Crimson Thoughts

I'm moving the location of this blog, both because I actually have had issues remembering the address (sad, isn't it), and to make the comments more accessible. And I changed the name to a singular (Crimson Thought, as opposed to Crimson Thoughts).

The new address is as follows; http://www.crimsonthought.blogspot.com

Well, I should be far nearer to Massachusetts than I am now. School starts tomorrow, and I was supposed to be in my room tonight. And I thought I was going to be, too.

Of course, I should have realized it snowed in Atlanta, that my flight was to Atlanta, and that flights would not be in Reno heading that direction. Of course, my flight got delayed, such that going to Massachusetts on that flight would mean missing my shuttle, leaving me (quite possibly) stranded in an airport or worse. And, of course, I had my fight re-routed.

The great thing about that, of course, was that the flight took me to Dallas, had me leave Atlanta, and arrive in Albany. Of course, if that didn't make sense, it shouldn't have; there was no obvious way to understand the teleport from Dallas to Atlanta. And, of course, we were put on another airline, which couldn't make sense of said teleport either, so we ended being referred to the original people from whom we came.

And then the lines were so long we missed that flight anyway in the counter. So when we finally arrived at the Delta counter, there was nothing to be done. In the end, it turned out that, after all, I would be in Reno another day, and that I'd be missing the first class of my next semester.

Laughing, at this point, my mother and I left the airport, only somewhat discouraged. It wasn't quite the end of the wackiness, though. As if to make things even weirder than they already were for fun, the subsequent visit to Starbucks in order to drown my headache in a hot chocolate was foiled.

If you're a Starbucks customer in differing degrees (I only go there rarely, but I know many who are daily), you might remember that the cups have a "Things People Say" (or something like that) section of text, where various (and often random) points of view are written, with the author, with varying degrees of expertise. It's usually just that, though, and not advertising.

But, amazingly, there was psuedo-advertising on the side of my cup, from none other than Bob Wright, CEO of Autism Speaks.

The message itself wasn't offensive (it was really centered on the rate of diagnosis), but the implied message wasn't as... pleasant as I might like. But what startled me most was that there was such direct PR on the side of my Starbucks cup and, worse, from a person who I tended to disagree with, to a degree of alarming regularity.

So much for not having a headache.

In the midst of all this, though, I had to note that, despite the oddness of the whole thing, it didn't really feel exceptional in a visceral way. Even though the odds of such occurrences weren't great, it seemed to fit perfectly with some of the general existence that is life, which, to be honest, defies expectations in many ways, and this was just one of many. The ordinary, it seemed at that moment, never really existed for me.

Of course, it now is snowing in flurries, with another round on the way. Reno, it seems, isn't really interested in letting me leave. And, in an odd way, that's very ordinary.

If you looked through autism news, the trial of Karen McCarron, who admitted to strangling her autistic daughter Katie, comes up often. It didn't come up here, despite my keeping up on it. Honestly, it was because, in all of the emotions and speculation, it was hard to speak with certainty about the issue. But now  that the jury is making its deliberations, I thought I would throw my hat in.

The nature of insanity, actually, is a little unclear to some degree. Insanity would usually be described as a person's inability to see right from wrong, but such a thing presumes a moral standard without contradiction, so as to make deciding certain actions unclear. There are variations on this and other trains in terms of insanity, and I'm not about to get into all of them and apply it to the case at hand. Instead, let's look at what the jury will use, which specifically follows;

A person is insane and not criminally responsible for his conduct if at the time of the conduct, as a result of mental disease or mental defect, he lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct.

That's the state statute, so I'm going to use that for now, and tinker with it a bit later, because it's interesting. Let's also assume that Karen McCarron decided it would be best for everyone that anyone  The jury isn't going to assume anything about Karen McCarron's mental state off the bat, because both sides put in contradicting psychiatrists, so that's left alone, giving us just the state of the crime itself.

The specific thing that Karen McCarron would have been considered psychotic on under that definition would be if she didn't have the capacity to appreciate the criminality of her actions. Note the act of separation in the clause. It is not that she didn't appreciate the criminality of her actions, it is that she could not  have had appreciated the said criminality.

Now, I'll have to use a little conjecture, because I'm going to assume that "could not" is not a cosmically deterministic sense (because that would get off every criminal ever to have existed, because the individual's mind would be stated as being such as it is determined the action, or the criminal's criminal mind made him commit criminal acts). And, because the action is being determined on a mentally ill basis, a strict definition that would insist on the individual's culpability is out. Thus, consider it so that the individual, at a level, judged the action rationally before committing it, such that the criminality was actively dismissed from the picture.

