I appreciate your comment. All too often institutional evil goes unnoticed especially in rural communities. No one believed me when I told them this school was bad for me, but everyone was completely surprised when I failed in my later education. Meanwhile I have fairly regular nightmares over my experiences there that are sufficiently bad enough to wake me up mid-sleep and I'd be incapable of falling back asleep until 12+ hours later. I probably need therapy for this, but I know I won't be able to get it due to insurance issues.

For the longest time I was pretty much left behind and was severely lacking in education and even my personality took a turn for the worse. Those schools don't help you. They give you contempt for authority and a pessimistic and cynical outlook on many subjects. Some people may say that's how I should act towards a lot of subjects, but this was an ingrained childhood experience that would negatively impact you at a core level. I still don't get how people were legitimately stupid enough to try and goad severely autistic people into writing or speaking when a lot of them were non-verbal. I have the disability yet people in a position of authority who lacked my disability chose this path for us and thought it to be the best way of approaching things.

They thought "coping" was the catch-all solution to fix the behavior of students there, and even the severely autistic people can get openly annoyed by the staff. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I think they look at severely autistic people like animals due to their lack of communication, but I always remember them lashing out without warning if they got upset enough because despite their disability, there's still a person in there. One memory that fails to escape me is a bulky red-headed severely autistic high school man kept having staff be hands-on and violating his personal space which he eventually without warning grabbed the wrist of the staff member nearby and squeezed hard enough to cause pain while bearing teeth and eyes wide open. That's when the aforementioned "security guard" took him out of the room.

When I left high school, I was highly estranged and had a warped worldview. Being a part of internet communities helped me grow up more mature, more intelligent as I had the ability to learn things at my own pace and need, and it changed me from someone who was originally thought to be a lost cause in the education system. Yes, people truly had that level of contempt for me and so very many others. When I went onto chat rooms and participated with other people, I learned how to participate with others and put that experience past me, even if I still have nightmares from it years later. Some of the only people in my childhood who treated me with any sort of kindness was people of the days of Digg, Reddit, IRC, and Discord.

I ended up a better person long-term, even if I was and to an extent still am fucked in life. And there's no amount of thanks I can give to the people who showed me kindness online at the absence of everyone else in-person.

Right?!? I had the same experience. A few (2 max) hours with some random worksheets was “school”

I actually just received my medical records from the psychiatric hospital I went to 5 years ago. They completely falsified my statements to extend my stay. The utter cruelty I witnessed and experienced is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. We need psych reform so, so badly.

I have 3 main points when it comes to autism. Autism is a spectrum and each case has different severity on the person affected. Light autism (Autism Spectrum Disorder or formerly Asperger's Syndrome), moderate autism, and severe autism. Light autism is what I am. We function differently but we can for the most part be as intelligent if not more than than the average person. People theorize that Albert Einstein was an undiagnosed light autistic person. As for moderate autism, that is when someone can understand basic issues and terms and may be able to utter some brief phrases and do things without assistance, but will need some form of support for the remainder of their life. Severe autism results in a non-verbal and are dysgraphic. These people will need life-long support in the same case as an elderly person with dementia. They cannot do any form of basic self-care and must be cleaned, assisted in the restroom, and hand fed.

Now, I want to be very clear here in that what I just said above is a very broad scope and each diagnosed case of autism is going to be different in various ways. A severely autistic man may be able to feed himself if handed food and have certain other skills, but may have trouble with the other mentioned issues of self-care. Meanwhile someone who is light in autism isn't guaranteed to just be "weird in person". I have epilepsy myself on top of that. Also, neurological conditions frequently overlap in the case of autistic people. I was not the only autistic and epileptic person in that school.

Severely autistic children and men may not ever integrate into society and they should just have a caretaker during their time in school without being disturbed too much outside of some if any activities they may be able to derive enjoyment from. I'm talking about non-verbal people who cannot communicate through text. I mentioned in another comment that the severely autistic children were frequently given assignments to try and teach them even kindergarten level speech/writing but it never amounted to anything for anyone there and frequently resulted in even the severely autistic children getting upset, then getting taken out and they are unlikely to understand what they did wrong when the staff were the major aggressors in almost all scenarios.

You do not see severely autistic people in school often because they are frequently sent to schools like my own and kept there until I presume they "graduate". It's not uncommon for them to be sent as early as first grade or even kindergarten if they are completely incapable of doing assignments. They are more common than you think and you can easily populate 1-2 classrooms per school district with varying degrees of autistic school children. Some of them get sent away but you're basically guaranteed to not participate in a regular school with severe autism.

