Confessions of a Caffeinated Nutcase

meltdowns can be misinterpreted as tantrums

sensitivity to food, light, sound, etc can be misinterpreted as whining or being picky

not knowing how to interact with people can be misinterpreted as shyness

one tiny, once-in-a-blue-moon success at something can make people believe that the problem never existed

autistic people often hide their traits to prevent being judged, and may eventually become good at hiding those traits

doctors have literally refused to diagnose people based on stereotypes (girls can’t be autistic, you have friends so you can’t be autistic, etc.)

People with binge eating disorder exist.

People with ADHD who eat when they’re bored, and need something to do exist.

People with depression who comfort eat exist.

People with PTSD who overeat as a way to make themselves look unappealing, or as a way of comfort exist

People who overeat as a form of self harm exist.

We exist.

Because overeating and being fat is so harshly hated upon, no one wants to believe that fat people are struggling with mental illness; they just want to believe that fat people are lazy and refuse to change because they don’t want to.

Even just groups where they can hang out with similar people and…I dunno…play board games or something. Where the staff are autistic or are trained by autistic people so they know how to be supportive without being ableist or patronizing. Maybe they can get together with other autistic people and go swimming or something. Do art. Exist. Thrive.

Imagine an organization that puts out pamphlets or educational resources so health care providers know how help autistic adults. How to recognize autism in adults, espeically adults who aren’t cis, male, or white. How to be supportive of autistic people at work.

Allistic Person: “To decide who to hire, the applicants should be forced to have a conversation with me. The conversation will involve me asking vague questions like ‘tell me about yourself’. The questions I ask will be so hard to answer that people will literally pay someone to give them tips on how to answer them. I’ll also be testing things like body language and eye contact, which tell me jack shit about their ability to actually perform the job. But it’s okay, because I have psychic abilities that tell me who to hire within one minute of meeting them.”

Disabled Person: (is well aware that their life would be easier if they could do it)

Disabled Person: (is already trying as hard as they can to figure it out)

Disabled Person: (would jump at the chance to do it once they know how)

Abled Person: “Just do it.”

I don’t hate allistic people, but I’d be reluctant to hire one. With their constant need for conversation, I’m afraid that they’ll frequently stop working to have a conversation with their coworkers, and because they must make eye contact, they won’t be able to work and talk at the same time.

My mother was trying to change the channel on the TV, but it wouldn’t change because the TV was on but the cable was not. She said to me “Can you fix the TV?” Because of the extreme vagueness of that question, I asked “What’s wrong with it?” She said “The cable.” That’s still very vague, so to get more details, I asked “What did you do? What did you expect to happen? What happened instead?” She got mad at me for even asking that. (She could have easily said “I pressed the channel button, I expected the channel to change, it didn’t.”) She then said “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” (Try going to a doctor and listing your symptoms as “I don’t know” and expect them to help.) Then, I somehow guessed what the problem was and fixed it, but she got mad at me for taking too long.

my god haven’t these people been through enough?! how can they charge them for contaminated water that couldn’t be used?! How fucking evil! 

source

Yes, really.

They have to pay for water that cannot be used, or their homes are foreclosed and their children taken away.

I started cracking my knuckles in fifth grade. My parents asked me why, and I told them it made the pain go away. My parents told me that I was too young for my joints to hurt, and that I would ruin them if I kept cracking them.

By the time was fourteen or fifteen and entering high school, I hadn’t stopped cracking my knuckles. The hurt more, and the relief was more. I was convinced that I had arthritis.

My parents told me that I was too young to have arthritis.

Fast forward thirty seven years when my joints take a dive and I cannot even get out of bed on some days. I take chemo therapy pills twice a week, and I have two injections of chemotherapy ever four months. I have to take two medications every day just to manage the pain the chemotherapy doesn’t cover.

This at least allows me to get out of bed and on most days it allows me to go to school. It doesn’t make the pain go away, and on bad days I want to cry it gets so bad.

The diagnosis? Early Onset Rheumatoid Arthritis.

It went unchecked for twenty five years, my immune system eating away at my joints like a buffet even though I wanted to go to the doctor from day one.

If I had gone to the doctor and I had been wrong - they found nothing - well, we would have been out a few bucks for the doctor’s visit.If I was right - and I was right - I would have been treated for 20 years.

If I had gone to the doctor on my insistence that I had arthritis at fifteen, I would not be in pain today. This would have been treated twenty years go.

Do I support minor self diagnosis?

Yes. Absolutely.

I would rather a minor self diagnose and be wrong than a minor ignore their body and suffer for 20 years like me. No one is harmed by listening to a minor and taking their concerns seriously. But that minor might be harmed for the rest of their life you ignore them.

Well you will never get it, no matter your stance on the subject. Autism is likely genetic and studies show that by six months of age there are already detectable changes in the brain that predict an autism diagnosis later in life. So even though we don’t know what autism is, it’s definitely something you’re born with and it is impossible to change that after the baby is born. Nothing will ever turn an autistic person who is alive into an allistic person. You can’t rewrite their entire brain anatomy.

