Editorial #147: In Memoriam 6
Autism Politico knows many autistics have died since the last In Memoriam post. No autistic is forgotten, even though we cannot write a post about every single one. But here is one that really sticks in our gut:
A mother apparently shot her two children in their home Monday while her husband was at work, then turned the gun on herself, Colorado Springs police said an autopsy by the El Paso County coroner determined.
This is bad enough, but then comes this:
Police offered no explanation for the murder-suicide. Neighbors said the son was autistic, although none said they socialized much with the family or knew them well.
And here we have it! It must have been the fact that one of her kids was autistic that made her do it.
Why is it that it is always the “mentally ill” kid that is blamed for these problems? How do we know the other child wasn’t the cause of it? How do we know that EITHER of the children were the cause of it?
Rene Ogden spent a lot of her time on the Internet, corresponding with people through Facebook and playing games on the social networking site, according to people she befriended online.
Hmm. Obviously her autistic child didn’t need much attention then. This woman had time to burn online.
But there is this phrase that NTs use all the time: “If EVER you need anything, just give me a call and I’ll help.”
Did this woman call out for help?
Probably not. It is socially unacceptable to do so.
If she did call out for help, did anyone actually help?
Yes, they probably “helped.”
They offered cheap, useless platitudes on the phone maybe. Or maybe the offered to babysit once in a blue moon. Or maybe they brought over disgusting food that took no real thought to make so that they could seem to be helping, when in fact they really weren’t doing anything but relieving their own feelings of guilt for not doing something that really mattered.
“With the wife being here with the autistic kid and the husband deployed, that’s hard on a mother,” Garcia said. “Everybody’s upset about it. There were kids involved. They didn’t do anything to anybody.”
Oddly, the article makes no mention about how the father feels about this. Sympathy seems to be with the mom. And it seems like the fault for all of this lies with the autistic kid.
As a certain famous politician said: “It takes a village to raise a child,” but Autism Politico knows that when that child is autistic, the village scatters like quail before buckshot.
“We thought there was a killer on the loose”
one person from the neighborhood said, and she was part right. There was a whole village of killers on the loose, right?
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #118: In Memoriam 5
Autism Politico wishes to apologize for all of those autistics who have either died or who have been murdered.
Click on the links to see just two of the many deaths of autistics that have happened recently.
There have been many more instances of deaths among autistics that Autism Politico has been lax in reporting on, and we apologize for that.
And so the usual reminder goes out: Watch and care for the people you love.
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #108: AS vs. Bipolar
Autism Politico notes that many criminals are using the “Asperger’s Made me do it” defense to defend themselves in court against any manner of crime that they have committed.
Now, in a bit of irony, Autism Politico learns that we have a “Bipolar made me do it” defense being used in the murder of an autistic.
Defence Lawyer Deanne Gaffar says Noyes is mentally ill and cannot be held criminally responsible for her actions. But the Crown intends to argue Noyes knew what she was doing.
A statement of fact entered by the Crown Monday revealed Noyes told police she’d stopped taking her medication for bipolar disorder two weeks before the slaying.
Autism Politico is curious to know what bipolar people have to say about this.
Four questions:
1) Is it true that when bipolar people are off their meds, they do not know right from wrong?
2) Is it true that when bipolar people are off their meds they cannot prevent themselves from doing wrong?
3) Do all people who are bipolar need meds to keep them from committing murder?
4) Should all people with bipolar disorder be locked away to prevent them from committing crimes?
Autism Politico is the first to admit that is believes most autistics DO know right from wrong, and if autistics commit crimes, it is because they made a conscious choice to do so.
Can the same be said about people with bipolar disorder? Because if the answer is yes for most people, than most people with bipolar disorder should be sentenced for their crimes just as autistics should be sentenced for the crimes they commit.
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #106: In Memoriam 4
Yes, there has been another drowning of an autistic.
Autism Politico has these things to say and ask…
1) If this was murder, it’s a crime.
2) If this is a case of an autistic wandering into water and drowning, then why was the autistic not better supervised?
3) If this was suicide, then why did it happen?
Suspicious about all these drowning deaths, don’t you think?
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #104: In Memoriam 3
Autism Politico hasn’t spoken much at all about all of the autistics who seem to die from falls. There are many. Some of these are surely suicides. Some may indeed be accidents. But one has to wonder how many of these falls are murders.
Read this article.
A man suffering from autism fell to his death from the 31st floor of a building in Makati on Friday, police authorities said.
<snip>
According to a family driver, who was watching over the victim, he did not notice his ward sneak out while they were boarding the elevator.
<snip>
Further investigation is underway to know if the death was indeed an accident and not a case of foul play.
