http://www.sussexautisticsociety.org/images/logo.jpgThis week we had to write an essay in the College Writing class about autism. One of my friends who is also taking the class had an interesting opinion on it. In her creative writing piece she described the thoughts of an autistic female in an asylum who committed suicide. The lady already killed a person and she was under close surveillance. Her essay was purely hypothetical, but I was wondering how much truth is there in this idea.
I cannot completely agree that an autistic person is capable of committing suicide. I see an autistic person as unable to adapt to the society. As we can see in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Christopher would have been able to kill a person, if he felt threatened by their presence. He would kill only in order to protect himself. The instinct of conservation has a greater input in his reactions than in normal people. Then, why would he kill himself? It does not make sense to me.
One argument I received was that they might feel pressure from the society, that they might feel threatened by their environment. How can this be true, when autistic persons live in their own world. They do not adapt to the society and sometimes they do not even understand what happens in the society. How can they feel pressure from something they do not understand or are not part of?
In conclusion, I believe an autistic person would not be able to commit suicide. What do you think?
3 comments:
An autistic person has crisis periods in which he/she can hurt him/herself. It is said that autists cannot feel pain and that's why they can bang their head against the wall for hours or can burn their hands without even saying a word. Also autistic persons are incapable of nurturing and expressing feelings... don't take movies into consideration, don't think of rain man as your typical autistic person because that's just a Hollywood story. Autistic persons cannot feel, don't express feeling and all they do is out of need of security, order, routine.
These are my two main reasons on which i base my opinion when saying that autistic persons don't commit suicide. First of all, by having no feelings and emotional attachments why should they feel the need to kill themselves? Suicide is a reaction to an emotional instability and is based almost purely on emotional distress, needs and lack of happiness. Second of all, one of their crisis and lack of surveillance could easily go from minor wounds to major wounds to something lethal. They like playing with unusual objects, they like blades, sharp objects. They can just bang their head against the wall for hours as I've said before... so imagine what would happen if no one was there to supervise.
That's my opinion from what I've studied and read about autistic behavior. Well... time to end an awfully long comment. bye
I don't think it's correct to say that autistic persons don't have feelings. They do have them, fear of being attacked, the need for security, is a feeling as well. They lack interaction; they cannot relate to other people, but they have feelings. I agree that since they cannot relate to the outside world they cannot reach the point of suicide. Also, they cannot commit suicide because of their strong sense of preservation. But, they do have feelings.
actually alot of people who have autism/aspergers has co-morpid conditions such as ptsd, depression, anxiety, they physically may not feel pain, but emotionally they can. i have aspergers syndrome (autism) ADHD, PTSD, anxiety and alot of people who have autism actually were mis diagnosed and have ptsd,adhd,anxiety which is similar to autism(aspergers) so people really need to be careful on what they blog about related to autism, autism is a mix of neurological and psychiatric issues (depression,ptsd, etc)
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