A few days ago somebody online asked if people think I have an accent

[conuly]

This is a fairly common thing for autistics to have, a sort of developmental foreign accent syndrome, and I've got it too. (So, I think, does my mother, but she has an alternate explanation. Well, whatever the origin, she also is afflicted by people asking where she's from.) Interestingly, the further I get from NYC, the less people are likely to hear some strangely unidentifiable foreign accent in my speech.

Anyway, it's been a while since this came up in real life, but what do you know, just yesterday one of the people at the doctor's office asked when I was there with my mother!

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Comments

[oracleofdoom]

I'd never heard the accent thing, but that's kinda me? I live in Colorado, and as far as I can tell, the people here, including myself, speak in the "plain" sort of way that most newscasters and such in the U.S. do. But when I hear recordings of my voice, it sounds like I have kind of a twangy accent. I don't get it, and it's kind of embarrassing.

FWIW, I'm not diagnosed autistic... we're doing some testing for my son, but I don't know. I've begun wondering about myself?

[conuly]

All people have an accent - even broadcasters. (Theirs is an artificial sociolect, where "sociolect" is like "dialect" except instead of being regional it belongs to a social group.)

It's really, really common for people to realize they're on the spectrum after a child in their family is diagnosed. But I might have said that to you before...?

[oracleofdoom]

That's why I put "plain" in quotes. :)

I don't think we've talked about autism? I haven't talked about it with a lot of people outside my family. My sister has a psychology degree and knows a little more than I do. I thought I was fairly educated about it, through virtue of knowing people online who are on the spectrum. Which sounds silly when I actually type it, but online is where I really learned about a lot of social justice-related topics. Anyway, I'm realizing more and more just how little I actually do know.

[conuly]

Anyway, I'm realizing more and more just how little I actually do know.

That's the beginning of wisdom :)

Though to be fair, knowing autistics can give you insider knowledge that a psychology degree probably doesn't. I constantly find that psychology is one or two decades behind what actual autistics already know and talk about widely.

I don't think we've talked about autism?

Then maybe the two of us are just retreading a convo I had with somebody else within the past 10 weeks.

[oracleofdoom]

The beginning of wisdom, or nearly textbook Dunning-Kruger? Perhaps both. :)

[siderea]

Hah. I'm a licensed mental health professional with graduate degree from a graduate program in psychology and counseling, and the full and entire extent to which autism was covered in my training was absolutely not at all. I get all my information about autism from knowing people online who are on the spectrum, too. *fistbump*

I'm reminded of when I interviewed for a clinical internship in a program for troubled LGBT youth. The clinician interviewing me told me the program had recently gotten a little influx of trans kids, and asked if I had any experience working with trans people. I answered truthfully, "I don't have any clinical experience with trans people. All my experience of trans people comes from my trans friends." And he nodded, and said, "That's probably just as well," and hired me.

[conuly]

I'm a licensed mental health professional with graduate degree from a graduate program in psychology and counseling, and the full and entire extent to which autism was covered in my training was absolutely not at all.

I didn't realize it was that bad. Geez.

[fred_mouse]

This! I have a qualification to work with teens in high schools (educational psychologist), and I don't remember anything about autism either. I remember drugs (oh, my how ignorant were my classmates) and sexuality and depression and learning difficulties that we can't call dyslexia but we treat using the reference standards developed for dyslexia,

[conuly]

You guys do that too? American schools are amazingly resistant to using the diagnosis "dyslexia", despite it being the most common learning disa- well, yes, that's the reason they don't want to ever, ever acknowledge that it exists, I guess.

[fred_mouse]

I don't remember if it was actively being suppressed as a diagnosis, or if it was just that a lot of the materials I was reading were from the USA. I do remember there being attitudes that translated to 'it isn't a 'real' diagnosis, but an 'excuse' diagnosis', but given my opinion on the person running the training the year I did it, I wouldn't want to claim that that was widespread at all.

[shehasathree]

I the lack of teaching about autism to educational psychologists is the most egregious omission. That said, given what passes for 'knowledge' about autism in the rest of psychology and medicine, perhaps LACK OF KNOWELDGE is better than the standard. :s

(I read a bunch of papers by Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Michelle Dawson et al a few weeks ago and got very excited about trying to figure out how their model of autistic learning did and didn't fit my experiences of learning.)

[conuly]

That said, given what passes for 'knowledge' about autism in the rest of psychology and medicine, perhaps LACK OF KNOWELDGE is better than the standard.

There is that. And to be fair, I guess they can't really teach about everything in detail. I guess.

