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Aug 10 2023
“How do I help my Autistic child?”

I have recently found myself being asked quite often about how parents can help their Autistic children. It sounds like a simple question, but as with most things in parenting, there is no simple, one-size-fits-all approach to parenting. I can, however, tell you what helps me support your Autistic child in my day-to-day professional life.

Monotropism

This has become the theoretical lens through which most of my work functions. Part of my day job is working to support Autistic young people, many of whom are quite traumatised by the wider world, in particular the mainstream education setting. So, what’s the deal with monotropism?

Monotropism as a theory works to explain a great deal of Autistic experience. Through understanding monotropism, I have come to understand a great deal. One of the main ways this influences my work is that it directs me to use gradual transitions between tasks and to know that abruptly changing activities is cognitively traumatic.

For people who want to know more about monotropism, I highly recommend reading the following articles.

If you engage better with video content, try this one

Monotropism 101

The Double Empathy Problem

Autistic children experience a great deal of communication invalidation, and this contributes to the clustered injustice that befalls so many Autistic people. Essentially, Autistic people are told that their communication style is a deficit, a flaw to be erased. We have to recognise and validate the communication of Autistic children if we want to be a part of their world.

In terms of reading, I really recommend A mismatch of salience By Damian Milton. For our video lovers, I have this offering-

The weaponisation of Autistic communication

Burnout and energy accounting

This is a big one. Autistic people living beyond the limits of their cognitive resources for extended periods of time can and will experience Autistic burnout. Burnout can cause a great deal of complications for the Autistic child. We have to work with them to make sure they have the resources they need to cope with the demands in their life (and yes, Autistic children have a lot of demands in their life).

Essential reading for this topic-

And of course I have a video for you-

Atypical Burnout

Interoception

Believe it or not, there are not five senses. There are eight. They are visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, audio, vestibular, proprioception, and interoception. While having a good knowledge of Autistic experiences of all of these will help you, interoception is a big one. Interoception is the sense that tells you what is happening in your body. Whether you need the toilet, are hungry, or feeling anxiety, all of this is informed by your interoceptive sense.

When working with an Autistic child, I have to remember that sensory differences mean that they may be alexithymic, preventing them from answering questions about their emotional state.

Reading around this topic that is important follows-

Masking

Masking is perhaps one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of Autistic experience. It’s best understood by considering it a projection of acceptability; we show people what we think they want to see. This is why your Autistic child might be fine at school and then completely meltdown at home. We have to be aware that Autistic children often don’t feel safe fully expressing themselves.

Anyone wanting to know more about masking should read the following-

And here is a video!

Autistic Masking in my experience

These are all essential foundations that come together to create the competency that people need to start to start understanding the individual experiences of Autistic people. Remember, you won’t get it right every time. You won’t learn everything overnight. What matters is that you spend time in and around Autistic community and culture. Nothing will teach you better how to support your Autistic child better than Autistic adults.

Katie Munday and I are currently co-authoring a blog series together that looks at the experience of being an Autsitic parent. Find it here.

If you want to learn more about the challenges that Autistic people and their families face, check out the Creating Autistic Suffering series I co-author with Tanya Adkin. Find it here.

Don’t forget to check out my books here!

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
Jun 5 2023
Creating Autistic Suffering: The AuDHD Burnout to Psychosis Cycle- A deeper look

This article was co-authored by Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond

Monotropism is a theory of autism. It is used interchangeably as a theory and also a trait that describes a style of attention. It suggests that Autistic people tend to have singular but highly detailed tunnels of attention, as opposed to spreading their attentional resources across multiple subjects (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005). It has succeeded where other theories have failed by offering an explanation for every element of Autistic experience. In this sense monotropism is the only universal theory of autism.

One could consider it the “engine” of Autistic experience. Whereby every other part of Autistic experience can be traced back to monotropism in some way. It is at the core of our experience.

