Autism Blog: The Future of Autism
November5
 I was asked for a paragraph about my vision of the future of autism. Here’s what I wrote:
The future of autism for me, is where ‘autistic personality’ and ‘autistic withdrawal’ and ‘developmental delay’ are separated out from ‘sensory perceptual disorders’, ‘communication disorders’, ‘health disorders’ and ‘co-morbid disorders’. In doing so we could finally begin to distinguish which people need intervention, adaptations, even treatment and which need only understanding, acceptance and advocacy and that we might live in a world where each of these things are achievable through respectful means.
Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons
International author, lecturer and autism consultant.
http://www.donnawilliams.netNovember 2008
There is a famous incipit (Anna Karenina). “All happy families are alike, unhappy families are all different”. I have some doubt about Tolstoy’s statement. Are there completely happy families? Is there a family where there is not a little disturbance, tension, distorsion, of relatioships, some member of the family used as a scapegoat? So how “happy” families should be so all alike? There is a continuum between “happy†families and totally disfunctional families.
Anyway I would like to apply the dictum to autistic people. Here I would strongly suspect that all autistic people are different. Maneuvering in and out of the bubble, to communicate somehow with the others, requires special techniques which you will not find in any handbook. You must invent them yourself, adjust them with experience, modify in time. This makes ASD people all different and compicates further social relationships (and loneliness of course). And makes any approach for help difficult.
I may say that all my life I tried to understand what life is. This
also because I have always seen life from a door ajar. I don’t believe
that to change the state of things is our task. Things go their own way
because there are no more vital subjects, ruled by vital laws.The
inclination to sacrifice oneself for one’s own tribe or family has
always existed. It existed 100,000 years ago, when humans were 6m, it
exists now that we are 6b. But the rationales for action are gone mad,
and have become unstoppable by any subject or organized force. In
opposition to what was true 100,000 years ago there is now a
generalized nihilism a mortal dissatisfaction, disposing of all
diversified means of destruction from explosives and all kind of
weapons, to alternative chains of command uncheckable, from satellite
phones to internet. Internet was designed to substitute a damaged
“legitimete†chain of command which might have been damaged by a sudden
nuclear attack. Now they have become part and instrument of the attack
itself.The mere repression is completely useless and even melts with
the attack itself. Terror and the fight against terror are becoming
indistinguishable, as we have seen in the 11/9 attacks and the wars
that were unleashed in reprisal, This is no more Life, it is the final
consummation of a path taken thousands of years ago, when humans chose
the shortcuts of technique. _Dommage_, Life was beautiful, and it is
still beautiful for what remains of it, especially outside humankind.
What we see now is the end of a path.
Sorry, Donna, there is no future for autism because there is no future (or perhaps the ony future is autism, or silence at least).
Nice website about autism. i am from germany and i search for interesting articles so that i can link other autism website from my german autism project autismus1.de