Tag: autism

Neurotypicals Are Different

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

My aunt Natasha traveled from Ukraine to Montreal over the weekend. It was her first time ever on an airplane, and the trip is long and exhausting. We were all worried about how she would deal with it both physically and emotionally. She has arrived already and she’s perfectly fine, but we were worried in the process.

“So imagine what happened to Aunt Natasha at the international airport in Kiev,” my sister told me. “She was sitting there, waiting for the flight, and then she met a woman who was also travelling from Kiev to Montreal on the same flights! So they traveled together.”

When I heard the story, my first impulse was to feel deep compassion for poor Aunt Natasha. Imagine the stress of traveling to Frankfurt, waiting there for several hours, and then taking another airplane to Canada! And as if that weren’t enough, now the unfortunate woman had to be sociable with a person she didn’t even know, spend time and pay attention to her, find things to talk about – how horrible! Gosh, I’d rather not travel at all rather than be forced to spend so much time with a chattering stranger. I mean, you’d probably have to remember that person’s name and listen to their stories and observations. Brrrrr.

And then I realized the story was being told to me as something positive. To a neurotypical eye, Aunt Natasha was lucky. Having a  stranger to travel with was a good thing.

Neurotypicals are strange, people. I wonder, is anybody looking for a cure?

An Online Degree for Autistic Students

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

This sounds like a great idea:

For some students with autism, the idea of operating in the social environment of a college classroom can be so debilitating as to derail the pursuit of higher education at all. For those who do enroll, their condition can make it difficult to succeed in a traditional classroom setting.

But Dana Reinecke, in the department of applied behavior analysis at the Sage Colleges in Albany, N.Y., said she realized that through online learning, students with autism can overcome those barriers. “It allows them to learn from their most comfortable environment, whether it’s home, a library, a friend’s house, a treatment center, their psychiatrist’s office,” she said. “It takes away that need to be in a room full of people that they might be uncomfortable with.”

I just hope that the program will be limited to those autistic students who specifically choose to participate in it because that’s what they (not their parents) want. I also hope that autistic students who prefer to receive on-campus instruction will not be steered away towards online learning.

I just walked down our building’s hallway and noticed how many disabled students there are in the classrooms, in the hallways, in the computer lab, in the cafeteria, etc. At the other universities where I taught, I never saw such a significant number of people who are visibly disabled on campus. A society that expects its disabled citizens to hide from view so as not to disturb the sensibilities of the able-bodied folks is a fully fascist one. And I’m sure everybody knows by now that I don’t use this word lightly.

If autistic students decide they don’t feel like being on campus, I believe they should definitely be accommodated. However, those of us who want to be on campus should be recognized as valid inhabitants of the academic world who can freely do so.

Those Unfeeling Autistics

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

Rachel at Journeys With Autism provides a brilliant analysis of how the tests that supposedly demonstrate low empathy in autistics are completely misguided:

Because the people writing the test are non-autistic, they have no idea of the methods that I use to work around the problem of being unable to read “normal” social cues. In instances in which I cannot intuitively tell when someone wants to enter a conversation, I tend to consciously look for people who aren’t able to get a word in edgewise, and I attempt to make room for them. In terms of perspective taking, this approach shows a significant level of cognitive empathy: I observe process, I see who is being excluded, and I identify with the experience of exclusion to such a degree that I attempt to ease the discomfort of other people. The fact that the authors of the test do not understand my adaptive mechanisms is quite problematic, because while my inability to tell when “normal” people want to enter a conversation would contribute to a low score, my adaptive mechanisms reflect a high level of cognitive empathy that the test does not pick up.

This is exactly how I act in social situations, too. I’m always extremely sensitive to people who experience discomfort in social situations and do all I can to ease it both on a verbal and on a non-verbal level. This is, partly, what makes me so popular with students. I can identify those of them who feel shy and uncomfortable and always try to help them by restraining those who attempt to hijack the discussion and push out the less socially adept of the group.

The idea that all NT people are a lot more empathetic while the autistics are much less so is wrong. Rachel points out that, as an autistic, she is a lot less likely to have an NT person adequately judge her responses:

For example, when I am in a store in which very loud music is playing, I have never had the experience of a non-autistic person being able to read my discomfort or note my awkwardness. Not once. Not ever. And yet, for me (and for a great many other autistic people), being in a store with very loud music is the hell-realm, and the question of whether to stay or go, whether to ask the store manager to turn down the music or not, whether to cry with frustration or put my fingers in my ears, places me in an extremely awkward position. My experience surpasses “normal” social awkwardness and “normal” social discomfort by several orders of magnitude, and yet non-autistic people fail to intuitively recognize that I’m having any kind of aversive experience at all.

Yet, we keep hearing that neurotypicals are so much better than we are at  “tuning in to how someone else feels rapidly and intuitively.”

I highly recommend this entire long essay because it does a fantastic job of exploring where these pernicious myths about autistics come from.