Emerging research is showing that both Autistic and ADHD people strongly identify with many aspects of monotropism as a way of describing their experience (Murray & Hallett, 2023). More on this can be found at this virtual presentation. It comes as no surprise then that monotropism is of significant importance to those who identify as both Autistic and ADHD, termed AuDHD.

Psychotic phenomena is another shared experience for many Autistic and/or ADHD people. 34.8% of formally identified Autistic people have experienced psychosis with up to 60% of Schizophrenic people also showed traits of autism (Ribolsi et al, 2022), In terms of the cross-over with ADHD, 47% of those diagnosed with childhood onset of schizophrenia experienced attention differences and hyperactivity in childhood, and in a sample size of 100 adults with psychosis, 32% reported attentional differences in childhood (Levy et al, 2015).

From this we can see that there is a significant overlap between the AuDHD experience and psychotic phenomena. When we look at this through the lens of monotropism, it begins to make more sense.

Monotropic Split

Monotropic split refers to a very specific type of attentional trauma experienced by monotropic people who are regularly exceeding their attentional resources (Adkin, 2022) in an effort to meet the demands of living in a world designed for non-monotropic (polytropic) people. It inevitably leads to burnout.

Atypical Burnout

Autistic burnout refers to a state of exhaustion created by using up all of your internal resources.

“Autistic burnout is often used by autistic adults to describe a state of incapacitation, exhaustion, and distress in every area of life. Informally, autistic adults describe how burnout has cost them jobs, friends, activities, independence, mental and physical health, and pushed them to suicidal behavior.”

Raymaker et al (2020)

Because Autistic burnout is described as a state of exhaustion, one would assume, that for many Autistic people observationally it can look like depression, and as such tools are being developed to differentiate between the two. However, exhaustion does not always mean that you are bed-bound, observably tired, and, indeed, displaying observable traits of depression. Many people with depression do not fit typical criteria, which is then referred to as high-functioning depression (useful!).

This is likely because the medical model has some sort of obsession with observable, diagnosable, traits. Many Autistic people are unable to stop and burnout. This may be because they are also ADHD, they may have interoceptive differences resulting in alexithymia and a lack of recognition of tiredness. They may simply have to work or raise children.

This may look like meerkatting and hypomanic behaviour (Adkin & Gray-Hammond, 2023) in addition to loss of skills and reduced tolerance to stimulus (Raymaker et al, 2020).

Meerkatting

Lovingly dubbed “meerkat mode” by Tanya due to the heightened state of vigilance and arousal it presents, it involves constantly looking for danger and threat. It is more than hyper-arousal, Tanya believes that it is actually an overwhelmed monotropic person desperately looking for a hook into a monotropic flow-state.

This is not just sensory hyper-arousal, it is the tendency of monotropic minds to seek out a natural and consuming flow-state to aid recovery from burnout and/or monotropic split. Because of the heightened sensory-arousal and adrenal response that comes with it, monotropic flow becomes difficult to access, leading into monotropic spiral.

Monotropic Spiral

Tanya’s original concept of Monotropic spiral results from the inertia of monotropic flow. It may involve obsessive-compulsive type occurrences of rumination about a particular subject of experience that pulls the person deeper and deeper into an all-consuming monotropic spiral. Associative thinking that starts connecting this to anything and everything, seemingly like an ever increasing black-hole (Adkin & Gray-Hammond, 2023; Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2023).

This can lead to the development of apparent loss of insight into ones own mental state and reality as described by the general population.

Psychotic Phenomena

Monotropic spiral is not psychosis. It is rather the vehicle that carries the person into psychotic phenomena, and maintains its inertia. Much like a star collapsing on itself, the resultant black-hole sucks in everything in its vicinity and is all-consuming.

A person experiencing monotropic spiral may lose insight and their sense of Self, compounded by a decoupling from shared reality. People can experience hallucinatory events, especially when alexithymic, making it difficult to differentiate between external sound and one’s own internal monologue. We can experience paranoia and rejection sensitive dysphoria to the point of delusion, it’s unclear where the line between this and fully fledged psychosis lies. We can also experience catatonic events and extreme lability of our mood, ranging from suicidally depressed to overtly manic and elated.

