This open access textbook on autistic community and the neurodiversity movement—edited by an autistic neurodiversity researcher—is a free download.
Parents and educators, check it out.
Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline
Anyone got a playlist of openly autistic artists? #AskingAutistics
On the links between autism and PTSD:
I touch on this in “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life”, which includes this relevant quote on trauma:
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.” In the book, I speak to the problem of language and how this insinuates differences that are not there, judgments, and assumptions that are untrue. 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.
“New research finds that #autism isn’t just about the brain. If you dampen the overexcitement of tactile sensors outside the brain, suddenly the brain doesn’t have to deal with that flood of incoming signals. It helps anxiety & social too.
Source: AspergersAutismNews on Twitter
What’s even more interesting is that once this over-ramping of incoming signals happened, it directly led to an increase in anxiety. That makes sense. If your brain is dealing with lots of additional input, it’s being stressed. Second, that over-ramping of incoming signals also lead to social issues. Again, it makes sense if the brain is already swamped with sensory signals that it doesn’t have extra time to deal with facial expressions and relationships. So everything here is related.
Source: Tactile Sensitivity Autism and Neurons – Aspergers Autism News
But, what about if your brain takes in too much information at once? The second photo shows a roundabout where there’s too much traffic happening from all directions. Gridlock. Now, nothing can get through. (Well, maybe cyclists. They can always get through somehow.) But the rest of us, stuck, overheating, beeping horns or collapsed in a heap of despair, going nowhere. Some autistic brains take in so much information that they can’t get any of it processed and sent on its way.
When it happens, our brains simply have to wait for the ‘traffic’ to clear. Just adding more traffic to it won’t work. More ‘traffic’ might be chatting with us, or trying to put a hand on a shoulder without our consent. Or shouting at us. Or making us stay in a busy, noisy place where the queue of ‘traffic’ waiting for our brains to process it just gets longer, and longer. It might be more ‘traffic’ from our brain trying to work out how to speak, or how to understand non-literal language.
We need the traffic to stop arriving. Noise cancelling headphones help me. Sunglasses help, too. A quiet room without bright artificial lighting also helps. Wearing comfortable clothes so that there’s isn’t a constant traffic jam from the, for example, ‘Your socks are hurting you’ lane.
Find out what helps us reduce the ‘traffic’.
Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Roundabout Hypothesis – a Guest Blog by Chris Memmott
People with ASD commonly experience aberrant tactile sensitivity: a seemingly innocuous touch, such as a gentle breeze or a hug, can be unpleasant or even painful (1, 2). In fact, sensory overreactivity is so common that it is now a diagnostic factor for ASD (2).
We therefore sought to determine whether somatosensory circuits were affected in ASD, and whether altered tactile sensitivity might contribute to other ASD traits. Our goal was to focus on tractable symptoms-somatosensory abnormalities-as an entry into these complex, heterogeneous disorders.
Together with a growing body of other research (_3_, _4_, _16_-_18_), our work highlights that peripheral sensory neurons have a major role in ASD and that selective treatment of these neurons has the potential to improve some developmental and behavioral abnormalities associated with ASD. We are moving toward measuring touch overreactivity in humans with ASD and pursuing modulation of peripheral neuron excitability as a potential clinical therapy.
Via:
To be a certified instructor in “Therapeutic Options,” one needs four days of training. That’s it. Four days to learn how to teach people maneuvers that kill and traumatize autistic kids.
Not once did anyone mention that maybe children shouldn’t be subjected to compliance training. It was a joke, and people like me were the punchline.
…flawed terminology, measurement and theory have all contributed to the mischaracterisation of autistic people as lacking empathy, to severely negative effect.
The myth of an empathy deficit in autism is now so well ingrained, that for an autistic volunteer to report they do not lack empathy is either to question the views of the large majority of medical and scientific professionals, or even to deny their diagnosis. As such, they may report empathy deficits even when they frequently experience empathic feelings.
Autistic people have described that they experience ‘…hyperarousal of the empathic system…’ (Elcheson et al., 2018, p. 189) or an ‘…intense, uncontrollable empathy…’ (Williams, 1998, p. 59).
Recent research has further indicated that autistic people may be more prone to object personification (White & Remington, 2019), suggesting that the autistic manifestation of empathy could not only be more intense but also more all-encompassing that the neurotypical model.
Source: Autism and empathy: What are the real links? – Sue Fletcher-Watson, Geoffrey Bird,
Via:
Related:
I updated “Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.” with selections from “NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer”.
Computers as the essential prosthetic device for autistics?
Despite a common history of what can, with the wisdom of hindsight, be termed “oppression”, the limited social, networking, and organisational skills of people with AS together with their aversion to direct human contact, had prevented them joining together to form an effective movement to address their specific issues. All this changed however with the advent of the Internet. Computers are the communications medium par excellence for autistics. A significant number of autistics claim that computers mirror the way their minds work (Grandin, with Blume, 1997). By filtering out all the sensory overwhelm caused by actual physical presence, computers free up autistics’ communicative abilities.
InLv members regularly sing the praises of the new medium that allows them to have the form of communication they desire, while protecting them from the overwhelming sensory overload and rapid processing demands of human presence. For many, email lists are their first experience of community. Jane Meyerding, a member of InLv makes clear just how much autistics owe to computer technology:
Like a lot of ACs (autistics and cousins), I find myself able to enjoy “community” for the first time through the internet. The style of communication suits me just fine because it is one-on-one, entirely under my control in terms of when and how long I engage in it, and, unlike real-life encounters, allows me enough time to figure out and formulate my responses. In real-world encounters with groups—even very small groups—of people, I am freighted with disadvantages. I am distracted by my struggle to identify who is who (not being able to recognise faces), worn out by the effort to understand what is being said (because if there is more than one conversation going on in the room, or more than one voice speaking at a time, all the words become meaningless noise to me), and stressed by a great desire to escape from a confusing flood of sensation coming at me much too fast. (Jane Meyerding – Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained, 1998)
As this statement shows, for autistics, computers are the essential prosthetic device, one which turns them from withdrawn, isolated individuals, to networked social beings, the prerequisite to effective social action, and a voice in the public arena.
Autistics compare the importance to them of computers with the importance of seeing-eye dogs to the blind. Martijn Dekker, who is the ‘owner’ of the InLv email forum, and a prominent autistic activist foreshadows puts it plainly:
For reasons obvious to our HFA/AS community, I consider a computer to be an essential disability provision for a person with Asperger’s. (8 Nov 1998)
It seems as if the Open Space principles and the Law of Two Feet have been designed specifically for autistic communication and collaboration needs. Even the way of initiating conversations in Open Space feels highly intuitive from an autistic perspective:
- write down and briefly explain a problem statement,
- listen to other problem statements, and then
- allow participants to self-organise around specific topics of interest
Source: What CAN be misunderstood WILL be misunderstood | The Aspergian | A Collective of Autistic Voices
Autistic social motivation is deeply rooted in the desire to share knowledge and in the desire to learn, and this has big implications for the protocols that are used in autistic communication. In contrast, the societies we grow up in and live in value abstract social status symbols more than developing a shared understanding, and this leads to the communication challenges that define our social experiences.
Source: What CAN be misunderstood WILL be misunderstood | The Aspergian | A Collective of Autistic Voices
The Diversity in Social Intelligence project compiled a list of videos and documents explaining their research. Very interesting stuff. When we talk about psychological safety and the emotional intelligence of teams, we should keep in mind that there are different social intelligences.
Hat tip:
rnbn 