Meanwhile, this particular parent, cheered on by her fanbase and without her adult son's consent, continues her efforts to rid herself of her son's autism which she accepts but doesn't accept, but hey, at least she now uses the word neurodiversity when speaking of how much she hates it.

If that was worth the price of excluding nonwhite and non-cis histories from NeuroTribe's narrative of autism, I hope it was worth it.

References:
Games People Play Explained:
https://www.amazon.com/Games-People-Play-Transactional-Analysis/dp/0345410033
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

The Geek Syndrome Article
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

The Problem With NeuroTribes:
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2016/01/autistic-while-black-erasure-of-blacks.html
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2016/05/how-not-to-endorse-anthology.html



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Friday, May 12, 2017

Autism, Accommodation for Disability, and Traumatic Normalization

Mu and his adult big sister in front of the Mother and Child statue in downtown Greenbelt when Mu was six years old.
Image of a child in a yellow winter coat and black slacks leaning on a young woman in a green winter jacket and dark jeans
both have their backs to the camera and are facing a giant sculpture of a mother holding a small child. ©Kerima Cevik
I try to stay out of autism parenting arguments in the community. My son doesn't fit the mold of those parenting issues being debated, and such discussions only end with my being furious at the lengths parents go to try and force normalization in their children the way Cinderella's stepmother tried to force a glass slipper that clearly wouldn't fit on Cindy's stepsisters. But sometimes speaking up saves lives and may change things for the better. So I'm going to write about an aspect of autism parenting.

Someone on social media decided to post a question. They asked if it was better to make an autistic child comfortable than to challenge them. The inquirer followed by saying this was a point of heavy debate in the autism community and someone had advised them that it was better to make their child comfortable implying that parent posting the question didn't agree with the idea of comfort over challenge.

The entire question was wrong because it was founded on the idea that normalization of an autistic child, by any means necessary, is the right ultimate goal when curing them is not possible. This ignores the reality that autism is a disability that requires, by law, just as much adaptation, accommodation, inclusion, and support as any physical disability would.

Autism is a lifelong disability. Autism is not "curable" by ABA. Enforced behavioral modification simply masks the outward expression of autistic behavior but can cause residual harm that presents in post-traumatic psychiatric disability. Parents often believe that the surfacing of mental health concerns in their autistic children expressed in anxiety disorders and PTSD are caused by autism when in fact they are part and parcel of a lifetime of no accommodation for their offspring's disability, traumatic enforcement of normalization in the guise of parental and professional "challenge over comfort" attitudinal ableism and treatment-related stressors accumulating over time.

Back to the question. Is it better to make an autistic child comfortable or challenge them?

What the hell does that mean?

Where daily life, care of self, care of the personal environment, and overcoming bars to access and disparities in everything from health services to educational equity are challenges which already exist for nonspeaking autistic youth, creating the "making them comfortable v challenging them" question as some adversarial issue dividing the autism community skews the autism conversation away from the true question.

Mu, in a gray t-shirt and gray shorts, Hispanic presenting
male with curly black hair and light brown skin uses
his AAC device, an iPad with TouchChat HD,
while sitting on our deck. ©Kerima Cevik
Why isn't the question "why hasn't the entire autism stakeholder community met and worked out the problem of how therapeutic support can be given without doing further harm to the autistic consumer, particularly when we now know that at least one generation of autistic adults have been permanently traumatized by how therapies are provided now?

When parents set incorrectly high expectations and later find they can't normalize their offspring to their satisfaction they begin a cycle of frustration based abuse that ends in tragedy.  Autistic disability rights activists discuss their own lifelong traumatic treatment experiences in the hope of sparing today's autistic children the long term damage they must live with because of these attempts to normalize them instead of providing the accommodations and supports needed to improve autonomy. If autistic parents were told their child had a physical disability that required they use assistive technology equipment like a wheelchair or cane, they would not then feel they must challenge their children to move through their environment without a wheelchair or cane. They would instead fight for the best equipment available for their offspring. Fundamental to the rift in the understanding of what autism accommodation, services, assistive tech, and inclusion should look like is this incorrect concept that autistic children must be forced to adapt to everything. This pressure increases the more a child can pass for what is viewed as normal. It increases if a child who might be able to communicate at a much higher level with an assistive technology device can produce single or two-word utterances. The goal with any other nonspeaking population is communication through AAC. With autistic nonspeakers, it is forcing two-word utterances and declaring their incompetence.