Under this definition, McCarron is guilty. It well could have gone through her mind, and she actively made the decision to murder based on another moral judgement (that her daughter's life was best existing as... not existing)  There isn't a reaction per se, but action based on stress and rationality. She well had the capacity to choose otherwise, given her rationality, which was actively used and not supresed in a real way. 

Interestingly, however, I've seen a few people analyze the situation while dropping the imporant distance of this clause, leaving roughtly this, if I was to amend the statute temporarily (though I wouldn't);

A person is insane and not criminally responsible for his conduct if at the time of the conduct, as a result of mental disease or mental defect, he does not appreciate the criminality of his conduct.

Here, I was a little hard pressed to say one way or the other. And here's why; McCarron's mindset was not on the criminality of the conduct. It was on the moral value of the daughter's life. It should be noted that the notion of murder as a moral crime should be taken out her  takes a step out of anyone's real moral authority to say either way;you could create an absolute, but then you're taking out even sketchier circumstances like euthanasia. And that's irrelevant, as it's more about the criminality.

But two things here would allow me to say that McCarron is still guilty. First, even if her rationality didn't decide based on rationality, that's not to say she didn't understand that while undertaking the action. It just meant that the criminality was a non-factor, and that she didn't care about it. She appreciated it, or understood it, but didn't care to make a decision based on it.

The other is that McCarron would have to have made the action based off of a specific defect. Any kind of moral rationality difference assumes a distinct morality, again, for each and every circumstance, and no such thing exists per se. There is nothing specific to McCarron, something distinct and separate from the rest of her mind, that would drive that action.

Now, the jury is going to consider the following pleas; guilty, guilty but mentally ill, not guilty by reason of insanity, and not guilty. The last bit is out of the picture. I would dismiss not guilty by reason of insanity, but it may be that she is mentally ill, not such to be considered insanity under the statute, but otherwise so. I'll be interested to see how that comes out.

Well, the flow of posts has dramatically stopped recently because I was on a self-imposed gag order. The reason for this being, actually, that my Mom just announced her bid for a Nevada Supreme Court seat, so I didn't want to so much as hint at that, so I stopped all of my online means of communication. I usually would trust myself on such an issue, but I found myself thinking about it a lot (I spent years telling her she should be on the Supreme Court, but she actually bid for different conspiring circumstances, rather than anything I said).

Of course, this all comes before our trip to Disneyland, so I'll be off tomorrow having fun in California at the Happiest Place on Earth by tomorrow, to return by Monday (though I may get a post in Sunday). And this... no, that wasn't what I was going to write before I go off to Disneyland. And I'm not even going to get into the new study that, by using largely the power of common sense, showed that mercury is not related to autism (others have, and I may well later. But I don't feel like broaching the subject now).

Instead, I'm going to mention something about motor skills, sports, and those related autism issues. It's something that's still pressing, but far less so than when I was younger, in my day to day life. It's not a really traumatic issue, but it is one in and of itself.

I had some rather severe fine motor issues. The issue was clearly something that was physical in addition to mental (as demonstrated so profoundly by my occupational therapist when she pulled by middle finger well past my wrist), but whether it started physical is another issue (the lack of using my hands as normal in the first place well could have created the physical issues without them being present before). I did do some significant occupational therapy, much of it I can remember (and in particular the taxi game, in which the individual uses their fingers to guide a taxi around a dorky town, but it required some force to actually move the taxi. It's ingrained so much in my memory I actually shuddered thinking of it).

Even so, it was a gargantuan school problem; I didn't have the motor skills to write. It was a serious educational put-off, because if I had a chance of understanding fully what the teacher wanted and did it, the teacher wouldn't be able to read my handwriting. In fact, it's only a development in the last two years or so that my handwriting has been considered legible at all, and it's still difficult and large. And there's no way I could write cursive, and because I could never begin to write it I can't efficiently read it, either (my signature, for this reason, is hilarious, because I am actually mimicking something that I remember as being something like my name written in cursive, but it's dubious).

Otherwise, I had some issues. However, when I was seven I began to take martial arts in both classes and independently (because martial arts I actually wanted to take were not near me), and in the process I began to gain enough other skills to be a decent soccer player, and even was a fast runner (though I never could actually be a runner per se, because I will never perform without some motivation, and running on a track of any kind does NOT provide motivation).

