Alex Spourdalakis: an atrocity, not a tragedy
Last week I heard the news that a 14-year-old boy with severe autism, Alex Spourdalakis, had been murdered by his mother and another female carer in a suburban area near Chicago after they had...
Category: Autism
Anti-vaxers, ME and desperate people
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998....
Ed Balls
Now that I've got your attention … There's currently a measles outbreak in South Wales, the reason for which is that a lot of parents didn't vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine during...
Women and Asperger’s syndrome: make-up is not compulsory
The Asperkid’s (Secret) Book of Social Rules: The Handbook of Not-So-Obvious Social Guidelines for Tweens and Teens with Asperger Syndrome – book information – Jessica Kingsley Publishers I recently came across the above title...
Ayn van Dyk: beginning of the happy ending
This past week I heard some very happy news from the family of Ayn van Dyk, the young autistic Canadian girl who was seized from her home by social workers in British Columbia after...
Extradition decision shows double standards
On Tuesday the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced that the computer hacker Gary McKinnon would not be extradited to the USA to face charges of hacking into NASA’s and the Pentagon’s computers before and...
Ayn van Dyk: one year on
For my previous writings on Ayn’s case, see these two entries from September and December 2011. There is also a Facebook group to support Ayn’s parents in getting their daughter out of care. A...
Will YOU pay for disabled people’s services?
Rachel Cohen Rottenberg recently blogged about the recurrent problem of parents of children with severe disabilities (usually autism) murdering them, and the stock response being that the mother (as it usually is, but not...
Ayn van Dyk: seized for no reason, spends 10th birthday in care
Single father fighting to get autistic daughter back This report tells part of the ongoing story of Ayn van Dyk, who was seized from her home, which she shared with her father and two...
Baron-Cohen on Anders Breivik
Anders Breivik: cold and calculating, yes – but insane? (from today's Guardian) This article by Simon Baron-Cohen appeared in today's Guardian and questions the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia given him by "independent" experts in...
Feel the autism?
OK, so after posting that long article criticising disabled and/or autistic self-advocates for forgetting how hard it was to raise a profoundly disabled or severely autistic child, I had this tweet today: Yesterday,a daycare...
Facebook troll jailed — why can’t people be adults?
BBC News – Reading man jailed for dead girl 'trolling' insults A man has been jailed for 18 weeks for posting insulting messages on Facebook pages dedicated to young people who had died, in...
Ayn Van Dyk: where child protection defeats itself
BC Local News: Abbotsford dad still fighting to have daughter returned home Over the past few months I’ve been following the case of Ayn Van Dyk, a 9-year-old autistic girl from British Columbia (Canada)...
Simon Baron Cohen, autism and empathy
I recently got hold of two books by Simon Baron-Cohen which focus on the subject of empathy. The earlier, The Essential Difference, focusses on the difference in empathy and systemising between men and women;...
Don’t hurt aspies, then play the aspie card
This past week it was reported in the news that Ryan Cleary, who had been arrested and charged over an alleged role in cracking the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which...
Review of my 2010
This is, as far as I remember, the first time I’ve ever posted a review of a year to my blog, and that’s probably been because no old year has been as different from...
The blue magic-marker fetishists
Since I’ve been a kid I’ve been something of a road geek. I was always fascinated by roads and road signs, road numbers, street lights and so on (although the last faded when I...
Starting my Asperger’s journey
Last Thursday I went to my GP in New Malden (or rather, one of the GPs at the clinic I’m registered at), and asked him to refer me to those who might be able...
Communication shutdown for autism a bad idea
I saw this "Communication Shutdown" event through a critical article highlighted on FWD/Forward — a scheme to raise awareness of autism by "shutting down" social networks for a day (1st November): WHAT IS COMMUNICATION...
Why wouldn’t you want to be autistic?
Last week a number of newspapers reported that scientists were "on track to establish the genetic triggers for autism, paving the way for earlier diagnosis of children who could be at risk of developing...