r/siblingsupport

My older (26M) brother has high support needs autism. He's tall, strong, and nonverbal. He also has OCD and ADHD. We've done ABA with him, but my parents didn't follow through so he doesn't use his ipad and he doesn't regulate besides hurting himself by slapping, pinching, and screaming. He doesn't know the word stop. He also has gastrointestinal issues which prevented him from learning how to poop properly until last year. His OCD causes him to rearrange things like clothes, pots and pans, food, and now trash in irregular ways. They make no sense besides whatever logic he has in his head which he can't articulate. On Self injurious behavior, he likes pressure, but only when people are applying it to him. So despite regularly hitting himself, he will use his strength on someone so they can push back.

But what pisses me off is that he is on the precipice for things. Like he can shower himself, he can feed himself, and he can be deceptive. We have locks because he doesn't know how to regulate his eating habits. But he knows how to open locks with keys and does so when we aren't in view. He can wash dishes (though doesn't really clean them out fully). When he organizes bottles or his spoons, he seperates them into pairs of 2s or 3s, showing he can count and organize. For the majority of my life, I always just thought of him as this unthinking, unfeeling guy. He only works off his bodily needs. But a lot of his behaviors honestly feel like stubborness. If we ask him to do something he can do, like pick up his trash, he will just ignore it until we have to get louder. It feels like an issue of motivation, but I feel like its too late to do anything.

But onto why I made the post: the r word. Its coming back into fashion on both sides of the political fence. My fucking psychology and law teacher used it, and I had to be the one to educate her. My classmates didn't say shit. None of these people know what its like to have to sacrifice your free time to take care of a brother who doesn't know/respect your boundaries. Or the fear of having him hurt himself and not being able to stop him. Or the fear of putting him in a program and wondering if he'll be safe.

Ofc old school movies use it, like Scary Movie, White Chicks, Jennifer's Body, and Legally Blonde, but newer movies have also used it like Venom having Eminem drop it in the rap, or even Deadpool and fucking Wolverine. People will always comment on some other problematic aspect of these movies, but never the use of ableism. And even older movies used idiot, moron, and imbecile, which were equivalents of the r word. The 3 Stooges built its whole act from comparing the leads to people with mental disabilities. But bring that up causes ppl to become defensive.

It also makes me hypersensitive of any words that seem to imply mental disability. A new game I play, Deadlock, had a character ask another character how often her mom dropped her. And I immediately made think "is he basically saying she is mental disabled". When I asked people on a discord I'm on, I got mixed messages saying he was just calling her dumb or saying shes dumb because of brain damage. But many of the people there were very condescending, saying I was being too soft. The same thing happened when I posted this on reddit. I didn't know who to believe and I ended up spirialing, and I learned a lot of things that I didn't want to. Like the "No this is Patrick" meme coming from ER where Kevin Michael Richardson played a mentally disabled character. Or the Pinhead Larry joke being based off of people with microcephaly.

I feel so alone in all of this. I don't have anyone to talk to. And I can't get a clear answer on things. Not just about my brother, but about ableism in language and how to deal with it.