This is my first time blogging in months. It's likely nobody will read this, but I felt I had to comment on the latest wave of parents of autistic kids killing their offspring. A few months ago, the mother and grandmother of a Chicago boy with such severe autism that he had to be restrained every time he went to the hospital gave him a fatal dose of sleeping pills, and when that failed to kill him, stabbed him in the heart. A few days after CBS aired a report that was perceived as sympathetic to the killers, Kelli Stapleton of Michigan locked her daughter Issy in a van with two portable grills blazing, hoping to kill her with carbon monoxide. She nearly succeeded, but fell short. She is now in a rural jail in northern Michigan, charged with attempted murder and facing life without parole. When that was in the news, a mother of two kids, one autistic, one NT, drove from Arizona to California and poisoned her kids in a motel near Disneyland. Those kids both died.

The autistic community is split on these murders. Autistic adults generally want to stand the parents up against a wall and shoot them. There is no justification for these murders, they argue, and the sympathy extended to the killers only encourages a view that the disabled are not worth the trouble ("life unworthy of life", in German parlance) and encourages more murders. The parents of autistic kids generally want people to consider the enormous stress that the parents are under. In that view, the mother "snaps" under the pressure, and deserves our sympathy.

A mother killing her kid is an act that is so unnatural that it's inevitable that many will recoil in horror. The general view of autistics is that my mom could have killed me, and then I wouldn't be here. Reading the blogs of Kelli and her friend Lisa Sain, whose son Preston was nonverbal and impossible to control as he got older, one gets the impression that these mothers were gradually losing their sanity over the challenges of raising a severely autistic kid. Issy would hit her mother on the head until Kelli lost consciousness. Preston would hit his mom too, and strip off his clothes in public. Both kids had been given medication (risperidone?) that had the side effect of turning them into physical Gargantuas, huge for their age and impossible to control.

It seems that the general procedure for controlling an autistic kid having a meltdown is simply to sit on them until they become exhausted and give up. Teachers do it, parents do it. This is the exact WRONG thing to do. It only encourages the kid to be more violent, and stops working once they get older. What happens when it takes 3,4,5 people to hold down a massive 14 year old? And then there's Lovaas ABA, which seems to be a more advanced version of this. Videos from the behavioral institute where Issy went show staff holding her hands so she can't stim, holding her shoulders down so she can't get up. Audio is missing, so we don't know what they were saying. Eventually Issy loses it and starts beating one of the staff, and other staff members rush in and yank her off. The general rule is to *keep doing this* until the autistic stops rebelling. In other words, break them of their will like a wild horse. Can't break them? Kill them. Apparently being "normal" is so important that these kids must be stuffed into the mold at any and all costs, including murder.

Did nobody tell Lisa that Preston is taking off his clothes because of sensory issues? Did nobody tell the behavioral "specialists" that stimming and pacing is like breathing to an autistic? Did nobody warn Kelli Stapleton in 2003 that hey, one day you won't be able to sit on Issy to control her, and she'll kill you? There's a video from a Kalamazoo TV station where Kelli is asked, you think Issy will kill you one day, and she says, she WILL kill me one day! Kelli's view was much like that of an abused wife, and eventually a choice is made: me or her. Either Issy dies or I die. That common thread seems to run through these murders: years and years of ineffective and wrong "treatments", followed by murder in the belief that the kid will kill mom, and so the kid has to die first.

We don't know a lot about treating autistics. What we DO know is that it's a "defect", if you will, in the basic wiring of the brain. You CANNOT rewire an autistic brain! You can't use force to rewire them. You are only teaching the kid that violence is ok, and soon you have a violent 14 year old with 5 grown men trying to restrain her, one who beats mom into Level 2 Trauma and closed head traumatic brain injury. Eventually, the violence becomes too much, and the mom kills the kid. How about, instead of violence, trying a different solution? When the kid throws himself on the floor and screams, let him scream until he's screamed out, WITHOUT restraining him? Few of these kids start out with abuse and destruction from here to Sunday, usually it's a 3 year old rolling around on the floor screaming. The kid is held down instead, and learns to hit to be released. From there it just picks up steam until you have a violent kid.

My mom used to just let me have my tantrums when I was little. It was embarrassing: I would start screaming in the middle of Sunrise Mall, and mom would simply drag me to the fountain and watch me until I calmed down. It was 1977 and nobody knew anything about autism, people would come by and say "shut that kid up!" She seemed to know that she couldn't stop a meltdown. Teachers didn't try to hold me down in the early 80s. It worked. Why not try that before you have a human wrecking ball on your hands?