This Is Autism

Last week, Autism Speaks told the world that autism is a number of bad things, including fear of the future, life in despair, a burden, etc. As a response, there's a flashblog going on today where autistics and allies submit their art, videos and blog posts on what autism really is. Here's my contribution.

Let's start with the facts. Autism is a developmental disability that causes problems in information and sensory processing. This leads to behaviors such as repetititiveness, withdrawal and different ways of communicating and relating to others.

Autism for me has both positive and negative consequences. One of the phrases that Autism Speaks likes to associate with autism, is in fact correct for me: fear of the future. This, however, is a pretty common fear in today's society. We're (here in the Netherlands) still in economically hard times, and I personally witness people worrying about whether they'll get a job, sell their house, etc. These are fears for the future. They may not be the same as mine - I worry about health care cuts -, but it's not like my worries are unique to autistics and their families.

Autism sometimes makes it harder for autistics to participate in society - or is it society's unwillingness to adapt to autistics' differences? These differences, in my case, include inabiity to handle intense, unexpected stimuli and/or multiple stimuli at once. I know that not all these can be prevented, but it's people having a mindset that autism is ultimately something that needs to be eradicated at least on the surface, that makes it worse. This attitude leads to people seemingly deliberately ignoring my sensory needs for the sake of treatment. And no, this is not a consequence of autism, this is a consequence of intolerance.

I will not go so far as to say all autistic experiences are due to discrimination. As I said, not all difficulties can be avoided. Yet neither can all difficulties for a neurotypical. Some autistics, including myself, have it harder than most neurotypicals. I won't deny this, and I won't deny that autism sucks sometimes, but so do a host of other experiences that we don't give nearly as much attention to eradicating as Autism Speaks does with autism.

Autism and Justified Anger

On my autism treatment and acceptance, Autisticook commented by saying that anger in an autistic is often justified. She compared it to the situation where a wheelchiar user gets angry because they are faced with yet another two-step staircase that wasn't necessary and where nobody thought of installing a ramp. This made me think: are we overpathologizing anger in people with developmental disabilities (and mental illness)? Are we incorrectly assuming that anger is part of the disorder, while it's just a response to a lack of accommodations? This is obviously not a scientific discussion, as what is a reasonable accommodation depends on your perspective.

I just a few days ago heard about cognitive accessibility, where people accommodate their language, for exxample, for understanding by people with learning difficulties. I'm trying to find an accessible and understandable explanation of this, but can't seem to find one. What I understan dit to mean, includes for example using simple, straightfoward language. With autistic people, you may need to refrain from using figures of speech, for example.

What if you were dropped in a country where you didn't speak the language and everyone refused to speak English? Would you get angry? Quite likely you would. Now understand autism as communicating in a different language, too. Is it strange then that the autistic gets angry when you routinely refuse to make an effort to speak their language?

Autism is not just a communication disability. It's in a way a sensory disability, too. Imagine, again, being in that foreign country and everyone shouting at you for whatever reason. They also randomly shine a flashlight at your eyes for whatever reason. In addition, this country is rich on insects, and they crawl over your body all the time. Would you get frustrated? Sure you would!

We do not medicate wheelchair users for getting frustrated at the umpteenth staircase. You would not want to be put on medication if you were in the aforementioed country. So why do we medicate autistics who are irritable? It's probably because accommodating them requires a radical paradigm shift in what we always thought access was all about. Is it a more radical shift than the shift towards wheelchiar accessibility? I am not sure.