So why do Autism Speaks talk of “the cure”? What they mean by cure is prenatal screening that will allow parents to abort fetuses with certain traits or genes. It means stopping autistic people from being born. It means getting rid of us even before a fetus develops a brain. It means that from their point of view not ever being alive (so essentially death) is better than existence as an autistic person.

That’s what you are saying when you’re advocating for a cure. “I wish you were never born”. “I wish your parents would have aborted you before you developed into a person”. “I think your existence is worse than death”. “I think you would be better off dead”. That is your message. That is your opinion.

To help you understand this hypothesis, first let me break down some evolutionary concepts. Let’s talk about speciation.

New species appears when two things happen: there is a new trait that gives a population better chances of passing on their genes through procreation in a certain environment (apomorphy: a new, derived trait), and there is reproductive isolation from individuals without that trait. New traits appear through random mutations and most of them are harmful. Useful traits get more and more common with every generation until a population separates and can no longer create fertile offspring with those most closely related to them. Wham, speciation.

This is hard to understand if you aren’t into biology so example. There’s a fish which has more muscle in its fins than all other fishes. That trait is new, it’s extreme and rare. However it allows the fish to move better in shallow water, where it has less competition and more food. It produces a lot of offspring, some of which has the same trait. They continue to live in shallow water and they meet other fish that also live in shallow water. Repeat that many many times and you get a new species of Sarcopterigii (muscle fins! technically that’s us). Apomorohy: more muscle in fins; new environment: shallow water; reproductive isolation: geographical.

Now back to humans. Apomorphies of the genus Homo were things like bipedal locomotion, use of tools, language, and so on, and our new territory was the savanna (as opposed to forests). However we still aren’t a sure what defines our species, Homo sapiens, and where to draw the line between hominids and us. My anthropology professor always laughs when talking about Homo species like habilis or erectus because he doesn’t know whether he should call them “males and females” or “men and women”. We just don’t know what is our defining trait(s).

But we do know that there was something about sapiens that allowed us to outlive all other Homo species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, and it is obvious that we have a difference. Well I am here to present a thrilling new hypothesis: we will realize what that trait is if we study autistic people, because the autistic brain is the extreme Homo sapiens brain. Just like the fins of fish continued to develop to help it navigate land, human brain continued to develop to adapt to our lifestyle, and that adaptation is autism.

Looking at some common autism traits we notice that a lot of them are neurotypical behaviors taken to extreme. Stimming is extreme fidgeting, special interests are extreme hobbies/interests, routines are extreme schedules/planning habits, sensory processing disorder is extreme sensory perception. Hence the intense world hypothesis.

Looking further, we notice that there are other characteristically human traits that autism takes to extreme: like noticing patterns, memory and imagination. Even further, if we look at developing baby brains, we see that if a child’s prefrontal cortex is growing faster and is bigger than typical, that child is more likely to be later diagnosed as autistic. And prefrontal cortex is the most characteristically human part of our brain!

So what I see is that a lot of autistic traits are Homo sapiens traits taken to the next level, and it might come from increased prefrontal cortex growth as well as more local connections between neurons. So arguably a lot of things that were Homo sapiens apomorphies just went further to better suit our new society with all the tool making, hunting, gathering, agriculture, art, science and religion.

Now I hear you saying “but Mattie, humans are very social and autism is a social disability!”. Well yeah, you’re right: social interaction problems are major autism criteria. However I’d like to talk about why that is the case. Autistics struggle with social protocol, which is supposedly a set of unspoken rules of existing in human society that relies on ability to read certain cues like facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and so on. And yes the majority of autistics suck at that.

But you know what? So do allistics! I know it sounds counterintuitive but social protocol is shit. It is constantly changing, imprecise, highly dependent on time and culture and impossible to define. It’s just sloppy. Allistics think they are masters of reading social cues but in reality they are making a ton of guesses. Research shows that cognitive empathy (subconscious guesses based on all that body language and stuff) is worse than conscious analyses, meaning that I, an autistic person who has to use conscious analyses to understand others, is technically better at it than an allistic person who uses cognitive empathy.

Allistics get away with this because they are the majority. When everyone’s bad at something together, there’s no way of telling you’re bad at it. They are flexible and go with the flow and they don’t see how illogical and sloppy social protocol is. But still, miscommunication is the most common comedy trope and there’s always so much misunderstanding in society, which means it is not perfect.

Autistics however seek structure, predictability and order. Sloppy and illogical isn’t good enough for us. Our brains just can’t find patterns in that mess of social cues. So if we were the majority, we would not get away with hints and subsequent miscommunication. I think we would develop a much more structured and well-defined social protocol which would leave much less room for misinterpretation and ensure better communication. Maybe we would have a system of gestures and hand signs to communicate different things, maybe we would use technology, maybe our language would change to accommodate it. Either way, if we were the majority, there would be no social disability.

