Legwork and Life, week of 12/6/17

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Agh, it\’s December already.   I was told that I should try to enjoy November, since now I have to panic and flail about presents again… but I don\’t think I succeeded.  I think November just kind of bulled its way by, one deadline at a time, until it was gone.  Which is maybe a good way of summarizing life for me overall right now.

I mentioned last week that I got a new doctor and got some blood tests done.  Those came back early this week.  Despite the vitamin D supplements I\’m taking, I still scored as slightly vitamin D deficient.  This is very impressive, because the vitamin D supplement I\’m taking provides 1250% of your daily required vitamin D.  And also 688% of your vitamin K, for good measure, I guess.

I\’m not really sure what to say to that, other than, \”Daaaaaang…\”  I can guess what my LENS-doctor will say, which is to start taking two of those capsules per day rather than one.  But I\’m going to hold off until I get proper directions, I think.

The other worrisome thing is that my blood glucose levels were getting near pre-diabetic levels.  I looked up the health ramifications for pre-diabetes, and they\’re basically about what you\’d expect.  \”Exercise your butt off, stop eating so much sugar (you moron), and start eating healthier, or you\’re going to get diabetes.\”   I am… hopeful that my current lifestyle changes will head off any occurrences of diabetes, as I\’m now exercising for over an hour, two days a week, and half an hour for an additional day. 

I\’d also mentioned last week that I was hoping to get a little booklet to track my muscle group weights for exercising.  Turns out five of those things is like $3, so I got a pack and have set it up for future use.  I can now illustrate how ridiculous my muscle groups are.  My legs, for just plain lifting, can easily handle in excess of 300 pounds.  My abs, using the ab machine, managed 110 pounds last visit.  And my back handled 200 pounds with no apparent complaints.  My arms, on the other hand, found 70 pounds challenging on the pulldown bar, and a mere 40 pounds difficult on the pushup machine.  At this very moment, I am incapable of doing a single standard pushup.

I\’ll track these weights as I continue using the workout facilities at my parents\’ retirement home, and perhaps eventually my arms will stop being about as strong as a wet noodle.  But I doubt it.  Genetics gave me this incredible imbalance of muscle strengths, I kind of doubt it\’s going to politely change its mind if I ask nicely.  (I say it\’s genetics because my father and my brother both have this exact same imbalance of muscle strengths.  They had it worse in gym class, though, because boys are supposed to be strong in the arms.)

The last thing for this week is that the materials for the government contract are finally up.  I\’ve been doing a lot of nothing other than flailing and panicking, because I forgot to take my supplements two days in a row.  Not my best moment.  But hopefully I can get started on this job soon.  It sounds like there\’s less than 15 things for me to look over and write critiques of, which is awesome because I was expecting 22 or so.  Regardless, I have to get started soon.  Maybe after I finish reading this webcomic… 

Reading the Research: Arrest Rates and Disabilities

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s article gives us a grim warning about interactions with the police, and highlights the needs for training for both the police force, and the populace in general.  Firstly, according to this study, any given person in the US has a 30% chance of being arrested by age 28.  That\’s nearly a third of the population.  Does this seem problematic to you?  It kinda does to me.

Now, let\’s add having a disability into the picture.  Your chances of being arrested before age 28 are now 44%.  Let me underline that: you are nearly 15% more likely to be arrested if you have kind of disability, be that an emotional, physical, cognitive, or sensory disability.  Your chances of being arrested before age 28 are now close to half.  One out of two disabled people is likely to be arrested.

Also, God himself help you if you happen to be black.  The arrest rate for black men with disabilities is 55%.  The article naively terms this \”the disability penalty,\” which I think is just adorable considering arrest rates for African Americans in general.  The researchers, naturally, consider this a problem and suggest police training should include a stronger focus on de-escalation, minimal use of force, and understanding implicit bias and structural racism.

And me?  Let me summarize my interactions with the police.  I attended the miserable failure called the DARE program in three different school systems, and I\’ve been pulled over four times in my life.  Once for a speeding ticket.  Once for having a headlight out.  Once for not moving out of the way fast enough to suit a police officer, and getting ticked when he shone his brights in my face.  Once for having an out of date registration sticker on my car.

Of all those interactions, two of the officers struck me as dutiful, well-meaning, justice-driven officers.  The first was the dead headlight.  It was near midnight in a suburb of Detroit, on New Year\’s Eve.  He pulled me over, merely meaning to address the problem, and I had the mistaken impression that I should get out of my car to speak to the officer.  He did not take it well.  I have no doubts that if I had been male and black, I would have been shot.  Or at least loudly threatened with a drawn gun.  I am female and white, fortunately for me.

Once he calmed down, the officer was nice enough, explaining to me my mistake and even commenting that the city listed on my driver\’s license was where he was from.  I did not get written up, presumably for a lot of reasons which included, \”cooperative, not drunk, bigger fish to fry this evening.\”  The second was the speeding ticket.  That was a pretty short interaction.  The officer seemed polite enough, and I wasn\’t going to dispute the matter- I had been speeding, albeit not in a dangerous fashion, and I really just wanted him to go away.  