This may be why criteria for conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar are so frequently met in the psychiatrists office. In a world that traumatises us by design, these phenomena may not be as atypical as we are led to believe.

Concluding thoughts

Are we looking at three separate occurrence that commonly happen together, within an observational model? Or are we looking at chronically stressed and burned out monotropic people, that due to the infinite possible interactions with an individual person’s environment, may observationally appear distinctively different?

Perhaps then we should stop thinking in terms of:

Autistic person + Environment = Outcome

instead considering:

Monotropic person + Environment = Outcome

Chronic stress or stressful life events have long been studied as a key contributing factor for the onset of psychotic phenomena (Philips et al, 2007) but the occurrence and impact of stress for monotropic people is vastly different, but it is not yet widely understood. This is because of the lack of training and rampant neuronormativity in mental health services (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2022); the antidote to which is neurodivergence competence (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2023).

Instead, we keep throwing money in the wrong direction and leaning on carcerative care to make the problem go away. If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? Seems to us like we should just fix the environment. Maybe that’s our “rigid” black and white thinking.

References

Adkin, T. (2022) What is Monotropic Split? emergentdivergence.com

Adkin, T. & Gray-Hammond, D. (2023) Creating Autistic Suffering: What is atypical burnout? emergentdivergence.com

Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2023) Creating Autistic Suffering: CAMHS kills kids. emergentidvergence.com

Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2022) Creating Autistic Suffering: Neuronormativity in mental health treatment. emergentdivergence.com

Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2023) Creating Autistic Suffering: Autistic safety and neurodivergence competency. emergentdivergence.com

Levy, E., Traicu, A., Iyer, S., Malla, A., & Joober, R. (2015). Psychotic disorders comorbid with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: an important knowledge gap. Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 60(3 Suppl 2), S48.

Murray, F. & Hallett, S. (2023) ADHD and monotropism. monotropism.org

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139-156.

Phillips, L. J., Francey, S. M., Edwards, J., & McMurray, N. (2007). Stress and psychosis: towards the development of new models of investigation. Clinical psychology review, 27(3), 307-317.

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., … & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in adulthood, 2(2), 132-143.

Ribolsi, M., Fiori Nastro, F., Pelle, M., Medici, C., Sacchetto, S., Lisi, G., … & Di Lorenzo, G. (2022). Recognizing psychosis in autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 768586.

Tanya Adkin 6 Comments
Apr 10 2024
Autism: What CAMHS Really Say

It would be unsurprising at this point for me to say I’ve run out of things to say about Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). I have been writing about them for well over a year as we campaign to change services. It is disappointing with the sheer amount of writing I have done, there is still much more to be said. You can check out a lot of the things I have discovered already over at the CAMHS page of this website. Before we move onto the main article, remember you can support this campaign by clicking the following buttons.

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How do CAMHS and the NHS describe autism?

In order to give a picture of what is actually being said about autism, I have taken a sample of writings on NHS websites for various NHS trusts. The trusts I have included are:

  • Oxford Health Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service
  • Hampshire Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service
  • Dorset Core-Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service
  • North Derbyshire Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

My aim is to capture the themes and ways they discuss autism, and how this may impact on the services they are providing.

What are the pathology paradigm and neurodiversity paradigm?

The first question that stood out to me, is what paradigm these services approach autism with. In the context of neurodivergence, there are two big paradigms. The Pathology Paradigm, and The Neurodiversity Paradigm. The two are quite self-explanatory, but for those who may not have heard of them before, you can understand them as follows:

  • The Pathology Paradigm
    • The belief that humans can be measured by a statistical norm, and any deviation from that norm is pathological (a disorder or illness). See Stimpunks definition here.
  • The Neurodiversity Paradigm
    • The acceptance of each individuals neurology being individual and specific to them, and as such a natural part of biodiversity as opposed to being a disorder or illness. Nick Walker’s Definition is here, and in her book Neuroqueer Heresies.

Which Paradigm is CAMHS using?

Autism is a lifelong condition that affects how a person perceives and relates to the world around them. The term ‘spectrum’ is used as no two people are the same. All people with Autism share certain strengths and difficulties, but these will affect each individual in different ways.

Oxford CAMHS

This was probably one of the more palatable descriptions of autism. Despite this, they are definitely approaching from a pathology paradigm and medical model basis. This stands in opposition to much of the Autistic community.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a biological basis that is present at birth – children affected by autism can show characteristics before they are three, and parents may recognise from an early stage that something is wrong in their child’s social or language development.

Dorset CAMHS

This quote will be unsurprising to most who have dealt with CAMHS. phrases like “neurodevelopmental disorder” and “something is wrong” fit very neatly into the pathology paradigm and directly empower deficit and tragedy narratives that surround autism, often causing a great deal of harm to Autistic people.

In general descriptions of autism were similar to these, some were better than others, but roots of the language used were distinctively medicalised and pathological.

How do CAMHS describe the traits of autism?

The thing that stood out to me the most was the emphasis on social issues and communication. There were statements that Autistic people lack empathy, struggle to understand the feelings of others, and that they are unaware or disinterested in other people.

Difficulty in understanding others’ feelings (referrer may describe it as “lack of empathy”

Oxford CAMHS

Difficulties making and keeping friends and romantic relationships

Hampshire CAMHS

Children with ASD can also lack awareness of and interest in other children. They can find it hard to understand other people’s emotions and feelings, and have difficulty starting or joining in with conversations.

Dorset CAMHS

They may show differences in how they interact with other people, such as how they show interest in other people’s experiences and interests and how they recognise and respond to other people’s emotions. They also may find social situations and forming friendships difficult.

North Derbyshire CAMHS

I would note that all of these descriptions place the responsibility onto the Autistic child to approach that statistical average rather than describing why these differences are observed.

There are two important pieces of knowledge here. First is the theory of monotropism. Monotropism explains why an Autistic child may appear to be unaware of other children by explaining that they tend towards hyper-detailed attentional flow states rather than surface level attention. Despite this, many Autistic people engage in a form of parallel play called “body-doubling” where we socialise by performing separate tasks in each others company. More on Monotropism at the video below.

Monotropism 101

The second piece of information that is significant here is The Double Empathy Problem, as proposed by Damian Milton. This suggests that rather than lacking empathy, different experiences of society and culture make it difficult for people of different neurocognitive styles to fully empathise with each other. They simply have no point of reference within each others experience. This may explain communication breakdowns and difficulty forming friendships.

Damian Milton explaining Double Empathy

What resources are provided for Autistic children?

A lot of the resources provided are quite generic with some “self-help” material thrown in. As an independent advocate the lack of meaningful resources screams “you’re on your own”, which can be all too familiar for Autistic people and their families. What stood out the most was that none of these services easily signposted towards Autistic-led initiatives and projects. The best people to learn from are Autistic people, and yet they seem to be excluded from this conversation. The offering from Hampshire CAMHS is a Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) based self-help book that makes no mention of autism. ACT is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which many Autistic people do not find helpful.

Dorset CAMHS even links out to an organisation that offers Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA)

From short-term skills such as toilet training through to full-time ABA programmes, we’ve helped hundreds of children over the years. Many families have told us that seeing their child make progress, learn to communicate and knowing how to manage their behaviours has been invaluable.

Child Autism UK

There has been a great deal of discussion and evidence to show that ABA is harmful, even abusive, for Autistic people, such as Shkedy et al (2021). When CAMHS is recommending ABA, they have gone to far.

Conclusions

CAMHS are deeply entrenched in the pathology paradigm. They lack the insight of Autistic people and scholars, and provide resources that can even be harmful such as ABA. All of this in the absence of meaningful support for Autistic people. To me, even this one article demonstrates that CAMHS need to overhaul their entire approach to autism. We can not, and should not, be satisfied with the current state of affairs. Autistic children and young people deserve better than they ways they are described and treated by professional services.