Now you may ask, well if autistics are extreme humans, why haven’t we replaced allistics as a phenotype more suited for life in our environment? Well, civilization happened and natural selection went to hell. Now we don’t change to fit the environment, we change the environment to fit us. And because the autistic neurotype was still that extreme, rare, “weird fish with muscly fins” population, we got screwed over. Allistics - the majority - built a world which was great for them and incredibly bad for us. It became especially prominent from the rise of industrial revolution, and even more prominent in the last hundred years, which is when it was described for the first time and is now diagnosed in like 1-2% of the population.

I don’t think autism has a chance to become more common now, because due to ableism and other reasons we are less likely to procreate. Autistics aren’t gonna create a new species either because we have no reproductive isolation now. The only thing we can do is to change the environment through education and accommodation to make it better for us, and maybe autism will stop being a disability some day.

However I think it is important to study autism, and not with a purpose of preventing us from being born, but because it may reveal the truth about the nature of humanity and show us what might have happened to our species if it wasn’t for civilization. In my opinion it is just fascinating and it might finally prove why we need accommodation for autism and how to do it the best. Until then, these are just random thoughts of a nerd obsessed with biology.

First, that scientists believe that the rise in autism is likely a combo of 2 factors

Now we know it exists people are getting diagnosed. The more autism i understood the more people will get diagnosed.

A lot of the ways autism presents itself are abated by mothers doing certain movements, such as climbing stuff and rocking on rocking chairs (it’s part of why incubators for babies now swivel gently). The more we stop doing those activities, the more autistics will pop up.

My mom, however, has posited (non-officially) that there’s likely a third reason, very similar to your own theory, that also plays a part: it’s a genetic advantage for the species.

Her theory is that, because auties are statistically more likely to engage in cooperation, we’re more likely to fare better overall because we help our species to succeed rather than screw other members of our own group/species over in order to get a better personal advantage. 

Then there’s the fact that we’re more prone to feel a stronger bond to animals; it inherently makes us more likely to care about the health of our habitat, as it’s advantageous to both our own species as well as to other species we care about.

We’re also better at breaking down complex systems and understanding patterns, meaning that not only are we better at creating innovative technology and improving existing stuff, we’re also better able to notice patterns like how our actions impact our habitat and our group/species.

We also often have more finely attuned senses, which in the wild could be useful for survival.

And finally, the fact that we’re more logic-prone in our thinking, meaning we’re less likely to do things that seem advantageous on a personal level in the short term (e.g. forcing people to only use the fossil fuels you sell rather than investing on renewable resources) but actually hurt us and others in the long run (e.g. forcing people to only use the fossil fuels you sell rather than investing on renewable resources).

Obviously, all of this would take millions of years to truly have a major noticeable effect, but it’s fully possible that this has been brewing for millennia and has only recently (the past few thousand years or so) that it started to bubble over and become noticeable. After all, us not knowing about gravity doesn’t mean it started only when Isaac Newton (who’s been widely theorized to have been an autie, btw!) discovered its existence. So why would autism only have started when we learned about its existence?

Not to mention that as autism has been repeatedly confirmed to be genetic in nature (pun fully intended), it means it’s likely been around for a very long time.

Remember, there’no way to test for autism in someone’s bones, only by their actions, so who’s to say the bones we uncover of past hominids aren’t autistic hominids? 

There’s literally no way scientists can prove that they weren’t. 

Alltistics have pushed the notion that they’re the default and we’re the odd ones out, but there’s no such proof. 

“You’re a girl you can’t be Autistic”

“why do you wear that jacket all the time?”

“Your weird”

“why don’t you follow fashion?”

“You don’t act Autistic”

“I hope they find a cure Autism it’s a disease”

“why are you so shy?”

“why don’t you wear make up?”

“you can’t be Autistic, my brother is Autistic and you’re nothing like him”

“I thought only boys had Autism”

“why do you stim in public? It’s weird”

“have you tried fitting in”

“you’re such a picky eater”

I’m at my local library and they’ve made a display for autism awareness month. This is a well meant effort, but… 

As you can see, they’ve gone with the “autism speaks” motif. This is somewhat distressing for me, especially since I usually come here to de-stress. I’m going to write a letter for the library about why this is offensive to me as an autistic person, but I don’t want them to think it’s just me wigging out about it, so if you all would be so kind I’d appreciate it if you could reblog this post and add your own thoughts on autism speaks and the symbols of their organisation. I’m going to print off as many responses as I can and hand them over to the library along with the letter. 

they’ve changed the display! I have to say, I wasn’t sure what the expect. I thought if they did anything it would just to be to change the colour and hopefully the puzzle pieces, but they actually changed the books and info that they have on there too, Including: 

A notice explicitly debunking autism as an illness, and advocating how autism is different for everyone and always requires individual support

Books written by autistic people 

Books about helping your kids with the challenges they might face, rather than guides for coping with having an autistic child

Even THIS book 

Which I thought had a very suspect title turned out to have this passage inside: 

You can even see that they’ve decided to promote the NAS, a society dedicated to helping autistic people live the lives of their choosing. 

I’m very happy with the changes that have been made here. And I think it’s a good reminder that just because someone gets something wrong, doesn’t mean that they’re bad people. The important thing is being willing to listen and learn, and the staff at this library have done just that.