If you’re NT, you are probably saying to yourself “Well, that settles it then. He wandered off when the driver wasn’t looking. These autistics, who are too dumb to care for themselves, have a way of doing things like this.”
But if you are autistic, you think to yourself “Gee whiz. Half the reason I don’t go out of doors for weeks on end is because the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touch sensations are too overwhelming for me. My whole life is based around self preservation, and I wouldn’t even THINK to go near the edge of a building. Rainman wouldn’t even FLY due to his understanding of airline crash probabilities, which were extremely low.
And does anyone notice that when autistics seem to wander into their own deaths, by golly it is usually a death by drowning or by a fall, or by hypothermia if they “wander” outside in the winter?
You never hear of autistics getting run over cars as they cross streets to get to lakes, swimming pools, and high ledges? That is pretty odd isn’t it?
In fact, there must be a hundred ways autistics can get killed while they “wander” to the destinations where they are ACTUALLY killed.
Maybe the police should take a look at that and see ho that can make sense.
And so, getting back to the main point, Autism Politico must ask again what caregivers are thinking when they bring people on the spectrum to dangerous places, or they let autistics go wandering, or when they push autistics off ledges, if indeed any of these things are what they do.
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #103: In Memoriam 2
Looks like another drowning has taken place. Read the article.
She was reported missing Wednesday afternoon from a Prospect Street address.
She was discovered just blocks away a short time later in a residential, in-ground swimming pool.
Autism Politico must either commend drowned autistics or chide the parents of drowned autistics.
If we commend drowned autistics, it is for the inherent ability to leave home and make a beeline for any body of water in the neighborhood and drown in it. What sort of homing beacon does this group of autistics possess that they can do this sort of thing. The one in this article seems to have the ability to get through shut gates or climb fences as well. [For those of you readers who are dull-witted, this paragraph is entirely sarcasm. It's meaning is that some of these kids may have been drowned deliberately, or else parents "accidently" left the doors open so that their kids would wander out and drown. After all, if you were a parent and YOU had a kid that was prone to wandering, wouldn't YOU keep better tabs on that kid???]
If we chide the parents of drowned autistics it is for their failure to put dead bolts on their front and back doors which require a key to operate, or for their failure to put a chain on the doors which are out of reach of young autistics.
Notable during these circumstances is a lack of commentary from parents of those autistics who have died by misadventure. How many times do we read about a “normal” kid dying of an accident and hear parents wailing and crying on the TV news shows, or read extensive articles about them in the paper. Too often, we read about an autistic child’s death, but don’t find out what the parents have to say about it.
Why is that? Do the newspapers not care? No, that couldn’t be it, because every time an autistic does anything common, or even noteworthy, the media jumps all over it like spectators watching a carnival freak eating swords. So it must be that the parents have refused to comment. Either that, or there are a lot of reporters out there missing some good scoops.
Now why would a parent refuse to comment publicly on the death of their own child? Especially when the child is a special needs child? Parents of special needs children are always eager to blab about what burdens their kids are and how they wish there was a cure for what their kids have, or how they wish they would have aborted their special needs children before they were born, or if there was a way to humanely kill them they would do it, but all too often they have “no comment” once their special needs kids die.
Odd, very odd.
Odd that such rude and disrespectful loud mouths who can never seem to keep their mouths shut about their “retarded” children while they are alive have problems opening their mouths when they are dead.
Replies to this editorial are welcome.
Editorial #100: In Memoriam
Rather than make significant hoopla over the fact that this is Autism Politico’s 100th blog entry, we will take time to honor all of those autistics who have accidentally drowned or who have been deliberately drowned by a parent or caretaker. While we certainly honor all the other autistics who have been killed by their caretakers or via neglect, or those who have committed suicide, we are going to focus on one particular case for this blog entry.
But first, a slap in the face to Autism Speaks for pioneering the way for parents to drown their autistic kids guilt free:
At times, the pain has become almost unbearable. In a documentary entitled Autism: True Lives, Harry describes the very large pond next to their house in the Hamptons. “We put locks on all the doors leading outside because we didn’t want David possibly going into the pond. But there were times when”–he stops, then talks through his tears–”you hoped he did, because you wouldn’t want him to suffer like this all his life.”
Everyone urged the Slatkins to cut this from the documentary, Laura says, but they left it in. “Since then, we’ve spoken to many families who say, “We all share that hidden, dark thought.”
If you read this article, you know what has most recently happened:
A woman who drowned her four-year-old daughter in a bathtub six years ago told a Toronto court yesterday she hoped to have children in the future — then walked out a free woman.
In a statement of facts submitted to the court, the prosecution and the defence agreed to a manslaughter charge and the lenient term noting the significance of Peng’s bipolar disorder when coupled with raising an autistic child.
Autism Politico