In many ways, martial arts training was far more helpful generally than any sport (on principle, I wouldn't consider martial arts a sport). The motions were broader, more complex, required more balance and whole-body work, rather than any other sport. It also was good that it also happened to be my favorite of all of the physical activities I did, though after that events conspired against me (the classes I was taking frustrated me by singling me out often as inferior due to largely social reasons, and though I did have a good run at a jujutsu/ninjutsu before I went to school, I otherwise couldn't find anything that I liked to take in Reno, which was filled with many martial arts that weren't suited to me (because I know a lot about martial arts, I was picky about my choices, and of course my favorite is taught only in very specific locations that, for obvious reasons, didn't include Reno, NV)).

From all of that, I could probably emphasize a few things in terms of teaching autistics motor skills. As so far as the skill abilities go, the actual exercises that would deal with coordination are specific (much in the same way that being a good runner does not teach one how to use a bike, though far more specific here). It's not total, though, there is some carry over. But it has to include a wide variety of different motions all fairly well balanced. Otherwise, there will be gains in some very specific areas but otherwise with little improvement.

I might want to draw attention to something that I noted earlier though; it's not clear to me that the fine motor skills were anything that, in introduction, were anything other than mental. In being seperated from the way other people hold themselves by means of innuendo (common in non-autistic children), an individual is not necessarily given an impulse to hold themselves any other way, and thus the body doesn't cooperate quite the same way from an early age and onwards, causing both a lack of given skill and strength. I'd have to think about other aspects which might be tied to this, but it'd take some thought to really consider it.

Anyway, I would just end on noting that such issues, while not the primary importance of autism communication (I've seemed to have gotten off fine in this day and age without the ability to write), is something that should be addressed and considered per the individual child and his strengths and weaknesses in such areas. Of course, remember that these activities have some of the same draws as they do for other children, so listening to said child is imporant too (I don't want to be advocating for forcing children into strict fitness routines).

I received earlier today, interestingly enough, given the other notes of the day, an e-mail requesting information regarding the CAA.

I sent it on (and forgot to mention who I generally was, and then made a few typos; I was multitasking a little too much at that point) to the relevant people, but I also decided to put it up, as imperfect as it was, here. So, it asked for my opinions on what I thought was high priority research questions in the following areas; 1.Treatment, 2.Diagnosis, 3.Risk Factors, 4.Biology, 5.Other. I answered accordingly, so here we go...

1. Regarding the treatment of ASD, the by far most important factor to be considered is the educational area, which includes the behavioral therapies such as ABA, and complimentary therapies that would work with the educational and the behavioral. Research that would lead to improvements in such practices, and potentially limit the number of hours needed so that more can get such practices in the first place, would be the most helpful of all kinds of research possible. Research that specifically focused on the learning differences and similarities of ASD individuals would be extremely helpful as well.
   

 

2. Diagnosis is a factor which is secondary to the educational aspects, but there is still value in researching the ASD phenotype. In particular, a more complete understanding of the AS spectrum is needed. There is also an incomplete understanding of the AS spectrum in its mental implications rather than in its behavioral implications, which are often disregarded (as the behavioral aspects are the most obvious factors). Also worth looking into is the status of individuals who are considered “lower-functioning”, who then gain certain skills and are reassigned to a different place on the spectrum, sometimes losing the diagnosis altogether. There may not be enough of a population to conduct such research, but if there were it would be important.

 

3. Risk factors aren’t the most important aspect of ASD research. The research itself doesn’t help the ASD individual or his family in any guaranteed way and with limited resources at hand there are far more pressing matters at hand, such as effective education for ASD individuals. If such studies are to be directed, the most helpful considerations would be centered on the possibility of genetic factors, rather than environmental factors.

 

4. Biology is another aspect of research which has limited pressing importance for autistic individuals. While research on the neurology of ASD may be helpful in so far as they enhance the education of ASD individuals, they otherwise have a limited function. On the other hand, an honest investigation of some of the biomedical treatments is necessary, in terms of overall safety and efficiency, though focus should be limited to the more widespread practices (as there are too many to address individually). Also, while not really a biological study, it would good to have an investigation into the intelligence of autistic individuals, noting the potent difference between the ability to express oneself intelligently and intelligence itself, which often have been confused in previous research.

5. There are a few factors which should be considered while conducting research. There should be an effort to include ASD individuals into the process, who have a unique insight into the condition. There has also been an issue of certain misunderstandings causing significant stigma for ASD individuals. It is also important to consider looking into the safety and ethics of all kinds of treatments, as some of them are quite potentially dangerous and yet are still in frequent use.