Morgan Smith<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ENGL384-02<\/p>\n\n\n\n
April 30, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Word Count: 1,091<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment. \u2013 Morgan Smith<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A Criticism on Julia Rodas\u2019s \u201cIntroduction\u201d to Autistic Disturbances<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes self-diagnosis is all a person has regarding their mental health. Visits to the doctor\u2019s office are expensive enough as it is without the added pressure of seeing specialists that are, more often than not, far out of town. On top of that, doctors are misdiagnosing or just not listening to their patients alarmingly often. For a real-life example, an early-twenty-something goes to the doctor because she\u2019s listless, lethargic, doesn\u2019t find joy in the things that normally brought her joy, is irritable, easily distracted, forgets things often, and experiences nausea when dealing with large groups of people to the point of scratching her skin. She rocks back and forth in her chair. Her leg shakes and bounces when she\u2019s not sitting on it. She doesn\u2019t sleep at night. The doctor suggests she has depression and anxiety. The doctor gives her Prozac.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is improvement for maybe six months. Then worsening. The doctor doubles the dosage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Repeat. The doctor adds Wellbutrin to her treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Repeat. The doctor removes the Prozac, doubles the Wellbutrin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Repeat. The doctor sends her to a psychiatrist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The psychiatrist outright ignores everything she says and gives her Trazodone for the insomnia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one thinks that the depression, the anxiety, the restlessness, the sleeplessness could all be symptoms of something larger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The twenty-something is twenty-five years old when she finally sees a therapist, and twenty-six when the therapist suggests she has ADHD. She\u2019s elated. She finally has answers. She talks to her primary doctor and spends one terrible, horrible month on Strattera before switching to Intuniv, and the Intuniv is working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This twenty-six-year-old is lucky, even though her doctors weren\u2019t listening to her at first. This twenty-six-year-old\u2019s best friend didn\u2019t get her autism diagnosis until she was twenty-two\u2014and she fought tooth-and-nail for it, starting with self- and peer-diagnosis before she went to a doctor. Not to mention, sometimes the patients are right, and the doctors are wrong. After all, the doctors don\u2019t live with the patient twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year after year. The doctor sees the patient anywhere from 15-60 minutes at most once or twice a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Often times, self-diagnosis can provide the answers one needs without risking their autonomy and safety in larger society\u2014the ostracization, the expectation to conform to autistic stereotypes, the judgmental side-eyes of being out in public with an \u201cobvious\u201d mental illness. The self- and peer-diagnosis can provide a community for the person who thinks they might have autism but is afraid of the systemic, social backlash of being autistic in a society that deems autism a defect to be cured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when Julia Rados claims that she could <\/em>seek out a diagnosis if she wanted <\/em>to, and finds self-diagnosis as culturally appropriative and predatory, she gives those who can\u2019t afford a diagnosis or are afraid of losing their rights and autonomy a very real reason to stay afraid and to borrow a term from the queer community, to stay in the closet. And yet, Julia Rados insists on writing her book about\u2014what? Finding autism in classic, Victorian texts even though she claims that retroactive diagnosis and diagnosing fictional characters is dangerous and predatory? Perhaps she\u2019s writing specifically about non-autistics reading autism into fictional characters, but what about autistics who want to find themselves in their favorite characters? Who want representation? And yet she claims that it\u2019s dangerous and that self-diagnosis can be exploitative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In claiming that self-diagnosis is predatory and exploitative, Rodas ostracizes those who cannot seek out an official diagnosis due to affordability or fear\u2014or both. In the same paragraph she ostracizes the poor and the afraid, she claims that she has the privilege to get a diagnosis if she wanted to<\/em>. But she doesn\u2019t. She doesn\u2019t want to \u201cpass\u201d as either autistic or allistic. In essence, she\u2019s claiming she wants to be both or neither. Which reeks of classism\u2014she\u2019s implying she can afford a diagnosis and is confident that she\u2019d have a positive one, but doesn\u2019t want to pass, ergo, she\u2019s engaging in that exploitative behavior she warns against when she talks about wanting to \u201cfind\u201d autism in her favorite classic Victorian texts, and even mentions Uta Frith\u2019s suggestion that the iconic Sherlock Holmes is autistic long before Benedict Cumberbatch came on the BBC with his heavily autism-coded Sherlock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the introduction, Rodas seems to vacillate between wanting to \u201cfind\u201d autism in her Victorian texts while warning against the game of \u201cpin-the-diagnosis-on-the-fictional-subject\u201d and the dangers of self- and retroactive diagnoses. She wants to have it both ways, but she can\u2019t. Not if she defends the position that it\u2019s dangerous and bordering on \u201cevil\u201d stereotypy. It\u2019s unclear what her actual goal in her introduction is, whether to say something like \u201chey, autism has always been around in both real life and fiction\u201d or to say, \u201chey self-diagnosis is dangerous and exploitative so let\u2019s not do it, maybe.\u201d \u00a0The former could be a positive affirmation that autistics have always been around and will always be around, but the latter is potentially insidious in that claiming that people can only be autistic if they have a doctor tell them they are\u2014which excludes people whose doctors refuse to listen to them and the people who simply cannot afford a doctor in the first place (a group largely made up of people of color).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rodas\u2019s claim that \u201cAutism should be for autistics\u201d (23) might seem like a road paved with good intentions, warning against the dangers of cultural appropriation and stereotypy, but it\u2019s also a claim of misogyny and racism: people of color have historically been unable to afford doctor visits and doctors have historically refused to listen to their assigned-female-at-birth patients, claiming it\u2019s all in their head or they\u2019re just hysterical. Whatever it is Rodas is trying to claim is lost in her meandering and undermined by her exclusionary tactics. Often, self- and peer-diagnosis is the only <\/em>thing a person has. To bar them from a community that Rodas declares she is not a part of reeks of gatekeeping tactics. Because she claims to not be autistic, has no knowledge of any relatives who are autistic, and has never sought out diagnostic services even though she\u2019s reasonably certain she could get a positive diagnosis (23), she has no standing in the community to tell others who do and do not belong. Even if she did <\/em>have a positive autism diagnosis, she doesn\u2019t speak for the community at large. She, as an individual, does not get to tell others who are allowed in the larger community. Morgan Smith ENGL384-02 April 30, 2019 Word Count: 1,091 I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized help on this assignment. \u2013 Morgan Smith A Criticism on Julia Rodas\u2019s \u201cIntroduction\u201d to Autistic Disturbances Sometimes self-diagnosis is all a person has regarding their mental health. Visits to … Continue reading “A Criticism on Julia Rodas’s “Introduction” to Autistic Disturbances”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-take-home-final-examinations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-ob","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1503,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1499\/revisions\/1503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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