I updated “I’m Autistic. Here’s what I’d like you to know.” with a selection from “Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America” to expand the bullet point on stress and stress cases and bring in a critical psychiatry voice. A longer quote from this piece is included in “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life”.

People who enter services are frequently society’s most vulnerable–people who have experienced extensive trauma, adversity, abuse, and oppression throughout their lives. At the same time, I struggle with the word “trauma” because it signifies some huge, overt event that needs to pass some arbitrary line of “bad enough” to count. I prefer the terms “stress” and “adversity.” … Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between “trauma” and “adversity”–a stressed fight/flight state is the same regardless of what words you use to describe the external environment. I’m tired of people saying “nothing bad ever happened to me” because they did not experience “trauma.” People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.

Source: Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America

This doesn’t fit the flow of the bullet point as well as I’d like. Connective editing TBD.

I might work this quote/theme into Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing.