A friend wrote that she feels more and more depressed each day, following news and politics on social media. My advice? Stop it. Getting away from social media can be the best thing for someone with an impulse to follow and comment on… everything. And I do mean everything. It’s…
Category: Health
From diagnoses to “treatments” and everything in between, posts about health and autistic life.
Trying to reboot as 2017 begins, I attempted physical therapy for my pinched spinal nerve. The therapy appointment lasted only 30 minutes as I discovered the horror that is electrical stimulation and heat on an inflamed spinal cord. Diagnosed with radiculopathy, a pinched and inflamed nerve root in my lumbar…
In a few ways, 2016 has been (with a nod to a great children’s book) a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for my wife and me. We have had medical issues, I have not had a full-time job, and a pair of accidents took our Jeep out of…
I realize my blogs (not only The Autistic Me) have been slow throughout 2016. Life has a way of consuming more hours than exist in the day. My to-do list exceeds any realistic amount of time I might have each day, week, or month. If all goes well, in December…
It is again that season, the time of year many of us will always consider the “new year” instead of some date in Winter. Yes, back-to-school. For me, this is the end of a busy five-class summer as an MFA student in Film and Digital Technology. I promise (sort of)…
A list of blog posts and columns worth reading: Compliance / Social Skills / ABA / Indistinguishability Resources | Parenting Autistic Children With Love & Acceptance Applied behavior analysis (ABA) has evolved since it emerged in the 1970s, but I have still observed what I consider coercive techniques within the…
I understand that holiday fundraising is a tradition. “Here’s a cute child. You care about children. Send us money.” At the end of every year, I receive dozens of emails from autism advocacy groups. The higher-end email newsletters from Generation Rescue and Autism Speaks offer “hope” for a cure… someday.…
Autism advocates I admire have recently shared their burnout with online followers. These advocates are not seeking sympathy, nor are they wallowing in self-pity. Sadly, they must anticipate negative reactions before taking a break from online and real life activism. I separate online from real life because the online world…
Driving has been causing back pain, which leads to headaches, and some of those headaches become migraines. A migraine is not merely a bad headache, either. I don’t mind driving on fairly flat, smooth, un-congested routes. The problem is that the roads where we live go over and around hills.…
Since completing my doctorate, I haven’t had a compelling reason to read much about the psychology of autism. When I read scholarly articles in psychology, they tend to be connected to economics or politics. You might imagine that economics and policy, so connected to rhetoric and persuasion, would delve into…