It is important not to conflate challenging a child after accommodation for a disability and forcing a child to a parent's view of what a normal person looks like. Forcing normalization is a clear sign that parent does not understand the scope of what encompasses autism as a disability and that is dangerous. Acceptance of disability is not lip service during Autism month where we can say we accept our children while compartmentalizing away the reality that they are disabled. It is critical to grasp that we are parenting disabled people. It is imperative that we be certain our children who can pass for typical are assessed for auditory, sensory, and cognitive processing disorders often missed in diagnosis because the child presents as "high functioning. It is critical to push for assessments that do not exist right now that can measure the same auditory, sensory, and cognitive processing disorders in nonspeaking autistic children and adults. Not knowing if a nonspeaking person processes what is said to them in a typical way is a major bar to any treatment, therapeutic support or communication support they need as disabled clients.

This is not a question of "comfort v challenge." It is a question of supporting decision making, educating your children about the scope of their disability and how to keep their mental health intact by using accommodations and assistive technology to support their processing and navigating a world not built for them. It means allowing coping strategies to remain in place as long as they aren't self-injurious.  It means actively seeking humane solutions to self-injurious behavior. It means when aggression occurs, understanding whether the culprit is something like your offspring being in that eight percent of epilepsy patients reacting to their medications with so-called Keppra raging.  One diligent autism mom tracked her daughter's rages and realized over time that the culprit was environmental and in fact an additive in McDonald;s fries. Once the culprit was discovered, the young woman was calm and happy.

Yet we parents are being taught that everything society considers wrong with our offspring is the fault of autism. More lives have been destroyed by this attitude than I can count.

This journey isn't about how embarrassed parents might feel that our children are disabled. It isn't about how things look to others. It is about preparing our disabled children to survive and navigate our world with as little stress and as much independence as possible. It is also about teaching them that society is also interdependent, and it is perfectly natural to need help and supports to safely navigate their lives.

Let us begin by understanding our own offspring as much as we are able. Let us realize everything we try to do with them on the excuse we are doing something for their own good has consequences.
Let us get our own headspace together so we can mentor confident, happy, autistic adults who know they are disabled and are fine with who they are.

Peace

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Thursday, September 1, 2016

Expanding On David Perry's 'Bad Disability Journalism: Autism as 'Genetic Devil''

Fred Dickey uses the smell of Bleach as subliminal messaging throughout
his train wreck of an article on autism. Pictured are Clorox and a bucket
from their #BleachItAway campaign 
I need to make some points about the heinous article professor David Perry discusses in  one of his blog posts. I chose to share it on the Autism Wars community page on Facebook. The discussion on the post is beginning to veer from the point of professor Perry's critique and my original reason for sharing it. So let me break this down from my personal point of view.

The goal of  journalist Fred Dickey is calculated and apparent. He’s written in this style (evil autie trope) nearly 10 years after numerous protests organized by autistic disability rights activists shut down everything from the infamous “ransom notes” campaign launched by New York University's Child Study Center (NYU CSC) to a series of horrific PSAs from misguided organizations like Autism Speaks. The media knows better than to present this dangerous view of autism by now. So we must ask ourselves why Fred Dickey wrote about autism this way at this moment.

Less than one year after the publication of two comprehensive histories of autism, the use of 1950's tropes to characterize disability could be in part Mr. Dickey not researching autism as a disability but rather imposing his personal ableism regarding autistic people into his writing. Mr. Dickey's goal appears to have been the deliberate sensationalization of a family crisis situation involving a vulnerable autistic 10-year-old and his overwhelmed mother. To the comments I've read on making this a teachable moment for Mr. Dickey, I sincerely doubt he is open to teaching nor is that a viable use of time and energy.  He stands to benefit from any sort of written attention  in terms of driving  traffic to his article and the chance to write more on this topic and do further damage. My opinion is such efforts are a zero sum game.

This is an election year that includes great pushes to pass some frankly terrifying attempts at mental health reform by regressing to draconian systems of care, so Dickey's attempt at painting the worst portrait possible may also have a hidden agenda supporting the case for funding the return of the mental institution model that locks disabled community members away from society to be victimized behind prison-like conditions.

Mr. Dickey may have also wanted to anger enough people to force a reaction, and by that reaction, whether  well-intentioned parents trying to educate him in autism awareness or angry activists calling him out on this atrocious piece of work, would serve to make this single article more prominent and more likely to facilitate Dickey being called upon to pen more controversial articles. Mr. Dickey may be using the Trump “strategy” of using shock value to gain attention. Unfortunately, his victim here is Rene Camacho, an autistic 10-year-old. No one should be allowed to do this to a child, and no parent should allow it.

The most effective protest that can be given in reaction to Dickey's sorry excuse for an article is to ignore posting any reaction to it or Fred Dickey and reach out to Rene Camacho and his mother instead since Dickey used them as props in his fake American horror story. Caring about the autistic victim and his clueless family is both the right thing to do and  the moral obligation of the entire community. Reaching out and offering to educate and help the mother, son, and siblings could save their lives.

