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

[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.

[shehasathree]

Sounds like a good (and ethical) choice!!