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Category: Autistic Adults

Building Autistic Community

Building Autistic Community

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Many autistic people have spoken or written about the benefits of autistic community.  For example, Jim Sinclair has some eloquent thoughts on the subject.  I firmly agree that these communities have much to offer us.  I’ve facilitated two communities for autistic college students at two different universities, and I’ve also been part of some other autistic groups, and had generally positive experiences in them. We live in a neurotypical world: a world in which autism is habitually treated as pathology,…

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Social Skills and Practice

Social Skills and Practice

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How do we learn social skills?  Practice. Let’s think about what is involved in a social interaction.  You have to make countless, split-second decisions.  You have to formulate and deliver conversational responses instantly.  While you do this decision-making, you have to pay constant attention to your body’s position, your facial expressions, and you are expected to make eye contact with the other person.  You have to attend to their expressions and nonverbal cues.  You have to think about their intentions…

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Media Normalization of Violence and Marginalization

Media Normalization of Violence and Marginalization

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Why do we allow mockery of autistic and neurodivergent people? If you look at our media today, it seems to accept the idea that awkwardness and difference can be a source of amusement.  We’re routinely invited to laugh at neurodivergence and mock it.  We’re invited to laugh at the class nerd, or the crazy professor, or some other stereotyped neurodivergent character.  We’re even taught that awkward kids will get bullied: such bullying is often presented as entirely natural and predictable. …

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Independence: Preparation for Transition (Part I)

Independence: Preparation for Transition (Part I)

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Transition to adulthood is a daunting challenge.  In transition to adulthood, we fall off a cliff.  We suddenly find the predictable environments that have surrounded us changing, and we enter new and different environments.  In these new environments, we encounter new expectations, new demands.  In these new environments, our familiar support systems fall away, and we find ourselves struggling to advocate for ourselves within an unfamiliar and inadequate set of adult service systems. Seriously, if you have a group of…

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Independence: The Transition (Part II)

Independence: The Transition (Part II)

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In Part I of this post, I raised the concern that many young autistic people can become dependent on their parents or support systems, and that many young autistic people aren’t being expected to succeed in adulthood.  As a result, they are unprepared for the adult transition. In Part I, I recommended that we should do more to prepare young people for the demands of adulthood in the years before they pass that magical dividing line and become adults.  In…

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Theatre and Autism

Theatre and Autism

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For a long time, I was part of a theatre group for autistic people.  I joined when I was 13 and I remained part of the group in some capacity or other for a total of ten years (although for the final year I was only irregularly attending meetings as a substitute instructor).  I suppose it’s fairly obvious I wouldn’t have stayed for such a long period – indeed, from the beginning of my teenage years until I was finishing…

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Autistic People, Autism Research, Grants, and Journals

Autistic People, Autism Research, Grants, and Journals

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There is something seriously wrong with the distribution of autism research funding. The most recent report of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) in the United States reported that fully half of all autism research funding continues to go to the area of biology and risk factors (Office of Autism Research Coordination, 2017).  For comparison, only 2% of all research funding was awarded to projects in the “lifespan” area.  A similar situation prevails in a number of other jurisdictions.[1] This…

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Autism & Violence: What About Psychosocial Stress?

Autism & Violence: What About Psychosocial Stress?

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We’ve come a long way in conversations about autism and violence.  It used to be normal for people to speculate that autistic people are more likely to commit violent crimes than neurotypicals, and to an extent people still do that.  But now we at least have access to some excellent studies, like this one by Heeramun et al. (2017) with its huge population sample, showing that autistic people are no more likely to commit violent crimes than neurotypicals, at least…

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