Monday, July 21, 2008
Fire the asshole
Savage must be the only person in America who does not know a family with an autistic child.NEW YORK (AP) — Radio talk show host Michael Savage, who described 99 percent of children with autism as brats, said Monday he was trying to "boldly awaken" parents to his view that many people are being wrongly diagnosed.
Some parents of autistic children have called for Savage's firing after he described autism as a racket last week. "In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out," Savage said on his radio program last Wednesday.
Savage offered no apology in a message posted Monday on his Web site. He said greedy doctors and drug companies were creating a "national panic" by overdiagnosing autism, a mental disorder that inhibits a person's ability to communicate.
On his radio show last week, he said: "What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, `Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.'"
I had the very interesting experience of volunteering for a small support group of parents of autistic children, about 30 years ago. Weekly, for a few months, my job, along with three other volunteers, was quite simple: We sat in a wall of chairs between a group of severely autistic kids on one side, & their parents & a therapist on the other. We had to keep the children in their space & prevent them from hurting each other or themselves while the adults observed their behavior at a slight distance, compared experiences, & discussed the therapies & strategies available at that time. Occasionally, the therapist would ask us to do something with an individual child, interact in a certain way or offer a small toy. Some of the children showed separation anxiety from parents they could see but not reach, others were indifferent. One could broadly characterize the behavior of some as bratty, putzy, an act, or antisocial . But those were judgments we could not make, as they implied a self-conscious willfulness that was just not evident to me. Whatever choices the children were making were in the contexts of their autism. I could not fathom what was going on inside the minds of the children, but they had minds of their own. For some of the parents, the weekly hour was a rare respite. They could sip coffee without it being grabbed at. We even gave the parents a ten minute cigarette break. What a test of patience & love those children were. Convinced me that working with autistic kids wasn't my thing. Bless them & their families.
Labels: in the news, mental health
I agree with you about autistic kids, btw. And adults. They live like they have domes around their minds. Hard to get to, hard not to try. We have a fellow in the neighborhood and he is exasperated when he is going for a walk and we are coming toward him on the same sidewalk. I try always to cross the street so we don't fuck up his counting his steps.
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