But it is also important to point out inconsistencies in this story. This kind of deconstruction of destructive content demonizing disabled family members in crisis can go a long way to correct the way other vulnerable autism families view them and reboot the entire train wreck into positive support for the autistic people in crisis being victimized by such rubbish. Here are a few things that caught my attention.

1. How does a woman so overwhelmed she cannot keep furniture or cleaning fluids safe in the house and needing to constantly disinfect because of her son's alleged behavior, have the energy to establish and run a nonprofit that repairs the property damage done by autistic kids in homes?

2. If this Rene's behavior is as described in the article, why is there no mention of his school life and how these behavioral challenges impact it? This would indicate that Mr. Dickey couldn’t find any facts to embellish there, making it conspicuous by its absence. If Rene does well in a school setting then his problems are related to his home environment.

3. The mother in this article claims to have repeatedly discussed her son’s inappropriate use of cloth towels in the bathroom with him, but claims because of her son’s autism, she has now chosen to not have towels in the bathrooms. Two interesting things not intended by Fred Dickey to come out here do once we are able to move past our justifiable outrage at the disclosure of the worst moments and private challenges of a disabled child.

     a. Because she discusses having repeatedly told Rene what the appropriate use of bathroom towels are, we can conclude that Rene has verbal speech, and sadly, his mother and whoever continues the therapies mentioned in the article have not tested Rene for an auditory processing disorder. They have simply assumed he is being noncompliant because they presume his incompetence.

     b. It never dawns on Ms. Camacho that her son Rene may be trying to tell her that something about the toilet paper she’s supplying for example that it is causing him discomfort, and she needs to change her brand of toilet paper. She probably has never asked him if he is having an allergic or sensory reaction to the toilet paper in the bathroom. Because her fixes are based on the presumption of Rene’s incompetence, she sees her own son as behaviorally static, and she will never accept any answer to the question of why a particular behavior is happening in the context of agency. The fact that Rene might be trying to solve a problem by behaving in what those around him view as a maladaptive way requires the presumption of his competence and respect of his agency in his own life.

4. Dickey describes situations like the replacement of a broken window glass with plexiglass, the uprooting of a tree in the context of the family not being able to enjoy their own preferred object and activities because of the autistic member. He does not discuss the changes needed to adapt Rene’s home to make it accessible an accommodate his disability. Had the changes in the house been approached from the standpoint of ADA accommodation, it  would have given a qualitative difference to the article’s narrative.

5. Rene’s sisters have not been taught to engage him as a sibling. They have been taught to blame every unhappiness on their brother including the absence of their father in their lives. His activities to seek sensory input are viewed as behavioral problems rather than attempts to gain accurate input from an environment he is clearly having challenges navigating . No one is educating his sisters about his disability except to scapegoat and victim blame. He is seen as destructive rather than a disabled young man trying to gain vestibular control in order to focus. Someone needs to reach out to these people and educate the lot of them. This is happening in San Diego, CA. I hope this can be made to happen.

6. Ms. Camacho’s husband was in the U.S. Navy, where the nature of duty assignments involves long absences from family and the military spouse is expected to carry on alone. Protracted duty assignments are statistically the cause of a large rate of military marriages ending in divorce, particularly in destabilizing moments for the military member, such as transitioning out of active duty military life, which was mentioned in the article. So the ending of the marriage here being entirely laid on the shoulders of an autistic ten-year-old is overly simplistic and dangerous, even if it gives Rene's mother an excuse beyond her control for the failure of the relationship.

7. The most important trope in the article, Dickey’s use of Ms. Camacho’s anecdote of her father wishing to call a priest to exorcise the autism from his grandson should be a red flag to everyone reading this. It harkens to incidents like the death of Torrance Cantrell who suffered and died at age 8 because his mother's church was trying to expel the demon autism from him. Demonizing, othering, and reaching for unhealthy solutions to a young man whose had no outlet to organize sensory input, navigate his home environment, and interact without ableism with his siblings and parents is not going to end well. That is justification for outrage against Dickey. But he is truly unimportant. Those he used to gain a moment's attention in a content laden Internet are the people that matter.

 References/Resources
-----------------------------
Bad Disability Journalism: Autism as 'Genetic Devil' by David Perry
http://www.thismess.net/2016/08/bad-disability-journalism-autism-as.html 
Disability Community Condemns Autism Speaks
http://autisticadvocacy.org/2009/10/disability-community-condemns-autism-speaks/  
The Ransom Notes Affair: When Neurodiversity Came of Age
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1065/1254
Exorcising 'Genetic Devil' Autism: The Murder of Torrance Cantrell:
http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-murder-of-torrance-cantrell-towards.html
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