Solving emotions rather than solving problems.

Michelle Dawson replied elsewhere to my post about other people’s perception of my writing as “angry” in nature. She said that she’d written to the Canadian Association for Community Living about Tiffany Pinckney, an autistic woman who died from neglect. Their response was to ask her if they could do something to make her “feel” better, implying that her emotions, not the woman’s death or any related injustice, were the problem.

I have been encountering similar things from service providers recently. In a meeting about my grievances with an organization (which included actions that jeopardized my health and safety), I was asked what would make me “feel” better. I replied that if I wanted my feelings taken care of, I would stay at home and pet my dog. It is strange, when talking about situations where life or health are at stake, to be treated as if the main problem is one’s “feelings” about the matter. (On a related note, where a problem jeopardizes not one but several people, it seems strange that I should be expected to care only about myself and my safety — or myself and my “feelings of safety” or somesuch.)

On another note, it seemed important for the person to let me know that my concerns were “heard”. I’m not sure what that means. What I care about is whether people do the right thing or not. Not whether they “hear” me when I talk about people doing the wrong thing.

When there is (as there was recently) an undue level of pollution from construction in my building, to the point where I’ve had to go to the emergency room for inhalation injury and asthma, I don’t want people to “hear my feelings of endangerment”. I don’t want them to come up with a “solution” to mollify me and nobody else, or give false solutions and claim it’s my fault if they don’t work. I want the building to be made safe for all its inhabitants. But those first several things were what was done, until I and another asthmatic had to take matters into our own hands and live on the streets until we were offered alternate lodging (and then only with a very specific kind of doctor’s note) and the construction techniques suddenly improved for the first time since the project started (but of course we were demonized in the press).

It seems that many people expect everyone to just have problems of “feelings” that can be resolved by moving “feelings” around, and also to only care about themselves. The idea that problems exist beyond emotion, that emotion is in fact not the only (or even main) component of trying to talk about or change such problems, and that the problem is not in the emotions of those who complain about it… that seems lost on a lot of people. Easier, I suppose, to reduce everything down to nice individual emotional problems with nice individual emotional solutions. Especially easier for people with power.

The real origin of “crypto-sensitivity syndrome”.

I hear a lot of people talking about crypto-sensitivity syndrome these days. Almost out of the blue. Just about everywhere. A rumor has been started that it’s going to replace autism, Asperger syndrome, etc, in the next DSM. I am surprised how few people were around the first time this term was going around, and how few people know or remember its origins. So consider this post an attempt to debunk this rumor.

Once upon a time, there was a Usenet troll (at least, back then he was considered a troll — lately many have been wishing for one as straightforward as this guy) who also happened to be (or claimed to be) the father of an autistic man. He used to stir up heated debates by accusing parents of abusing their children for not following his peculiar theory of the origin of autism. He was thrown off many autism lists for his nasty behavior.

He (or his son) also invented the term crypto-sensitivity syndrome and all the associated characteristics (“crypto-sensitivity” meaning something like “hidden sensory sensitivities”), which he claimed would replace “high-functioning autism,” “PDD-NOS,” and “Asperger’s”. And then he spammed just about everywhere with that and with his barely-sensical nasty rants towards anyone and everyone. He specialized in calling everyone “twits” if they disagreed with him and saying that they were bad parents and/or just all-around bad people.

If you didn’t know this guy, you should probably be glad. But if you run across people who don’t know that this — and not some serious plan to revamp the DSM, or anything else like that — is behind that extremely long symptom list with the strange name, then you might want to point them at this blog entry.