To the Select Committee on Autism,
I am perfectly fine with this submission being made public.
I have autism. It’s this simple. I can’t control my face properly. There is a large body of research that implicates skull base pathology as a causal factor in autism. There is a complex mesh of holes through which nerves and vasculature pass on the other side of the palate. These innervate the face, including structures involving speech, vision and hearing. I have a physical disability, an internal congenital deformity of the face. There is no precise etiology for autism because it is a functional diagnosis. You may have noticed that the face is close to the brain. In some patients there exists a particular genetic, developmental or pathological condition that also affects the brain. This will explain the difference between high functioning autism and those with lesser independence. A problem arises when people assume that difficulty controlling the face implies a deformity of the brain.
my first memory of the law is the Vice Principle’s son in grade 1. Spending most lunch times in detention after being set upon by him and his goons because the perfect angel could do no wrong. My name is Flash forward to grade four, two boys are holding my arms behind my back, the third about to start punching, suddenly a teacher appears around the corner. I see her and start screaming for help. she tells me to be quiet and watches until they start then walks away. Usually I waited to be alone to cry but that betrayal hurt more than the beating. I run to the office. they tell me to stop causing trouble have a talk to us, make us shake hands, threatening to expel me when I refuse so I comply. They push us outside and lock the door, the boys knock me to the ground and start kicking. lesson learned, keep my back to the wall. By the end of primary school I’d been in more fights than a drag queen.
I learned early in life that the people who are expected to protect or support me wont. I had to learn to struggle on my own. I’ve had jobs but constantly faced discrimination. Overt otherness, except in discreet select cases such as blindness or being-wheelchair bound is to be discouraged, something that can be bullied out. Read and write slowly? It’s because you’re lazy and out of practice. Talk funny? You’re on drugs or need to be socialized.
It is very painful but not necessarily in the way that you might imagine. People with chronic pain stop experiencing the acute experience of pain but continue to experience the cognitive effects of pain. There is a large volume of literature that -I suspect knowingly but unattributed- duplicates research previously performed in chronic pain and sleep deprivation research. In fact many of the symptoms, behaviors, physical and cognitive effects are identical. There is great overlap between the skill set associated with forensic psychology, patients who experience tremendous suffering, and autism. There is an often misunderstood idiom of the, “little professor,” that is misinterpreted as referring to
intellect, speech or fascinated interest in a subject but is actually a self-reference on behalf of the forensic psychiatrists who treated these patients, referring to their identification with the experience of tremendous suffering, a sort of, “I know what he’s going through.” There are also overlaps between the pathology of torture. Without describing specific methods, it is possible to inflict damage to a person such that the nerves, that are less elastic than soft tissue, are torn from the tissue causing, “sensory dislocation,” or the sequela of nerve injury, particularly in the neck, that can lead to difficulties with proprioception, balance and co ordination. Whether or not any of this is simply correlation, exacerbated or caused by self injurious behavior(ie. head-banging), certain other autistic seqeula such as wandering or being dropped as an infant due to flopping about while being held is speculative.
Due to the implications of the correlation between skull base pathology and autism I would recommend research funding for a mapping project. Current knowledge of the variant anatomy of the skull base is poor, generally only held in the memory of specialist ENT and neurosurgeons, or otherwise disparately spread across many small studies examining n=
I would caution against research into autism. It’s a functional diagnosis not a condition with a specific etiology. There is a disturbing trend involving extremely vulnerable sections of the population. Unproven medications are frequently recommended and approved for both dementia and autism, with no demonstrated clinical efficacy. Often these patients cannot fend for themselves and therefor become not so much guinea pigs but simply a way to extract revenue from health insurance. Special attention needs to be paid to the utility of the particular metrics used. When I read the journals and drug trials, I apply what I call the, “dead test.” Would improvements in this measure also occur if the patient died? ie. moves less, complains less. Ethical guidelines should be developed by the RACGP, RANZCP and the TGA for what they would consider to be functional improvement in autism rather than what is currently used in the drug trials and prescribing guidelines that are, in their current state, confusing for many practitioners. The FDA approval process prohibits the approval of a new drug that has a lower therapeutic index than an existing treatment. Special attention needs to be paid to pre-marketing marketing campaigns that attack the reputation of a current established pharmaceutical in order to establish the superiority of the new pharmaceutical. The simple reason being that the new medications often turn out to be no less dangerous when patients comply with dosing schedules, less effective, more toxic or worse side-effects but manufacturers get them ranked up to first line treatments which has the effect of simply costing PBS and patients more money.
