re: #900 Obdicut

No, I don’t reject it, I just find it a limited viewpoint. I don’t think language has that sort of totem power, where the brain really interprets ‘autist’ as different from ‘person with autism’. If I were to have enough autistic people tell me that they did feel that way, or see other evidence that’d convince me, I’d change my mind.

But it kind of seems to me, yeah, just a semantic point, and a semantic point that’s giving ground, that’s saying being an autistic person is something terrible enough to try to describe our way around it so we don’t have to say it. I’m trying to say being an autist isn’t a negative thing, and it shouldn’t be run away from.

There was a very funny bit in the Nature article I can’t cite, but it was from the autistic researcher, who wryly noted that any difference in the brain structure of an autistic person is seen as negative. Whether it’s a thickening of a structure, a thinning of it, an increase in activity in one place, or a decrease, it’s all seen as part of the problem. Obviously, autistic people have tasks they perform better at than ‘normal’ people; just as obviously, that should mean not every brain structure is an explanation of deficit, some of it is an explanation of increased capacity.

I’m not sure.

If I hear someone refer to someone as a person with schizophrenia, it bumps up against my expectation that they would just refer to them as a schizophrenic. In that, it causes me to pause, if just for a second, and at least subconsciously consider that I was identifying them as an “other,” by identifying them with one overall attribute, as opposed to someone who has various attributes just as I have various attributes.

Maybe it’s like the difference between referring to someone as “hearing impaired” as opposed to “deaf” - where some people reject the term “hearing impaired” because they think that using that term means that not being able to hear is an “impairment.” So, yeah, it’s complicated.

Speaking from personal experience, I find it less desirable when someone calls my brother someone with schizophrenia than when they call him a schizophrenic. I happen to know that in the academic literature, there is clearly a preference among some for the term “person with diabetes” over the term diabetic. And I know that there are at least some people in various communities who prefer the “someone with” terminology. I wouldn’t know the general preferences, but it seems that using the term that the least # of people find offensive might be a good guideline.

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