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ABA is Not Okay10/24/2021 CW: Descriptions of ABA First, a little bit of backstory: I am afab and Chinese, and as we all know, kids who are afab and POC often fall under the radar when receiving a diagnosis for autism. I figured out I was autistic when I was 23 when I got a job as a behavioral technician for autistic children and noticed that I had lots of similarities with all of the autistic children I worked with. I had never heard of ABA therapy before I got this job, so I didn't know how controversial it was, nor did I understand why it was so controversial. While working at this job, I took a graduate-level Introduction to Autism class, and boy did I encounter a lot of ableism. First of all, in the very first week, the book they had us read was called "Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family's Triumph Over Autism." The title itself is ableist, as it shows how the author considers autism to be some kind of "enemy" that she needs to have triumphed over. The contents are as bad as you think; it's a book written by people who hate autism, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to try to force the autism out of kids, including putting children through lots of pain and suffering. The book describes children crying as adults touch and harass them against their will. Nobody else in the class seemed to think this was abusing the kids. I was so badly triggered that I wasn't able to articulate my grievances in a calm and collected manner at all; instead, I lashed out with hostility, and the professor reacted by dismissing all of my concerns and giving me poor grades. In the third week, we were given a video to watch entitled "A New Hope for a Cure." As everyone should already know, it is impossible to cure autism because autism is neurological, meaning it's connected to the brain and the spinal cord; plus, most autistic people don't even want a cure. The video had lots of ableist content. Psychologists put a boy through three years of ABA therapy for 40 hours a week since he was 13, and in the end, he was declared "free from autism." Even the boy himself believed himself to be freed from autism. We know for a fact that autism cannot be cured. That is impossible. The only explanation is that psychologists traumatized this boy so badly that he had to go into denial about being autistic so that they would leave him alone. Looking at the boy's eyes and listening to the way he talked, I could tell that the boy had PTSD because I was recovering from PTSD, and I know what emotional flashbacks look like from the outside. I pointed out that 40 hours a week of ABA therapy is way too much for a 13-16-year-old child, especially since he has to go to school at the same time. The professor once again dismissed my concerns and graded me poorly. There were many other ableist concepts taught in this class as well, but the book and video were the two worst ones I encountered while taking this class. Basically, the whole class kept talking about looking for toxic cures, which I repeatedly told the professor was not only impossible but hateful because wanting to "cure" autism is like wanting to "convert" gay people. They don't want to help us; they just want to get rid of us because they hate us. I wish I could say this story had a satisfying ending, but it did not. To this day, the professor has not changed his teaching curriculum. What has changed is that I moved on from my old job to a new one and am a firm advocator of "ABA is Not Okay." Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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I need Trigger Warnings10/24/2021 I have PTSD and had to sit through a debate on whether or not content warnings were a “good artistic choice”. The professor of the class said “Trigger warnings are examples of according to a felt moral obligation to the reader…I have to reject them as a mistaken application of ‘real world rules’ to ‘imaginary world’ realities.” I explained that without trigger warnings, I have virtually no way to access media. Made a complaint to my school’s administration, nothing happened. That was the last straw for me, so after years of fighting for any accommodations I could get, I graduated with a 2.7 GPA and the knowledge that higher education wasn’t for me. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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I'm a Damn Good Scientist10/24/2021 CW: descriptions of bipolar mania I have bipolar disorder, and I'm a damn good scientist. It feels really freeing to get that off my chest, and I look forward to the day I can declare that without anonymity. Unfortunately, there is still an overwhelming stigma surrounding schizophrenia/bipolar in STEM. Depression and anxiety have started becoming acceptable to have, but other mental illnesses are still off-limits. Outspoken members of the sci-com community still use ableist terms like "manic" to describe a quirky thing they did that week. Mania is not quirky. Mania is life-ruining. Mania means I may never see my spouse again. Mania is the difference between waking up every day in a safe home and going to do research at a job I love and going on a drug binge that ends in jail/homelessness or thinking I'm God. Unless you have fought to sleep and eat for multiple nights in a row, knowing that if you do not get back on a regular life hygiene schedule, everything you enjoy in life will be stripped away from you, you do not get to discuss mania. There is nothing more terrifying than feeling your mood escalate to a point where you know it will be out of your control. Oh yes, so quirky and fun. I've heard peers make off-handed comments about how a certain person "obviously skipped their meds" just because that person was having an off day. If someone knows you have a mental illness, you're not allowed to have a bad day around them because it immediately gets attributed to your mental health and not the fact that you're a human experiencing a normal fluctuation in mood. In a lot of ways, I feel like an imposter by hiding my bipolar. If people knew that I had a mental illness, would they still look at me as the standout, infallible student/trainee/peer/friend they see me as now? Would the qualities they admire about me become the things they criticize me for if they knew some of my better personality traits were developed coping with bipolar? Maybe, yes, maybe, no. Bipolar is not all fire and brimstone. When managed well, it is an asset to my training. I've been stable with proper meds/therapy for the better part of a decade and lead an otherwise typical life. I hope someday I can find the courage to be out with my mental health challenges so I can help other people like me. At this point, I am both a contributor and a consequence of ableism in academia. Selfishly it is comfortable to hide my mental illness. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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Removed from Campus10/22/2021 Content Warning: PTSD, Bipolar Mania I want to let people know my story, but I wish to remain anonymous because of the stigma. I have bipolar 1, autism, C-PTSD, and a constellation of chronic physical illnesses. My first semester of college, the only mental health diagnosis I had was PTSD, so I had no idea I am bipolar. I was experiencing my worst ever manic episode for over four months my whole first semester, and although I remember very little, I can tell you the outcome. I was permanently removed from campus and have completed my studies (I’m currently a senior applying to grad school) entirely online. I have made opportunities for myself to conduct independent research and overcome this massive hurdle my university has put before me. The university refused to reconsider having me back on campus once I was stable on meds because it would make other students who saw my erratic behavior uncomfortable. They also refused to explain to the people from my dorm (it’s a tiny college) why I had acted that way. I couldn’t transfer because most of my credits would not have transferred to another university. I was stuck. I’m hoping for a better grad school experience. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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Campus Tutors10/22/2021 Content Warning: Sexual Assault, Suicidality My community college didn't have disability testing. They required doctor letters that have been written in the past 30 days. The only accommodation was 10 mins extra on test time, nothing else--no interpreters, notetakers, nothing. I'm Deaf. I went to campus tutors constantly to help with notes, then was raped by 1 of them. No investigation. No sympathy. There was no counseling services. It was implied by staff that I was lying to be excused from homework or exams since I was marked a high risk student (aka disabled + poor). I was in Phi Theta Kappa & took honors. I was hospitalized for suicidality, after they refused to take incompletes off my transcript. I was too triggered being on campus, so I dropped out. It was clear they didn't care anyway. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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Am I the only one?10/22/2021 I was really excited when I heard about DEHEM. I’ve been in graduate school for 10 years, and I’ve met very few other disabled people. Still, even after reading through all of the roll calls, I feel like I’m the only one like me in academia. I’m a schizophrenic with borderline (BPD). In all the conversations I’ve seen about mental health visibility in academia, I’ve NEVER seen anything about academics who experience psychosis. Anxiety and depression are becoming more normalized, but psychosis is being left out of the conversation. When I first started graduate school, I joined a group for mentally ill academics. Everyone inspired me with how open they were about their diagnoses. When I announced that I wanted to be open, too, the reaction was “Woah! No! No one will hire a schizophrenic.” Maybe there are other academics like me out there, but we’re being silenced and kept in hiding. I wish I could post this story with my name; but, since I want to become a professor, I just can’t risk it. My plea to those who are working on mental health issues in academia is to remember that I’m not the only one like me out there. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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Being open about plurality10/22/2021 Haven't seen a whole lot of folks like us in higher education, which is probably why we're choosing to share that we exist. Hello. We're an autistic grad student in the STEM field. We're also an undiagnosed (but seeking therapy) OSDD-1b system. In layman's terms: we're many people in one body as a result of identity dissociation, but do not experience traditional dissociative amnesia. This is also called "partial Dissociative Identity Disorder" in the ICD-10. While our dissociation was likely caused by long-term trauma in our childhood and teen years, we also strongly theorize it's possibly part of how we function as an autistic system. We have also experienced stress-induced psychosis symptoms, but do not necessarily want to claim a label there because of how little it affects our day-to-day life. Our path to discovering we were plural was very traumatic and interrupted our undergraduate career, and affects our current graduate school experiences. While the specifics of our experience are not in this story, we do know for a fact that we're not the only system that has experienced interruptions in school due to coming to terms with plurality, long-term fronting issues, and memory issues. We've recently started seeking out therapy in order to work through one of our headmates' trauma, as well as to work on strategies to deal with active memory dissociation during the course of our daily life, which leads to us feeling like we're just "waking up" several times a day. For us, being open about being plural is something we're still coming to terms with. Because we're "functional" (as in, able to retain memory and can mitigate most professional and interpersonal difficulties that arise from our plurality), it seems futile to associate ourselves with being openly plural, especially because of intense ableism and sanism within both wider society and academia. In STEM communities, it's common to discredit wrong scientific practice and conclusions with associations to delusion and insanity. In wider society, mentally ill folks with psychotic and dissociative symptoms are often portrayed as villains, as inherently evil, or as being affected by outside forces, which directly harms mentally ill people with psychosis and dissociative symptoms. Even within the mental health field, many clinical practitioners doubt the validity of DID and OSDD-1 as diagnoses, and within the advocacy community there is massive in-fighting about who "counts" as a legitimate system versus who "harms" the face of the community. There is immense pressure to disclose personal information about systemhood and trauma, to the point where people have posted their personal medical information in order to avoid harassment (though, as we're learning, this is not uncommon in some disability circles). Ultimately, what matters here is that of all the DEHEM stories we've seen so far (and we might have missed a few!), we've seen very little mention of what many might call "serious mental illness" like our own. We want to connect with other academics who have similar lived experiences. But in order to connect, we have to be willing to be vulnerable in an environment that has thusfar shown that being open about being "insane" (a label we've reclaimed for ourselves) is a legitimate threat to our ability to pursue the careers we want to because of how ingrained ableism and sanism are in our society. For us, our disabilities are ones that putting a name to more than one of them have dire social consequences, and we'd like to live in a world where, one day, that may not be the case. As an autistic system, we stand by and for everyone within the disability umbrella. We all deserve more than what we've been given within higher education, we all deserve to not be harassed for needing accommodations, we all deserve to not have to face ableism and sanism as a daily life torment. We also all deserve to not experience other forms of bigotry, including but not limited to racism, colonialism, sexism, misogyny, the many varieties of queerphobia, antisemitism, intersexism, and all others I have missed explicitly naming. We all deserve better. Signed: TDC We thank the author for sharing their story.
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Unsupportive Advisor10/22/2021 This weekend I decided that I need to switch labs. I am starting my fourth year, so it will be extremely painful and likely hurt my career, but my advisor keeps telling me that I don’t belong in academia and if I can’t work longer or harder then I should just leave. I believe that there should be a place for people like me in academia (I have depression and panic disorder, as well as hypothyroidism) and I want to make it through to help reduce the toxic cultural expectations, but I can’t do that if my advisor won’t give me a chance. I’m heartbroken. Thank you to our anonymous author for sharing their story.
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