I am not aware of any prosecutions, to date, in Australia, of optometrists selling blue filtering lenses as a medical device to cure autism. Why not?
As for the suggestion of an autism register, it already exists in the involuntary health datasets, which I strongly object to. I wonder what the honorable member Dr. Steven Miles would think about a government register for homosexuals? What would the honorable member Ken Wyatt think of a government register for indigenous/aboriginal Australians? Maybe we should ask the honorable member Josh Frydenberg if we should have a government register for Jews. I am told these are demographic cohorts with their own unique health care challenges. I can’t believe I am needing to bring this up yet again. The people who advocate for such ideas only want to exploit us. They want to control a funding
pool and they want our data. I worry that this wave of funding will be eaten by the mafia yet again.
A lot of what you think you know about autism was written by forensic psychosocial workers. According to a 2019 RANZCP estimate the number of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Australia is 1.6FTE per 100 000 population. It is the position of RANZCP that there is a shortage of child and adolescent psychosocial workers with even the most serious forensic cases experiencing a shortage of staff, requiring interim measures. It takes a very long time to train a forensic child psychiatrist. If funding is to be spent on mental health services, first and foremost it must be spent developing current psychology courses into forensic focused courses. What most people believe is the work of a clinical or general psychologist is actually the work of forensic psychologists. Everyone else focuses on normative psychology. Rude hairdressers who don’t even cut your hair. We need to train forensic psychologists.
After harping on about education in other submissions I figured that I shouldn’t be a hypocrite and at least try to go back to university. So I enroll at University. They’re playing YouTube and whole TEDTalks in lectures. I ask them how to get journal access, they tell me to go to a librarian, the librarians tells me to just use Google. Students are just reading Wikipedia for their “research” answers in tutorials. Assignments have a hard limit of 300 words. Plagiarism is not allowed but referencing and independent research is also disallowed. This is not education.
The people who mark the assignments are functionally illiterate. In one assignment I lost a mark because the assessor could not parse a sentence with a noun phrase serving as a determiner in a noun phrase in the shape of a first-person singular genitive personal pronoun. This explains the problem with tertiary education. The assessors only have an elementary grasp of grammar. Anything more than a restaurant level crash course will be unintelligible to the assessors.
The textbook, An Introduction to Crime and Criminology 5th Edition, edited by professors and published only a few months ago says, “Critics have likened the operation of the Chinese Communist Party to those of a mafia-style organized crime gang -a ‘kleptocracy’- ruthlessly exploiting its own people for personal wealth.”(pp. 167) Coming from Australia, a country that supported human and drug trafficking in Xinjiang. Coming from the Australian tertiary education industry that deals with university placement brokers that traffic women from China to Australia, under the guise of education, to become sex workers. This slur upon the people of China wins the prize for shear audacity.
I had an assignment that earned a measly 55% because I successfully navigated the race conditions. I lost marks for not plagiarizing. A coined term and technical definitions in the tertiary text is accompanied by a citation. We were not allowed to use citations for the specific purpose of forcing us to use our own words, as explicitly stated in the task description. The requirement to plagiarize, as the very first act in a course intended to furnish officers with degrees(This is just a free elective) should raise ethical standards concerns. I confirmed that observations(but not conclusions drawn from those observations) matched official data. I lost marks because the assessor confused an
observation with a conclusion. I lost marks for not omitting inconvenient data. I lost marks for performing the required task lawfully and according to all the criteria. I get penalized for their illiteracy. This needs to be referred to ethical standards because apparently nobody involved in the teaching of this course understands plagiarism.
