A LOT of parents think mainstream schooling fails their children, disabled, autistic, or not. There are a LOT of things wrong with traditional schooling when it comes to what they teach, how they teach, and how they treat their captives. It is your right to stand up for your child, and your child’s right to be treated with dignity and get a real education.

I have had a lot of people try to “open my mind” by forbidding me from reading the medical textbooks, history books, etc. that I loved so much. (Ironically, the people who tried to open my mind are the most conservative, uptight, boring, etc. people on the planet…and whenever I try to expose them to stuff that I am into, they won’t have it.) They don’t want to open my mind, they want to take away the shame of having a freak in the family, or in their community, or whatever, and make me blend in as much as possible. I actually had people tell me to pretend to have interests other than the ones I had, and to hide my feelings and opinions because most people don’t share them and they get turned off.

Well, if my friends don’t like who I am, then they aint real friends, are they?

Kids used to shove me into objects and throw rocks at me, and no end to the comments, the laughter, etc. And guess what the school does? Nothing! They blame us for “not adjusting.”

Well, maybe it would be better not to adjust. After all, schools are really good at producing two kinds of people-emotionally and intellectually obsequious cowards or gangsters. But very few free-thinking, happy, compassionate people with the ability to assert themselves. It is the worst for most honors students, because in order to be an ideal honors student, you have to really sell yourself out. As von Goethe once pointed out, “Those who are most hopelessly enslaved are always the ones that falsely believe they are free.”

Of course, I am an honors student myself, but a bad one, if there is such a thing. I’m not valedictorian, I have wanted to drop out, I do not get upset if I do not get 100%. Kick me out of the Latin Honor Society, the heretic! Lol.

I also love it that whenever I used to approach adults with my issues, they would tell me to explain that it was hurting my feelings. Well, that might work if they had no idea that was hurting my feelings, but they do, and that’s what they want.

I also am really curious to find out who decided which books, which movies, which interests were “good” or “acceptable” and which ones weren’t. Where was I when that meeting was held?

And this really has nothing to do with anything, but…I am not a dag. *Sheepish* I do not like mainstream fashions, but I still like some of the minority fashions, like the Goth thing, and I LOVE my fetish gear and my makeup.:) I REALLY go to town with some of my looks. As long as the makeup doesn’t aggrivate the eczema from hell, I’m fine.

But I have to tell you, NOBODY messes with a girl wearing fetish gear, so that is really convenient if I am on a mission, in a bad mood, and don’t want people near me unless they absolutely have to be.
If I want people to still approach me I’ll wear something quirky but gentle, like…whatever…Or something totally normal if I really don’t feel like getting all sorts of stares, comments, etc. Not that I completely avoid it, but that’s okay. Every now and again, a stranger makes a dumb remark, who cares? It’s the constancy that sometimes gets to me. Shut up! I am a little off-kilter when I walk, I flap my hands, etc. Life goes on!

Then again…the whole fetish thing is really quirky itself, but I won’t get into that. Oh, and that is another thing that has gotten me into a lot of trouble with school administrators and parents…sometimes, it is justifable to not be outrageous, and that is a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

Another really nice technique is putting autism tags and buttons on prominent display on my famous “monkey bag.” Things like “I’m not ignoring you, I’m autistic.” I have that on my myspace and adultspace pages.

As for everything else about me, well, you would have to meet me and see.:)

But the thing is there’s no personality traits which are prone to halucinations or delusions although there are several more prone to depression and withdrawal than others - ie the solitary, idiosyncratic, sensitive have apparently been more prone to depression than others, just as those with the artistic have been found more prone to bipolar (the extreme of the artistic is called Cyclothymic personality disorder). There is also the case that the extreme of the vigilant personality trait is Paranoid Personality Disorder (they’re all out to get me stuff) and the extreme of the self confident is narcissistic personality disorder (in which grandiosity happens… but that can happen in manic benders in bipolar people too, but the flavour’s slightly different). And with mercurial trait, the extreme of which is Borderline Personality Disorder, people lose their identity and can become very emotionally unstable (which is different to those compelled to hide behind roles out of exposure anxiety/social phobia), and the Inventive trait has the extreme of Compensatory Narcissistic Disorder in which they raise themselves above others and put targetted individuals down to impress the masses (which can be pretty psychopathic).

So, I guess if one had certain traits that , in disorder proportions, could collectively mimic the presentation of schizophrenia without neurologically being schizophrenia, then I can imagine this is what he might have meant.

Ps I have no ear piercings.. Don’t mean I ain’t a dag though.
Just got huge ears like dumbo!
That’s why I have long hair, and no ear piercings. Lol!

PS your buzzy beard thing is very cool.

And the “social filter” thing is a good idea. I noticed life got a lot easier for me somehow when I grew a beard because people would know up front that I was a little wierd.

John.

glad your son is so much healthier and happier now. I’m sorry he had to deal with such idiocy and rubbish. One question, I have never heard of SchizoPRHENIC personality disorder.

There IS SchizoTYPAL personality disorder (extreme of the idiosyncratic personality trait in which one has a strong world of one’s own, interacts and chats within their ‘own world’ and becomes out of touch with the ‘normality’ of the mainstream around them).

And there’s SchizoID personality disorder (which is the extreme of the solitary personality trait in which one is nervous of intimacy and fuss and feels comfortable with logic but not emotion…and in the Schizoid end of this has become cut off from the interactive expression of emotion) - neither of which are schizophrenic.

There is also SchizoAFFECTIVE disorder which is where the person swings between emotion without thought and thought without emotion, and again this is not Schizophrenia either.

And there is Schizophreniform thought disorders, which is sort of ‘Schizophrenic traits’.

It’s pretty important that if your boy has never been Schizophrenic that he doesn’t confuse having some personality traits exaggerated into the disorder proportions of those traits, with having an often deteriorating thought disorder of Schizophrenia.

I have the solitary and idiosyncratic personality traits, so when under months or years of extreme stress in really not autie-friendly environments, I’ve displayed what people could have seen as Schizoid (unable to show or share my feelings, emotionally detached and afraid of attempts to get close to me) and Schizotypal personality disorders (recreating everyone in my own world rather than interacting with them in the external world and socially phobic responses to forced conformity) although because they didn’t used to identify such things in children, they tended to just label it as part of my ‘psychotic infant’/'disturbed child’ labels (aiaiai, how convenient).

Tics don’t bother me too much now the breathing related tics (throat clearly and compulsive coughing) have stopped plaguing me. But I have some intermittent funny vocal and motor ones and I see them as a kind of social filter which filters out those who can’t stand difference or see the difference so phobically they can’t see the person. Then although that hurts my feelings, its a good way to tidy one’s life of social clutter