HOW TO HELP SAVE AUTISTICS' LIVES.
Around five months ago, I read with sadness, about a friend of a friend's who was homosexual who committed suicide. His reason? Internalised homophobia. Similarly, tonight, I watched a video where a member of my neuro-tribe talked of autistic people committing suicide and what the motivation behind it was.
I remember, when I was twelve, going to bed at night and wishing I wouldn't wake up the next morning and greeting each new day with, "Oh, hell, another day." That year was also the year I had recurrent bouts of asthma and had to deal with a specialist doctor who might have been knowledgeable about respiratory illnesses but had no concept of mental illness. I remembered him saying that my cough was a bit of a habit, which was a very poor way of expressing two things, a) if we use the example of a small kid who gets pains in the stomach when their parents separate, they don't have a physical explanation for the pain. And, b) sometimes people can have a nervous cough, just like a nervous laugh, so the cough may have a biological cause but it may also be psychosomatic.
What I needed was not someone to tell me to ignore bullies but someone to advocate for me and say, "Look, you're not going back to that high school. Maybe, I could ask your Japanese teacher to give you some lessons outside school hours and have some tuition in maths and the like, but no, you should be homeschooled." The attitude of the time was akin to accusing somebody with PTSD from war service to get back out into the war zone!
What actually is harmful for autistic's mental health is the push for a cure and I would rate it as poorly as gay conversion therapy clinics. Why? Well, gay conversion therapy clinics put a conditional love spin on the LGBTIQA community and this comes mainly from organisations that claim that God's love is unconditional yet qualify it by saying, as long as you're not LGBTIQA. Just like LGBTIQA people are vulnerable, so too are autistic people. What do most people want in their lives? To be loved and accepted for who they are. It is much the same as in Nazi Germany where Hitler declared the ideal specimen to be a male who was over six feet tall, had blonde hair and blue eyes, and not even Gregor Mendel's experiments with plants could have convinced a genocidal dictator that blonde hair and blue eyes are recessive genes and even Hitler himself was short with a small build and had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes (evidently he hated himself). What is being pushed, in the push for a cure is that the perfect person is the neuro-typical, cis-het individual. It clearly doesn't matter that without autistic people, we would not have light bulbs, electricity, radios, and many other things that we take for granted, so why would you want to take us away?
We may stim, we may be quirky, we may be many things, but autistic people have the potential to amaze. What hurts me the most is that one of the people who believes a cure would be wonderful is my "mother". She is wilfully ignorant of the fact that I am happy being autistic and that it is better to accept me than to want me to be like someone I'm not.
So don't assume that autistic people want to be cured. It's like assuming that someone with brown eyes would rather have blue or vice versa, and wanting to cure autism is as bad, if not worse than trying to force a left-handed person become right-handed.