Here is the piece de resistance. There is a mandatory course for all University students, without passing they can not graduate. The DSM-IV(probably how old the course is) lists the first diagnostic criteria for autism as,
“qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following: marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction.”
The assessment criteria uses the exact same sequence of words, except for the posture heading that has different text formatting, as though the text had been moved around the page.
Sa eeaeeEeeeeeeee & fe fe ee ee ee ee 2 2
ATTENDING AND FOLLOWING
Our nonverbal behaviour plays an important role in conveying that we are listening. Your textbook reading on this topic (“Nonverbal Messages”) covers a variety of ways that we can show others that we are attending and following what they say. The following information provides some general guidelines on nonverbal behaviour you can use to demonstrate you are listening.
Types of Nonverbal Attending Skills
(Use the acronym SOLER + GPA to help you remember)
Posture: A posture of involvement is a very important component of effective listening. The listener should face the other person Squarely (allows listener to be at eye level with speaker and demonstrates involvement), maintain an Open position (arms and legs uncrossed), and they should Lean slightly forward (to communicate energy and attention).
Eye contact and Gaze: Maintaining eye contact with the speaker serves the dual purpose of demonstrating interest and allowing the listener to collect facial information. The listener should gaze at the speaker for most of the interaction, but may break eye contact and look away when they are thinking.
Relaxed Facial expression: Listener should have a friendly and Relaxed facial expression, The listener should adjust their facial expression to reflect what the other person is saying.
Gestures: The head nod is one of the most important gestures in listening and is used to indicate attention and interest
Small head nods — show continual attention
Larger nods — indicate agreement
Proximity: Listener should not be positioned too close or too far away from the speaker. Degree of physical proximity that is considered appropriate depends on your relationship to the other person and may vary for different cultures. Usual distance for personal
relationships is less than 1m and between |.2m and 2m for social relationships.
Avoid distractions: Actively move away from distractions so that the other person has your full attention.
Demonstrating good attending skills takes practice. In your learning group you will have the opportunity to demonstrate and observe poor and good attending skills. Use the Observer’s Sheet on the next page to record your observations. This also provides you with a good summary of factors to focus on during your skills practice in your learning group meeting (extra copies of the sheet can be found in the appendix).
This is for a course, PSY1008-Interpersonal Skills.
They accepted me into the program knowing that I am autistic. I tried to bring them to the table. I tried to negotiate. I told them this course directly discriminates against me. I spoke to my tutor. I spoke to a Senior Disability Advisor. I spoke to someone in the Autism Centre for Excellence. Instead I get silent nodding and smiling. They practice “assertiveness” and “behavior modification” techniques (further along in the workbook.) Unable to understand the imbalance of power, thinking I am in passive agreement when they simply talk over me and change the subject. They did not understand. They treated a serious legal matter as a battle of wills. It’s direct discrimination. You can’t lift the exact words for the diagnosis out of the DSM and then test people academically on that criteria and especially not in such a vague way. That would be like having a requirement for the honourable senator Jordan Steele-John to climb a flight of stairs. “Don’t worry you can still drag yourself up with your arms to pass.” Then when he gets to the top, “I’m sorry, it just didn’t look right. Try again next year. You can still pay to study but not graduate.” It absolutely crushes me. This is a course that they claim teaches empathy and non-discrimination.
If I go back to university I need a lawyer or a mentor to negotiate for me. It gets to a point where I am spending more than 90% of my time and effort fighting just for the basic right to an education and then no time to actually study. I have been systematically excluded and have now dropped out completely. I was only going so that I can get a job. I’m not particularly well suited, coordinated or have the stamina required to take up a trade. Apparently I can write. I’m already running circles around the professors but they are lawless. It is even illegal to accredit a program that discriminates but nobody stops them.
All I want is justice. I’ve been an outlaw my whole life. An outlaw is not a criminal but a person specifically excluded from the protection of the law. I try to do it your way but I am denied justice. You manage to find millions of dollars to pay people to convince children to play in traffic. The President of gets $865k a year to write policy but they don’t even have a disability policy. If you want to make my life easier then you can just give me some fancy policy or advocacy job.
14/04/2020