‘propensity to suicide ideate when we lose hope because things go wrong in our lives’

I would just like to clarify that ‘suicide ideation’ is not a trait of autism; it is a trait of depression.

Autistic people who find themselves socially excluded are more likely to be at risk of depression and suicidal thoughts – in exactly the same way a non-autistic person who found themselves socially excluded would.

Equally autistic people who are able to socially integrate are less likely to be depressed and the above view wouldn’t apply to them.

I am commenting as an autistic adult who is able to ‘socially integrate’ when required and who knows other autistic adults who have socially integrated as they are working and have colleagues and/or partners who are supportive and therefore have not found themselves depressed.

This is not to detract from David’s valid point that autistic people with depression need support – they do.

It’s just important that autism and depression are classed separately – they are not one and the same.

Consequently they had to work long hours in heavy industries trying to help keep the nation free of Nazism which meant I spent my waking hours six days a week with my mother’s deaf, dumb, autistic, near feral and shamanic maternal grandfather, Grampa, who taught me to read and write, so it’s him I have to thank for my successful professional career and this fabulous retirement.

I’ve written and published five Amazon Bestsellers and also two Smashwords novellas and have a Smashwords novel in the pipeline resulting from competing in the NaNoWriMo competition and being a 2014 winner. And I write on the New York based Huffington Post as a featured author, thanks to Arianna Huffington the Editor in Chief offering me a ‘voice’ on that publication.

And I coach and counsel other people of the spectrum to help them escape from our propensity to suicide ideate when we lose hope because things go wrong in our lives.

I was first diagnosed as a savant at Nursery School, but the only treatment that got me was being locked in a storeroom all day, every day, with only my children’s encyclopaedia for company. The same happened in my first year at Infants School. In the summer between the first and second year I was found to have Childhood Autism, but the only benefit I got from that was they let me take a series of books about the Bible to my lockup to study as a change from the children’s encyclopaedia. But I was happy, so, hey, I was doing my own thing my way and that’s all I wanted of the state education system.

All hell broke lose when I started at Junior School however, as the Head of School, in the first Morning Assembly of the new term, told the rest of the pupils and teachers that I was suffering from Witchcraft, and that the Bible says, Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live. So they tried to kill me, four times a day, every day for the first week of term, and I ran away from home on the Friday evening after school and tried to kill myself four times – and ended up in a 48 hour near death coma locked in an industrial cold store at the local Coop dairy of the village where we then lived, at 30 degrees below freezing. I was so hated that the local police refused pointblank to join in the search for me and the local doctors refused to attend to me when found.

I was frozen solid. My fingernails, thumbnails and toenails dropped off, and I came back to life as my mother was stripping me off and washing me down for the undertaker to come and collect me. Obviously, my parents withheld me from the state education system when I told them why I had suicide ideated, and so I had no state education at all, but was pre-schooled by my Grampa, then self taught for four years, then had private tutors for the next eight years, then qualified professionally, rather than academically, at fifteen and a half.

But my being withdrawn from the state education system did not satisfy that Head of School and my peers at that school – they continued trying to kill me at every opportunity that presented – every morning from eleven and a half to twelve and a half as I had to catch the same bus as them to go to the Grammar School for my articled pupillages, and on my way home from that School on the day that I qualified. They cracked my head open and slashed my brain on that last occasion, so I lost my memory and identity for the next 35 years of my life, until hypno-regression therapy diagnosed and treated me for Asperger’s Syndrome.

That diagnosis and treatment turned me into a super human and my performance at work rocketed so much I was asked to start coaching and counselling other auties and aspies to help them cope better with their condition, so I’ve been doing that ever since, by using the internet, in my time and at my expense.

It has been a very fulfilling cause and I have saved literally thousands of lives as I have focused on the suicide ideation issue. And I have won awards in Yahoo Answers and in Linked In for my contributions. My books and blogs include lots about that work, as it is my aspie ‘special interest’ so I love writing about it. It is what has given my life meaning and purpose.

So as one autie and aspie educator to another, I thank you for loving us so much and giving up so much of your personal life for our sakes.