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Describing autistics or anyone with a developmental disorder by using pejoratives indicating intellectual deficits is insane. The standards were set in order to provide support to racial and class hierarchies, and they were never meant to provide anyone with an aid. Belief in intellectual superiority just doesn't make sense.
Mental health agencies are overwhelmingly using the request for aid to register and discriminate against classes much more than providing any type of assistance.
Worst of all, autistics are seen as un-empathetic. That's the most pathetic expression of modern cultural bias and the most dangerous attribution for any group of people.
People do have a variety of differences and even deficits according to standards (I am someone who has many)but traditionally mainstream society has proven itself incapable of differentiating between the compassionate act of helping others and the degrading of people who need different types of help and/or accommodation outside of the mainstream.
Autism is a developmental disorder which can't be identified by pathology nor can that be the basis for autism treatments.
Reguading the rights of the "mentally deficient":
"Our most basic human rights which we are guaranteed by the United States Constitution - rights even granted to killers, rapists, and terrorists, are denied to people who have been labeled "mentally-ill." The burden of proof for involuntary commitment is based solely on "probable cause", "reasonable grounds", or "a reason to believe" that there is a danger to self or others. By contrast, for a criminal to be convicted of a crime and incarcerated, his violation of the law has to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."David @ mentalhealthstigma.com
Concerning how people seeking different types of aid have traditionally been judged from a perspective which is according to state-sponsored morality:
Thomas Szasz
Mental illness: psychiatry's phlogiston
" While alchemy changed into chemistry, the soul changed into the mind and sins became sicknesses (of the mind). The early alienists (physicians who claimed special expertise regarding the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses) frankly acknowledged this metamorphosis. However, instead of recognising that it was an early manifestation of a move from a religious to a secular outlook on human behaviour, they attributed it to scientific advances and believed that a set of new brain diseases had been discovered which they called "mental diseases".
AND:
"Domination-Submission
The typical mental patient is a conscious adult who has not been declared legally incompetent. "Seriously mentally disordered patients neither lack insight, nor is their competency impaired to the degree previously believed," writes George Hoyer, a professor at the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromsoe, Norway.(4) Moreover, mental patients are regularly considered competent to do some things, but not others, for example, competent to live independently, but not competent to reject psychiatric drug treatment; competent to stand trial, but not competent to represent themselves in court; competent to vote, but not competent to leave the hospital.(2) "
AND:
"Paradoxically, the old, prescientific-religious explanation of human behaviour is more faithful to the facts than the modern, scientific-psychiatric explanation of it. When man invents the Perfect Judge and calls him "God," he creates an arbiter who does not distinguish between two kinds of conduct-one rational, for which man is responsible, and another irrational, for which he is not. Being held responsible for our actions is what renders us fully human: it is the glory with which God endows everyone, and the burden He imposes on everyone. Erroneous explanations of the material world lead to physical catastrophes, false explanations of the human condition, to moral catastrophes."
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Concerning the ways in which psychiatry and psychology were designed to identify control minorities according to the hierarchy of racial myth:
Psychiatry: the use and abuse of
"Psychiatry arose about 300 years ago from two main sources: the need to control and put away "lunatics" who were disturbing the social order in European cities, and from a growing interest in the study of the "mind" in European medical circles. Since both psychology and psychiatry developed together at a time when the powerful myths of racism were being refined and integrated into European culture, racist thinking became an integral part of the system of psychiatry that Europe developed and exported around the globe (source: Fernando, Forensic Pyschiatry, Race and Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1998). Even the U.S. was not immune.Hailed as the founder of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) theorized that a cure for having black skin "would add to the happiness of the Negro" as it was not God but nature that marked the black man --that his blackness is "a sign not of his congenital sin but of his congenital illness." (Szas, Thomas: The Manufacture of Madness)."
The contributions of Benjamin Rush
"During the 1790s, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, for example, explained skin color—specifically, blackness—as a product of diet, custom, and disease. In his 1792 address to the American Philosophical Society, he argued that blackness was a product of leprosy, which caused the skin to become "black, thick and greasy." The disease "induces a morbid sensibility in the nerves," an "insensibility [that] belongs in a peculiar manner to the Negroes." "They bear," he elaborated, "surgical operations much better than white people, and what would be a cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard." Charles White concurred. "The thicker" the skin, he opined, "the duller must be the sense of touch." Little wonder, then, "that Negroes have not that lively and delicate sense of touch that the whites have." Such deliberations suggest that scholars of skin and touch who tend to treat them in the same breath do so for good reason. As the philosopher Steven Connor explained, touch is—and was—distinguished by its "two-sidedness." A quality especially apparent in the hand, "the active or formative faculty of the skin" means that skin both touches and is touched."
A general continuity marked proslavery thinking and some antebellum southern medical thinking about race and skin. Black skin was commonly associated with insensitivity, and the growing demand for slave labor lent the stereotype an important currency.
The proslavery ideologues Josiah Priest (a New Yorker), George R. Gliddon, and Josiah Nott all concluded that blacks naturally had thick skins, a thickness that had nothing to do with Rush's environmental explanation. Gliddon even suggested their "comparatively thick" skin was really an indication of "an extra skin in the negro." Some southern physicians, though, stressed the nervous system in their thinking about black hapticity. Samuel Cartwright echoed the common wisdom but offered a new twist that contravened much of slaveholders' thinking. Cartwright agreed that blacks had thick skin but filed the caveat that they had an "excess of nervous matter," which ministered "to the senses." He believed that slaves were especially given to "sensuality, at the expense of intellectuality." In reaffirming one stereotype (that of the merely sensuous slave, sans reason), Cartwright had to concede that while "their skin is very thick it is as sensitive, when they are in perfect health, as that of children, and like them, [they] fear the rod." This argument put an uncomfortable spin on the slaveholders' understanding of black hapticity: while it endorsed the cherished belief that black slaves were childlike, it also exposed masters to abolitionist charges that physical punishment of black, highly sensitive skin was especially cruel.'^"
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It doesn't make sense to place a priority on fixing treatments before or without fixing the attitudes and beliefs which have created the stigma. No matter what tool people are given, they are going to act based on how they think. If people think they are justified in what they believe is the basis for behavior, they will find a method for that treating behavior based on that belief.
Stigma is the basis for all political judgments of atypical behavior.
Science/medicine has an agenda and will change the standards only to fit that agenda. Social models of disorders create empowerment and ability in order to oppose and redirect the discrimination that science intends.Intellect and emotional stability are major concerns for the increasingly growing number of people who have an inconvenient need for different types of accessibility. The judgments for these are unreasonable as well as unpractical. However, never, ever, ever should any group of people be stigmatized as being un-empathetic based on undetermined behavior. It's a dangerous convenience that society cannot afford.
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