Another April

Another April has come. April has been known as Autism Awareness month for almost three decades now. I thought I share some of the things that pop up in my news feed a lot during this month from the Autism community.
1. Autism speaks is a organization that hates people with Autism. To go into full detail for this thought process is a whole other blog post. (hopefully in a week or so)
2. Applied Behavior Analysis is a horrible practice. Already wrote on this topic a little bit, but it comes down to a few people who should have not been dealing with this population being put under extremely stressful situations that did not make the best of the situation. These events have caused for some to call that ABA can cause PTSD and other anxiety related disorders as well as being abusive practice. I even read once that compared ABA strategies to that of training household pets. There sure is some strange things out there. applied-behavior-analysis.html
3. Acceptance not Awareness. The main thought behind this is to stop trying to change individuals with Autism to be nuerotypical and accept these individuals as is. This goes along with number 2.  The fact remains that even when as I am labeled as a higher functioning individual with Autism, I have had numerous people find out that I have Autism give me weird looks because they are not completely aware. Also wrote more about this in another post. awareness-or-acceptance.html
4. Vaccines cause Autism or Vaccines do not cause Autism. Another previous blog post. I am still unsure why this is even still a prevalent debate. We have both sides correlate the the research they know to argue there side. The research tell us that the only one research article that held any substantial prove that vaccines cause Autism was retracted by the scientific community and the author. The research also tells us that a small percentage of the population can be injured by vaccines. These are two separate topics. Can vaccines cause injury within a small percentage of the population? Yes. Do vaccines cause Autism? Not at all. On a side note: Stating that people with Autism are the subjects of a experiment gone wrong rubs those individuals the wrong way. the-big-myth.html

All these topics are discussed in length in numerous blog posts stating they are truth. However coming to know this population better in the past couple years, I think I can say that some of these beliefs are based on such a small amount of cases drawn into a bigger ordeal due to a mob mentality that comes from trusting people with the same condition only based on that you share the same condition and not who the person really is.