Autism News, 2014/05/08

(This particular news post lacks content warnings, I’m having trouble figuring out how to do them fairly this week. Content should be fairly obvious from the names of the links and from my short descriptions, but I’m not sure. Meh.)

Here is some FDA news. There was recently an FDA hearing on the use of aversives (including randomly administered electric shocks) for the treatment of autism at the Judge Rotenberg Centre; the panel recommended that the shock devices be banned. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should super urgently read this.

Ari Ne’eman and some other people live-tweeted parts of the hearing. This was really interesting to me and I wanted to Storify it but forgot that there is a time limit on when you can Storify people’s tweets, so there is no Storify here, sorry.

Very soon afterwards there was a hearing by a Congressional subcomittee on law enforcement treatment of adults with disabilities, following the death of Ethan Saylor, who had Down’s syndrome and suffocated while being restrained by police because of an unpaid movie ticket. I didn’t Storify this in time either. (Autistic people are subject to this kind of thing too, especially young autistic men who have a meltdown or other uncontrollable behavior when cornered by police.) Here is a (very short) article.

Other posts on law and professional care issues:

  • The FDA has a friendly reminder about bogus and dangerous autism treatments
  • The Combating Autism Act is still apparently up for renewal; here is a #StopCombatingMe PSA by ASAN
  • Star Ford on specificity, and on how professionals who are supposed to provide autism support often aren’t giving the kinds of support that we need most

April 30, the last day of Autism Acceptance Month, was designated Autism Positivity Day and there was a flash blog. Yay! This one comes with a bunch of poetry, too!

Intersectionality section:

Misc:

Meanwhile, in the Sad Things section, we have Robert Robinson, a 16-year-old Canadian boy murdered in a murder-suicide by his mother last month. Once again, mainstream news coverage mostly blames this on “lack of services”.