The third interaction was less pleasant.  The officer who noticed my expired registration sticker didn\’t care what I said or felt, he just wanted to write me a ticket and get on with his life.  Which was exactly what he did.  

The last interaction… kind of took the cake, and it\’s what I remember when asked about the police.  I was driving to another city for work.  It was before the sun rose, making it rather dark outside still.  A car zoomed up behind me in the passing lane, so I started looking for a space to get over.  I apparently did not do so fast enough, because the car flashed its brights in my eyes repeatedly.  I made a \”go away\” motion, which was not taken well, and the lights went on.

When I pulled off, the officer put this massively bright, painful light on me, causing me to hunch and squint in pain.  He then proceeded to swagger, yell over me aggressively when I tried to say anything, and demand everything he wanted loudly and arrogantly.  I was cooperative and polite, but he didn\’t give a crap, having decided I was a troublemaker.  The blindingly painful light stayed on my car, despite my repeated requests for it to be turned off.

Officer Sunnuvabitch had nothing he could actually write a ticket about, thankfully, so all I have from the encounter is an ill-will towards cops in general and some personal evidence that screenings for who can become a cop and who can\’t are clearly not sufficient.  As far as I\’m concerned, Officer Sunnuvabitch belongs in a rehabilitation program for violent and aggressive sociopaths, not toting a gun and wearing a badge. 

The DARE program I mentioned above was a miserable failure, statistics-wise.  It (accidentally) taught neurotypical children that drugs were for older (cooler) children, which naturally did not end well.  As I\’m not neurotypical, it didn\’t have quite the same effect on me.  I listened soberly, and not knowing I should be distrusting the police, was sufficiently warned off drugs so as to not try them.  I was, however, not offered a chance to do so until I was 19, so I\’m not really sure that\’s a success.

I mention the DARE program here because one side effect it had was introducing police officers to children.  I wasn\’t really reading body language at the time, but in retrospect I think those officers were probably pretty uncomfortable.  When you\’re used to handling what you see as the worst of humanity, and suddenly you have to manage children… it\’s maybe not surprising the whole thing was an awkward experience.

I don\’t recall particularly liking or hating the police officers that came to teach our classes.  But I do recall their analogy for divisions in humanity.  The policemen explained that people fell into three categories: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.  Most of humanity was sheep- not aggressive, not harmful, simply needing guidance.  Some of humanity were wolves- aggressive, dangers to society.  Those were the criminals.  And some of humanity was also aggressive, but was trained to protect and serve, using those instincts for the safekeeping of the sheep.  Those people were the police.

I can\’t imagine the police really think of themselves in those terms, and it was just a illustration to get a bunch of 4th graders to understand the police a bit better.  But remember that last interaction with Officer Sunnuvabitch, I kind of wonder if the comparison isn\’t more apt than it was meant to be, and whether the cops know they routinely invite wolves into their sheepdog clubhouse.  That, or the sheepdogs go wolf after awhile and no one does anything.

Obviously, I haven\’t been arrested.  That is because I am still relatively verbal, even while stressed out, and because I am white, and because I am female.  Change any one of those variables, and I fully expect, given my experiences, that I would have ended up with handcuffs, or even shot.  The police do not know how to deal with us, they consider anything deviating from \”normal\” threatening, and in some cases, shoot first and ask questions later.

I have nothing happy to say here, so if you are autistic/have disabilities, you might want to consider carrying this card around.  If you\’re a caretaker, parent, etc, you might want to consider adding that card to your child\’s wallet or purse, and teaching them to present it slowly and carefully when interacting with the police.

If you\’re a cop or other emergency personnel and would like to speak to me on how to improve your training program, please email me at therealisticautistic(at)gmail(dot)com.  I recognize most police aren\’t Officer Sunnuvabitch, and I would like to understand the police and other emergency personnel better.  More to the point, I would very much like you to understand me and other autistic and disabled people better, because these statistics are unacceptable.  Together we could help stop the needless deaths.  

Book Review: Relationship Development Intervention with Young Children

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Relationship Development Intervention with Young Children: Social and Emotional Development Activities for Asperger Syndrome, Autism, PDD and NLD by Steven E. Gutstein and Rachelle K. Sheely, is a handbook of activities for young children, using the RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) method.  The RDI method is geared towards teaching social skills in context of their purposes, with a focus on developing and maintaining relationships.

So, say you have a child that doesn\’t look at the people they\’re talking to.  This is a problem, because neurotypical people assume you aren\’t paying attention if you don\’t look at them while you talk.  (It\’s also a problem because some nuances of communication are non-verbal, but it\’s worth pointing out that it\’s a really arbitrary requirement from my perspective.)  Some programs would take this hypothetical child and try to teach them eye contact directly.  85% looking at the person you\’re talking with, 15% looking away.

