Last night I engaged in a very interesting conversation with a guy who works at the service that helps me out at night.
I was in a lot of pain. By a lot of pain, I mean I was crying and periodically screaming. I don’t cry from pain usually. I didn’t cry when [...]

My friend Joel recently told me he wanted to start a group for autistic people dealing with daily living crap. I told him I had for awhile wanted to start a group for autistic people who have (or need) support services for helping us out with daily living crap. We figured we’d instead [...]

And People Still Fail to Get It, Again and Again
By a student who’s been fighting for accessible education for a long time.
Quote from it:
These things– accomodation, and related issues– are rights, not privileges. But even if I can acknowledge that intellectually, I’m so used to having to shut the hell up in order to get [...]

This post is far more medical and far less political than what I wanted to post, but today is the first day I’ve been able to not think about breathing for any appreciable stretch of time, and that’s still most of the day spent figuring out breathing-related stuff.
I had known for awhile something was screwy [...]

Awhile back, an autistic woman sent me her autobiography. She said I was one of the few people who responded to it. She’s spent years being labeled a psychopath. I offered to put her story on autistics.org. She just finally, after several weeks, agreed and sent me an edited form that’s [...]

I gave a presentation a few years back at Easter Seals Central California for staff who worked there. The following video was made from the text of one of my handouts for that presentation. It addresses the extreme dehumanization experienced by people in that system, and that had probably taken place in the [...]

When I read about various issues surrounding disability on the net, some of the worst viewpoints about us seem to come from people who work in the healthcare system or as personal assistants.
I’ve started to cringe when I hear a sentence starting with “I’ve been in in-home support worker for 20 years, and…” or “I’ve [...]

Dave Hingsburger has a training video about the ethics of touch in the human services field. He describes, in great detail, what kinds of touch are and are not acceptable, and under what circumstances, between staff and developmental disabilities.
One of the audience asked him something like, “Well what about people who are more severely disabled?”
Hingsburger’s [...]

Mike Stanton has written a blog entry about the latest atrocities at the Judge Rotenberg Center.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering, how do we stop things like this in general, not just at the JRC? (None of the pictures on this page, if you are wondering, are of the JRC or any other institution that is named on [...]

(Warning: Facetiousness ahead.)
When told to do something, do it. Don’t ask questions. No matter who it is. No matter how much of a stranger they are. When told to do something three times, with rising amounts of annoyance, by staff, do it right away and then run off and hide.
It is perfectly reasonable for [...]