[fred_mouse]

There are so many things that I didn't learn in the course (Grad Dip Ed) that I decided I wasn't actually qualified to *be* a school's psych, and that with a newborn, I didn't have the time/energy to teach myself everything I was going to need to know and manage to be a good parent at the same time. I have never regretted going into other areas of work. A lot of the material was focused on topics relating to high school students, or at least, that is the material that I remember.

[fred_mouse]

The being a parent of a person with autism thing - one of my friends has two kids who are on the spectrum, and got quite heavily into the parent community here, including going to conferences on the topic. At one of them, one of the researchers said effectively 'if you have a kid on the spectrum, you will have some or all of the indicators'. She and I then went through a whole pile of indicators, and it was surprising how many of them I trip (I've never investigated diagnosis, and made a deliberate choice not to investigate a diagnosis for Eldest because I could see more negatives than positives in our education system. But the older they get, the more convinced I am that they would be assigned one of the 'high functioning' type diagnoses).

[oracleofdoom]

This makes sense. I'm hearing a lot of concern about insurance problems with the diagnosis, but I feel like my son really needs it, because he's having a really hard time right now, and if we can get a better understanding to help him, I want to do whatever we can. For me, it doesn't seem that important to have myself diagnosed.

[fred_mouse]

That makes a lot of sense. Here's hoping you end up with good outcomes for your son, and that he finds his place in the world.

Eldest made it through primary and high school with mostly social problems, although they didn't end up with a university entry score sufficient to get them in to their course of choice, so we are still working on that. Their inability to think sideways is mostly the issue now (they baulk at filling in online forms, because there is invariably a question that doesn't make sense in some simplistic manner, and then they stall and can't finish).

[conuly]

Can't you get a diagnosis but not disclose it?

[fred_mouse]

Yes. Except that eldest's responses to strange situations was such that putting them through it would only have been worth it if we were going to use it. And while the school turned out to do quite well (there were 5 identified kids with autism in youngest's year group of ~45 kids) I don't have a lot of faith in the public education system dealing with unusual kids, particularly ones that are academically 'gifted' *and* not NT. Now, there probably is a benefit to having a diagnosis, because the university equity office can use a formal diagnosis for accommodations that they can't get without one. (At the high school level, there is almost no point in putting in a request for accommodations for the final exams. I've heard a number of doozies, but basically, you have to do the exam at the set time or fail. Which meant for me, an examiner came to my house, while I was still feverish and contagious [chicken pox] and invigilated my exam in my lounge room! I'm told that they don't even do that these days, and I would have had to take my contagious self to a examination hall across the other side of the city).

[conuly]

Oh, geez. That's a ridiculous system. Sick kids having to take tests? When they're sick? Now I've heard everything.

[fred_mouse]

Yeah. This is only for the final high school exams, which are made out to be A Really Big Thing, but euh, people's lives are generally not in the balance.

[shehasathree]

I am so UGGHH to hear that WA is just as bad as Vic in this regard.

It was bad in 19999 when my boyfriend broke his jaw on his way to a midyear exam (which meant he also missed the GAT, which...meant that VCAA screwed up and didn't bother averaging out his marks from the two assessments he did complete, they just gave him a very low Study Score, which wasn't revealed until after the end of the school year, and Change of Preference day, etc etc ugh ugh ugh).

It was bad when i did Year 12 while in the midst of an episode of clinical depression/autistic burnout, and, afaict, it's still bad now, because i recently looked into what kind of accommodations are available for kids with documented learning disabilities, including dysgraphia, and...it was pretty dire.

[shehasathree]

cf. also hypermobility-related diagnoses (which, fwiw, seem to have considerable overlap with autism-type diagnoses). So many women report figuring out they had a problem/getting a diagnosis only after their kid/s did!!

[fred_mouse]

Yes - I keep hearing this. Also ADHD (I have a friend in her mid-40s currently investigating this as a diagnosis not just for one or more of her children, but for her).

For me, people starting talking about hypermobility online, I went 'oh, that would be this and that and the other', which caused me to talk to a friend about it and it turned out that this is part of her area of expertise, and she gave the kids a once over and then a strongly worded discussion about how to look after themselves so as to not have problems as adults, so it can go both ways. And despite that, it was only this week that I suddenly realised that it isn't just youngest who has shoulder issues as a result - the problems I had in my 20s are probably hypermobility linked, and my mother used to regularly dislocate her shoulder as well.

[shehasathree]

no spare brain for coherent utterances, but: +111

[fred_mouse]

:}