I had an experiment. I put the words autism and behaviour into Google and looked at the fist result. This is about how people see us. This in italics below is what I found A child or adult with autism spectrum disorder may have limited, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities, including any of these signs: Performs …
Category: Autism
The Gospel takes away our right to discriminate
“The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor.” - Dorothy Day. I love this quote. God's care for the poor is because they are poor nothing else. It cuts across governments whose attitude to immigrants is less than generous, especially those who have signed up to the 1948 …
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Formal language and lying in autism
With these words, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," President Bill Clinton condemned himself. It was clearly a lie. The tell of the lie is repeated, what do "did not," "sexual relations," and "that woman" have in common? They are all formal word pairings where "didn't," "sex" and "her" would be more …
Executive function and visual thinking
Some people when asked to imagine a church steeple will imagine something generic pointing up into the air. Me? I would see, in detail, the spire of St Thomas's Longroyd Bridge near here, or again Wakefield Cathedral... now it is Salisbury Cathedral... and now the crooked spire of Chesterfield. Saint Patrick's Cathedral. New YorkPhoto by …
What is the worst that can happen?
The last time I wrote about autism it was about specifically hyperlexia and dyslexia and generally about sensory processing issues. This is about another side of autism, social anxiety. Social anxiety is why you'll always find me in the kitchen at parties, or towards one side of a room or another. It is also why …
Hyperlexia – autistics who speak early
This is not me, dyslexia is in my family, hyperlexia is the opposite. Both of these exist outside of autism, but both are more common among autistic people. Hyperlexia is identified, usually in childhood, in someone with a reading ability which is well advanced for their age and a fascination with numbers or letters. It has …
Vaccine reluctance
I was going to post something else today, but on the day I started writing and researching for that post on autism the name of former Prime Minister Tony Blair was trending on Twitter. The usual crowd were saying the usual thing, axes were being ground, one political commentator wrongly said, "We kicked his a**e …
Disturbing intrusive thoughts
Disturbing intrusive thoughtsthat make you worrythat you’re a bad person I get these thoughts. When I see the schemes of the bad guys in a James Bond film I think that it is tame, either they could just shoot Bond, or they could do something like suspend him over a tank of hungry piranha fish, …
A challenge to ABA therapists.
My challenge is this: If you claim that there is proof that ABA has proof or has a scientific basis, can you show any evidence that has either evidence from a double blind test*, or a test with a significant (in the high hundreds or in the thousands) sample size. The challenge is any one …
God is at the centre of fellowship — Matthew 18:18–20
Humility and honesty— part 2 40 blogs of Lent — day 38 Oops, looking for an image to illustrate the phrase, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven I found images that I imagine 50 shades of Gray would have, even though I have the worst of this filtered: It was revealing. …
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Making an ass of myself 