Moderately autistic people are frequently there for a majority of their years, but may be able to pass kindergarten and first grade with some enhanced difficulty. They are like severely autistic people but are more capable with basic functions and aren't necessarily non-verbal or dysgraphic. However it's always going to be an uphill battle trying to teach them anything complex or having them deal with complicated scenarios. It is likely in most areas you do not see anyone moderately autistic as they do not tend to last long and while they don't stand out nearly as much as severe autism, they do still stand out a fair amount and they will struggle to keep pace with the other children and failing very early elementary classes is a quick ticket to a school like the one I mentioned.

Finally, people like me go to these schools only if we have developmental or behavioral trouble or the parents recommend it. Many high-functioning autistic children had difficult times in school either not understanding right from wrong or being influenced by someone bad. I had issues with fatigue to my epilepsy and sleep schedules, and I inadvertently fell asleep in class once which caused the principal to appear in person and physically pull me out of my chair which I had responded violently. That ended up getting me put in the charting school after a discussion with him and my mother. I entered the boarding school not knowing what I did wrong since a stranger was physically pulling me without warning in the primary school system. Keep in mind, I was not familiar with the principal as I had just entered middle school (I was only there for a few months). So some man came in from nowhere and started dragging me out of my classroom, and I didn't know how to properly act. My mother put me in the boarding school not knowing how bad the environment was and I began to hate school and I never felt like I had anyone to look up upon as my older neurotypical brother frequently injured me for being "stupid" (he has a much more mellow personality in adulthood and felt remorse for his actions some 15+ years later knowing my autism diagnosis) so I often looked to entertainment media (aka violence in a lot of it) to try and understand how people acted.

Only when my mother got internet for my brother did I learn exactly how other people acted, since during school I did not particularly relate to adults or other students that well, but people on the internet treated me like an equal without regard to my disability. It was only with social media that I grew as a person and learned I wasn't a failure or beyond hope. I just got into the internet far too late as rural america lacked internet for far longer than people in suburban and urban communities. Schools did not let you use the internet as far as I remember as it served no purpose for education.

One final parting note is that I believe that autism in general is horribly misunderstood. I said severe autistic people are looked upon like animals in the other comment, but that's only the base of it. Autism is misunderstood and so many false stereotypes exist about people like us. One popular example is that people like me are inherently shy because we don't look people in the eyes. This is one of the bigger stereotypes peddled. Autistic people can be shy, but we aren't inherently afraid of neurotypicals just because we don't look you in the eyes. And I can be quite mean if I feel someone is coddling me for that or treating me any less than the person I am due to these stereotypes.

I hope this answers in depth all of your questions. I believe that severe and moderate autistic people should get the support they need without being haggled by staff in these boarding schools, and I also believe that whatever approach that these staff are currently using are ineffective and result in worsened behavior or traumatic memories that negatively effect high functioning autistic children.

They aren't much different in practice, some are religious and others are not. They keep kids "in line" and try to guide them through dubious means, but it never ends up working as expected and this is assuming it's all genuinely trying to be helpful. Sometimes it's just to get kids out of primary school or even for money as mentioned.

Last Podcast on the Left is doing a series on this now and it’s good!

Excellent podcast

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Do you remember a show on TV, wanna say Fox, where a group of very young children was dropped off in the Utah wilderness and they had to build a village, more or less, Lord of the Flies style? It was in the mid 2000s.

I didn’t watch it, evidently others did.

No you don't

The behind the bastards podcast on Elan drew heavily from the comic but gave greater context to just how horrible the "schools" were, including the kidnapping tactics used on children to get them there.

It is almost as if that organization lacks credibility.

Not that I can tell. There's no record of it doing so. That may have happened to a different school.

It's frightening to imagine what this kind of environment from the Elan school would do to an already anxious/depressed teenager. I can't even imagine.

All cults are bad. But it's a uniquely bad cult that sells itself not to the people who join it but to someone else to sell their kid into.

Seriously. They would.

Yeah, there are endless reports of these horrendous "programs". I read an entire series about them a good while ago. I think it was ProPublica or maybe Slate. It was a good source, regardless. The one was a ranch I think in Montana and they had PICTURES of young girls doing hard, heavy manual labor that was wrecking their bodies. I think someone smuggled in a camera because they weren't allowed phones.

I just remember being gobsmacked that these places aren't being shut down. I get that parents get desperate but for god's sake, in this day and age to be unaware of such a rampant problem and do no research before consigning your child to this hell is beyond me. I think the one place the local yokels were in on the grift and getting quite a cut of the deluge of $$ the place was making. LE, judges, state rep's - the whole nine yards.

Glad you got to a good one, but yes, you can consider yourself exceptionally lucky.

The reason the bad ones get in the news in 'bursts' is they get shuffled; a bad one gets shut down after going too far - but only that. It starts up again and does as bad or worse, until it's caught again a few more times.

Eventually after years of this they finally touch someone they shouldn't or a big enough news station gets involved, and that is when the entire stack of complaints and related incidents gets on the news. So less a clickbait affair with these, more a "file cabinet of complaints" found in a basement under some dead kids we finally sift through.