Is autism really the cause?

It has nothing to do with it. I am autistic, very autistic. My father forced me to learn to live life and deal with society, instead of coddling me and making me into a drugged up dumb-ass.

I have gone through life and succeeded, I am now retired at the age of 35, on a little farm.

It has nothing to do with the autism, it has to do with the parents.

if your child has a missing foot, or a limp, or whatever, you work with your kid, you teach them ways to overcome their disability, and to succeed anyways. That is what parents of children with mental problems have to do.

We all know people with downs syndrome who never left the house and mommy has to feed them with a spoon. We know others who live alone and take care of themselves and have jobs. They have the same disability, the difference is one group had parents who coddled them and always did everything for them because they couldn't. The other group had parents who supported them, taught them to work with their issues, and how to overcome their disability, and they were able to thrive.

Parents make the difference, broken people have broken parents for the most part. Yes, there are a few people out there who are born sociopathic and nothing can be done about it, but they are rare, and none of them that I know of have committed mass shootings.

This was along the same lines I was thinking when I started a thread earlier, (not sure how to link to it) well said op.

what's your official diagnosis?

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Colombine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Jarred Viktor, age 15, stabbed his grandmother 61 times after 5 days on Paxil.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,

(Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

___________________

Hey - somebody actually gets it! :) When it comes to Asperger's, I see many of the child's autism traits in the parents - just more pronounced. The parents are often very OCD themselves - but it tends to be about their children. Nobody loves their children like they do. Nobody understands their children (and what their children are going through) like they do. Nobody should try to teach their child life lessons, that it up to them. It becomes a real task, training the parent and the child. Sometimes those kids come in and they are the worst kinds of brats - not because of their Asperger's but because their parents have allowed the behavior and excused it - claiming the child can't help himself due to the disability.

THE CAUSE IS SSRI DRUGS


Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Colombine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Jarred Viktor, age 15, stabbed his grandmother 61 times after 5 days on Paxil.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,

(Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

___________________

Let's look at the GLP population.

Many of you are pretty open about physical revolt should the hammer come down and you are then violently, socially, and chemically forced to become a stupid consumer sheep-slave.

It is much the same with these kids. Force (in many forms) is used against them in an attempt to change their very nature, and then we wonder what happened when/if they respond in violent fashion.

And make no mistake, this is just the beginning. Right now they are targeting those who are more obviously unable/willing to conform. When new rules are established to govern the "anti-social" the definition will be expanded.

Excited about the new Lady Gaga album? No? Then you obviously have some kind of social pathology and need to have your rights limited for the good of "normal" society.

class 3 moderate to severe pdd/autism

You have no idea what you are talking about, autism and asperger are real somatic diseases, it's not "being shy" or something, it's dead real. You can't just "get your shit together" and pretend you are normal, I tried this many times but what I got my condition became more severe every time, it's very hard to adopt to it, possible, I guess, but you can't blame people that they failed to adopt. You just have no idea at all.

you are the one who has no idea.

like anything else, every person has tools they can use to get past the bad parts of themselves, and to better themselves.

just like a blind man may develop better hearing, or a man with no arms may develop amazing dexterity with their toes.

The brain is capable of amazing things, but it needs help. It needs support, and understanding. an autistic child needs a parent who can stand outside emotion and truly look at the capabilities of the child, and then develop a program to help them learn. look for their shortfalls, and find ways to work around them.

it is what parents have done for millennium, but have given up on in the last 50 years, favoring a "one size fits all" approach to child raising, which leaves a large percentage out in the cold.

Maybe there are things you will never be able to do, but you will learn to do the things you can do so well that it won't matter.

