Trigger Warning: Murder, threats of murder, abuse
Did you think I was somehow exaggerating when I said that our lives could be on the line? A family is missing now, a family that came here from Vietnam to treat their autistic four year old daughter. They made a pact that if they ran out of money or if their daughter did not improve, they would kill themselves and both of their children. The autistic daughter is four years old, and they want a huge difference in her behavior now or they kill her, and guess what? All four year old kids are difficult, but the tragedy model of autism has everyone convinced that the autistic one won't get any less difficult as she gets older unless huge intervention happens, and so we get things like this. A family of four could be dead.
Or Alison Springer says in Autism Every Day how she has fantasized about driving off the George Washington Bridge with her autistic daughter and only hasn't because she has a neurotypical child at home. Within a week, a mother killed her autistic kid. Do you think that's a coincidence? I don't.
Or the mother who killed her six month old child who wasn't even autistic because she somehow decided the kids was autistic, and "when you have a child with autism, your life is ruined." That really happened this year. That is the tragedy model right there, killing someone who wasn't even autistic, just as it may have done or may soon do with this family that came here from Vietnam. (The two year old isn't autistic.) It's not just our lives that can be lost to seeing autism as a tragedy, though our lives should be reason enough to quit it with that mode.
It's clearly not, of course, given what the congressional hearing looked like. According to them, we're all vaccine-injured burdens, somehow ignoring the fact that the autism rate isn't any lower among unvaccinated people and the fact that calling someone a burden is a horrible thing to do and the fact that insisting that we are all burdens can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in that no one wants to hire someone who is supposedly a burden.
So if you ever want to know what happens when autism is treated as automatically tragic, when autistic people and their families are considered to be victims of autism, the answer is this. People die.
Did you think I was somehow exaggerating when I said that our lives could be on the line? A family is missing now, a family that came here from Vietnam to treat their autistic four year old daughter. They made a pact that if they ran out of money or if their daughter did not improve, they would kill themselves and both of their children. The autistic daughter is four years old, and they want a huge difference in her behavior now or they kill her, and guess what? All four year old kids are difficult, but the tragedy model of autism has everyone convinced that the autistic one won't get any less difficult as she gets older unless huge intervention happens, and so we get things like this. A family of four could be dead.
Or Alison Springer says in Autism Every Day how she has fantasized about driving off the George Washington Bridge with her autistic daughter and only hasn't because she has a neurotypical child at home. Within a week, a mother killed her autistic kid. Do you think that's a coincidence? I don't.
Or the mother who killed her six month old child who wasn't even autistic because she somehow decided the kids was autistic, and "when you have a child with autism, your life is ruined." That really happened this year. That is the tragedy model right there, killing someone who wasn't even autistic, just as it may have done or may soon do with this family that came here from Vietnam. (The two year old isn't autistic.) It's not just our lives that can be lost to seeing autism as a tragedy, though our lives should be reason enough to quit it with that mode.
It's clearly not, of course, given what the congressional hearing looked like. According to them, we're all vaccine-injured burdens, somehow ignoring the fact that the autism rate isn't any lower among unvaccinated people and the fact that calling someone a burden is a horrible thing to do and the fact that insisting that we are all burdens can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in that no one wants to hire someone who is supposedly a burden.
So if you ever want to know what happens when autism is treated as automatically tragic, when autistic people and their families are considered to be victims of autism, the answer is this. People die.
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