Introducing myself and this blog

I hate doing introductions. It's so much easier to write within an established context. But as hard as I tried, I couldn't think of a valid reason to avoid writing an introductory post to this blog.

I'm guessing that a lot of people who come to this blog might already be familiar with me in other contexts. The most familiar context would be that of my role as research analyst for the disability rights group Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group that helps organize the disability community's opposition to legalized assisted suicide, euthanasia and other forms of medical killing.

During an independent study course in 1991, working on my Masters degree in Special Education, I came across a 1988 article by Byron Rourke on his identification of a "syndrome" - nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD). Roughly - and I'll no doubt go into it in more detail later - the individuals have relatively high verbal scores in intelligence tests paired with relatively low performance scores. Poor coordination and visual-motor skills are near-universal.

People with "early shunted hydrocephalus" were identified as a population within this new label. People like me, that is. (Yes, those pictures on top are pictures of me)

No problem self-identifying as someone with neurological issues. I've always been aware of my poor balance, lack of coordination, poor spatial sense, and other issues that make up my version of "normal." In fact, descriptions of some of the children in Rourke's article sounded very much like me as a child - and dealt with some problems I wrestle with as an adult.

This label, though, really sucked.

According to Rourke, this Masters student would have significant problems with the following:

Concept-formation, problem-solving, strategy-generation, and hypothesis-testing/appreciation of informational feedback. Marked deficits in all of these areas are apparent, especially when the concept to be formed, the problem to be solved, and/or the problem-solving milieu(x) is/are novel or complex. Also evident are significant difficulties in dealing with cause-and-effect relationships and marked deficiencies in the appreciation of incongruities (e.g., age-appropriate sensitivity to humor). Most noticeable when formal operational thought becomes a developmental demand (i.e., in late childhood and early adolescence), relative deficits in these areas tend to increase markedly with advancing years, as is evident in the often widening gap between performance on rote (overlearned) and novel tasks.

Good thing I'd fooled my profs about the whole concept-formation thing. (wink)

Over the next few years, I became more set on a career course of engaging in policy debates where issues of disability, killing, discrimination, bioethics and myriad other elements collide. I made a deliberate decision to avoid self-identifying as someone with NLD, since I saw it as professional suicide to do so at that point. It would have opened me up to effective ad hominem attacks, based on the literature regarding people with NLD.

Since then, I've had a chance to establish myself. I may be regarded as quirky, odd, annoying -- but my competence isn't questioned very much. It's a little late to start questioning it now.

The things I do in the course of my work include - reading, analyzing and responding to research; analyzing media coverage and public discourse regarding policy issues; communicating with other activists to aid organizing advocacy efforts related to my work.

Wonder how that would have gone if people had known I wasn't supposed to be able to do any of it - or at least very well?

One more note: This blog is a work in progress. Appearances may vary a bit for awhile until I get things to where I don't want to bother with it any more.

Thanks and welcome! --Stephen Drake