That isn\’t good enough for the RDI folks.  Instead of simply teaching the skill, they teach the foundations of that skill.   To teach eye contact and paying attention to the person you\’re talking to, they make the environment and play require that eye contact.  If the child doesn\’t pay attention, the activity pauses, restarts, or ends depending on the directions.  This style of teaching is potentially a really good idea.  It\’s a more natural than teaching by rote, and theoretically a more effective way of teaching social skills. (I have to say theoretical, because I\’ve never seen statistics on the subject.)

This book has activities to teach attention, cooperative play, flexibility, voice volume, hand-eye coordination, expression-reading, emotion-recognition, vocal tone recognition, give-and-take conversational skills, etc.  Reading through these, I didn\’t really have objections to the skills specifically chosen.  The same is mostly true of chapter 2, where they describe their components of relationships.  I did take some exception to the first criteria, which was \”Enjoyment\” and insisted that \”Friends must be enjoyable, exciting companions.\”  I\’m not sure I\’ve ever been an \”enjoyable, exciting\” person.  But perhaps the book is specifically referring to friends in childhood, which might explain why I never had friends at that age.

I had a really hard time getting into this book.  It started on a trio of bad notes.  The first was the introduction quote.  Y\’know how some people put dedications to people or favorite quotes at the very front of a book, before even the introduction section where the book itself is discussed?  They\’re usually inspirational quotes, or at least amusing ones.  The quote in the front of this book is a Bible verse.  Specifically, it\’s a Bible verse from Ecclesiastes.  Otherwise known as the book of the Bible that discusses, in great depth, how everything from riches to wisdom to hard work is pointless, because everyone dies and everything is a waste of time without God.

Now, I actually like Ecclesiastes because I\’m weird like that.  But this quote is just a little snippet talking about how two people are better than one, because when one falls the other can help him up, and feel-good stuff like that.  But as a reasonably intelligent, somewhat educated human being, I really have to take exception to a book that purports to be full of helpful advice, quoting from the most depressing book in the Bible with blatant disregard for the rest of that book\’s contents.  So that annoyed me.

The second thing that annoyed me was the book\’s promise of results, with apparent disregard for the child that goes into the program.  There is literally a list of \”social changes\” that you will apparently, without fail, see in your child assuming you do the things in this book.  I don\’t know about you, but I\’ve found, personally, that people with autism vary widely, and expecting a single program, even an excellent and relatively flexible one, to magically produce the same (exceedingly idealistic) results in every autistic child it\’s applied to… well, it seems arrogant and absurd, frankly.

The last thing that annoyed me at the start of reading the book was its language choices.  The book is meant to be used by parents, teachers/special ed teachers, and therapists, but the language used is pedantic and formal.  I found it cumbersome to understand, and this is coming from someone with a BA in psychology and a well-practiced skill in reading…  I don\’t envy any parents, particularly ones that aren\’t college-educated, the experience of trying to read through this book and adapt the activities for use at home. 

That said, a lot of the activities could probably work reasonably well, if used properly.  The earliest ones seemed to rely strongly upon the \”Coach\” (their name for the parent, therapist, teacher, etc) and their ability to bluff (or be really good at taking on and projecting) their emotions. The activities are made fun, not because they\’re actually fun, but because the Coach is instructed to smile, laugh, and engage in \”fun\” behaviors.

The activities work their way toward teaching the child that interaction, especially interaction with their peers, is fun.  I don\’t think I\’ve ever seen the word \”joy\” printed so many times in such a dry context.  I can only hope these methods really do work, and in the long term, because the way I tend to approach interactions is not at all with joy, and more with a general cautious neutrality.  Sort of the way you approach a friendly but inexplicably venomous dog.  It probably won\’t bite you and cause you suffering, but some days you just really don\’t want to take that chance.

My only other concern was that the activities listed didn\’t seem to account for an comorbid problems, particularly sound sensitivity or touch sensitivity.  The earliest activities seemed to suggest tickling and roughhousing as \”fun\” and \”enjoyable\” activities with children.  And I can tell you I have hated being tickled since I was quite young, so that really wouldn\’t have worked well.  I can\’t speak so strongly for roughhousing, but considering the fact that I was bullied quite young, I can\’t imagine I\’d like it all that much more.  Preusmably situations like mine would be accounted for by a therapist with more training than simply this book… but I do wonder what their tactic would be when someone with sound sensitivity covers their ears and curls up at the first sign of other children and their loud, shrieky noises.

Read This Book If

You want a primer for creating and running RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) activities for a young autistic child.  This book is pretty much what it says in the title, and that\’s it.  It\’s a very specific form of social skills teaching, and not a style that\’s intuitive in the slightest.  The bones of the RDI philosophy are mentioned in this book, but if you want a more thorough explanation, you\’ll have to look elsewhere.  I am somewhat dubious of the book\’s usefulness to the average parent, due to its stilted language.  Especially a parent that\’s already overwhelmed with raising a more heavily affected autistic child.  But a special education teacher or a therapist might use this book to work with a parent reasonably effectively.