I never got over my fear/hatred of crowds, and people, and public speaking, and just general society, so I became good at things that allowed me to be alone, and I did them well, and thrived on them, and now I have been successful enough to buy a small farm and be retired, and I do not have to mess with anyone I don't want to, because I get to be my own boss.

you must learn the skills that you can, and structure your life and plans to take advantage of your plusses, and as much as possible negate your negatives. It is possible.

and for the record, I do not blame people who fail to adapt, just like I do not blame the downs syndrome kid who hasn't learned to use a spoon at age 25, I blame the parents and caregivers.

I was answering to op's post, I believe it was about "well-adjustment" and how a "non well-adjusted" person can act insane like that kid in Newtown. I meant that you can't become well-adjusted by will. You can't become well-adjusted if you are autistic. You cannot control yourself like other people do. You can make money and have a job of course but it doesnt save you from losing control and starting to destroy yourself and maybe other people if something in your life goes wrong.

You can't blame parents too just because you think that you parents dealt good with your disease, each patient is different and each medical case is different.

Something was lost in translation here. My point was that you can't take someone who is autistic and feed them drugs, socially belittle/outcast them, and physically punish them and expect them to adapt. In fact, as in your experience, one should expect the opposite effect.

The example was that if you took a non-autistic and tried to make them act autistic in the same fashion that is used on autistics (at leat in America/Europe/Canada) you would end up with crazy people.

I'm saying it's not the autism, but the way it is handled by the neurotypical authority that leads to a violent reaction.

We do not have a disagreement here.

No, we here have very different situation than you in US, I was diagnosed with asperger only at the age of 19 and before that I was threated exactly like you say, everybody, my parents, teachers, school psychologist pretended that I'm just shy, that I should just stop being pussy and everything will be ok. I didn't take any drugs or antidepressants before I was diagnosed, and I ended up as a crazy man nevertheless.

This is one of the main issues with Autism spectrum disorders. Parents refuse to accept that their children could have something wrong with them, and as such, they do not give them the skills they need. These kids need to be found early, like age 6 or 8, and and worked with, so that they can learn the tools to survive during their learning developing years.

Once those years are over, it is very hard to change.

Things have been different here since the late 90's. I never had a diagnosis though would have gotten Asperger's, and I was just considered a wierdo and told to "man up" much like yourself.

Now we slap a Dx on them as early as possible and start drugging them and using behavior modification. In the schools, if the drugs and "applied behavioral analysis" doesn't work, many kids are subjected to verbal abuse, physical restraints, and even isolation in padded cells.

My daughter is very autistic (non-verbal) and I am constantly having "therapies" and drugs pushed on me as a solution. So far I have been able to avoid this while keeping her out of public school, but I fear that one day (particularly with this new focus on "mental health") we may have to "go into hiding" in a sense by moving state to state in order to avoid government-mandated "solutions" and avoid being charged with neglect, and possibly losing her to state custody.

Excellent thread. Promotes understanding. Thank you.

Gosh, I'm guessing since I posted at 6:03 PM:

Thread: Adam Lanza diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome before parents divorce in 2009!

This "new" topic was posted at 6:29 PM that seems to be an opinion related to my topic.

An opinion is like a "youknowwhat....."Everyone has one!"

I only stated a fact from an article:

[link to www.newschannel6now.com]

If the problem was meds, or anything don't you people think the media would take that and run with it?

I haven't seen any mention of medications, mental health care, or whether or not the school knew he had Asperger's.

I think social media has certainly dummied down our world. People think others actually want to hear every passing negative thought that goes through their mind.

Not everyone thinks negatively the majority of the time.

The death of the children is extremely sad.

As a spiritual being having a human experience, I KNOW that all souls come from ONE SOURCE and are all the same age, whether they be babies, or children in this incarnation, whether you choose to BELIEVE IT or not.

Bless them for the choice their souls made to be part of this life that was cut so short.

Be Love!

Yes, I created this thread based on yours. It has absolutely nothing to do with being an autistic parent of an autistic child that works with autistic adults for a living and is a member of several groups for both autistics and the parents of autistics who are all talking about this with varied opinions.

You win. Pat yourself on the back.