Held for Ransom

The Child Study Center at New York University has a new advertising campaign entitled "Ransom Notes," which is, unfortunately, just what it sounds like. "Awareness" posters focusing on various psychological conditions and developmental differences, including autism and Asperger Syndrome, are written in the style of ransom notes from kidnappers. They begin with "We have your son," and go on to describe in absurdly melodramatic terms how he is being destroyed for life, etc. I'm not going to quote this repulsive dreck in any more detail or give it an active link, but this is where you can find it:


aboutourkids.org/about_us/public_awareness


Thanks to hollywoodjaded for bringing this appalling example of hate speech to my attention. I posted the following comments into the contact form on the website to express my disgust, and I urge readers to let them know what you think of it, too.


To the person(s) responsible for creating the grossly offensive "Ransom Notes" advertising campaign: Because it's so obvious that you did not consult with any autistic people or other neurological minority groups before trotting out that odious medieval stolen-child changeling nonsense, I'm going to take this opportunity to educate you on the actual views held by many people in the autistic community today.

Many of us do indeed feel as if we're being held for ransom, but you've got the identity of the perpetrators all wrong. To find a clue, you might want to take a good look in a mirror. We—that is, America's autistic citizens and our families—have had our lives hijacked in recent years by a greedy profiteering agenda that has deliberately and viciously stigmatized autistic people as broken, less than human, our souls stolen from us, and similar bigoted garbage, all for the purpose of making money by selling therapies. As a result, we now face prejudice and discrimination every day, in all aspects of our lives.

We are being held for ransom by psychs who, after inventing the Asperger diagnostic category in the 1990s to drum up new business by pathologizing millions of people who had been considered normal up to that point, now have the hubris to claim that they are the only ones who can save us from the horrors of being ourselves. The list of accomplices in this obscene scheme is long and shameful. It includes quack doctors peddling wonder cures, amoral researchers vying for grant dollars, nonprofit organizations more interested in self-aggrandizement than in actually helping anyone, posturing politicians trolling for votes, advertising agencies that have no qualms about creating the ugliest propaganda if the price is right, media corporations that regularly concoct bogus epidemics and milk them for all they're worth, and more.

On the About Us page on your website, you claim that one of the central goals of your organization is "to eliminate the stigma of being or having a child with a psychiatric disorder." But after seeing Ransom Notes, I just have to wonder if you really think you're going to fool anyone with that claim.