I’m a so-called “picky eater,” like many autistic people. Nowadays, as an adult, this is no problem. I have a system that works for me. I buy foods I like, prepare them, and eat them. I do try to cover a variety of food groups and so on, but I am not going to agonize over not being able to stomach some particular food or another – I’ll just avoid it. This is a bit different from the situation early…
The monotropism account of autism – which was introduced by Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson in 2005 – is, within the autistic adult community, probably the dominant theoretical approach towards understanding what autism is. Many autistic people – myself included – find monotropism to be quite a bit more consistent with our personal experiences than other theories of autism. I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the monotropism account was developed by autistic…
Autistic sensory sensitivities are closely related to anxiety. I hope this isn’t a terribly controversial point. There are now several studies showing the existence of an association between sensory symptoms and anxiety (e.g., Mazurek et al., 2013; Uljarević et al., 2016). Furthermore, it just makes sense that sensory sensitivities would be associated with anxiety. When my sensory sensitivities were really bad, they caused genuine distress. Naturally, I didn’t enjoy being overwhelmed by my environment and experiencing sensory distress. Therefore, I…
Last week, I was unpleasantly startled to read in a Spectrum News article that the latest draft of the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD-11, excludes differences in sensory processing from its list of autism symptoms. I thought we were over this. The ICD-11’s counterpart, the DSM-5, now includes sensory symptoms. I still grumble a little that they’re just lumped as a single symptom under the general category of restricted and repetitive behaviours, but I’m at least happy that they’re…
It’s been a whole ten days since my last criticism of the mainstream schools, so I think it’s about time I got back to it. As I argued earlier, this is an extremely important issue – where someone spends their days for the duration of their school career is going to have a bigger influence than any limited, short-duration set of intervention sessions. The sensory demands of the mainstream schools are one of the biggest challenges they impose on us. …