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David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
May 8 2023
Mask on, Mask off: How the common understanding of Autistic masking is creating another mask

This post was authored by Tanya Adkin

Over the years I’ve been privileged enough to play a part in the discovery journey of what must be hundreds of Autistic people. One of the questions I am frequently asked about masking is “how do I unmask?”, as if there is a more authentic version of themselves that exists below the layers of neuronormative conditioning and the traumas that come with that.

My answer is often received as quite shocking. You don’t unmask. Not consciously, at least.

Masking tends to be commonly understood (thanks to some really interesting literature) as a choice. Almost as if when somebody suggests that we are Autistic, or we come to that realisation, we can begin to remove parts of ourselves that we deem “inauthentic” or “forced”, but where is the roadmap that tells us which parts are inauthentic or forced? How do we know what is the mask and what is us?

Autistic masking (also referred to in the literature as camouflaging, compensation, and most recently “adaptive morphing”) is the conscious or unconscious suppression of natural responses and adoption of alternatives across a range of domains including social interaction, sensory experience, cognition, movement, and behavior.

Pearson & Rose, 2021

To sum up the above quote, while we can consciously choose to conceal authentic Autistic expression as a way to avoid stigma; masking is also an unconscious projection of acceptability in an effort to avoid traumatic situations that arise from our differences. Projecting acceptability does not just mean pretending to appear more neurotypical.

Much like water, we take the shape of our container. To put it another way, we don’t choose the form that our masking takes, the environments we exist within often choose it for us. This is why many Autistic people experience internalised ableism, the environment of neuronormative society teaches us that we are broken and unworthy.

These attitudes are taught to us from the moment we commence education. Schools that give out attendance rewards, and punish children and families that struggle to engage, usually because of unmet needs or disability.

Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2021

This feeds back into Beardon’s Golden equation:

Autism + Environment = Outcome

It stands to reason then that if you have been unconsciously masking for a significant amount of time in order to protect yourself due to previously traumatic experiences, you may not even be aware of the ways in which you conceal yourself. Traumatic experiences for an Autistic person are unavoidable (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2021), therefore an unconscious response to said trauma in the form of projecting acceptability is also unavoidable.

50% of Autistic people are alexithymic (Kinnaird et al, 2019). Which means that we have difficulties reading, interpreting, or even feeling our emotions. Emotions are an internal sense, this sense is called interoception. When we talk about alexithymia what we are talking about is interoceptive differences specifically related to our experiences of emotion. If we have interoceptive differences, how are we supposed to know which internal authentic expressions we are unconsciously masking?

I posit that masking is one of the most authentically Autistic expressions. It’s been argued that not all Autistic people mask, what we actually know is that all people mask, regardless of their neurology. This has been called many different things, from “using a telelphone voice” to code switching. All of us mask, it’s a human experience. For monotropic people, who cannot perform neurotypicality as comfortably as a polytropic person might, the taxation on one’s attentional resources can be huge. This then leads to monotropic split (Adkin, 2022), burnout, potential suicidality, and mental health concerns.

If all humans mask to some degree then so do all Autistic people. We need to get rid of the notion that masking is appearing more neurotypical. This may not be achievable for everyone. There are often phrases thrown around such as “high-masking” or “unable to mask”. To me this is repackaging of functioning labels. Truth be told if we are basing our analysis of somebody’s ability to mask on how neurotypical they appear, we are missing the entire point of an unconscious trauma response.

If cognitively privileged Autistic people are unable to articulate the beginnings and ends of an unconscious mask, then who are we to impose our own unconscious masking onto another. We are reinforcing neuronormative and ableist stereotypes by assuming that all masking is about performing neurotypicality, and that neurotypicality is something we should emulate.

When we discover our Autistic identity, our environment changes. The vessel in which we exist is changing shape, so therefore so are we. This could be the literature, the information absorbed in google searches, the attitudes around us (such as those of Autistic advocates). It could reinforce negative views of ourselves.

What people are really asking is not how to unmask, but “how do I behave more Autistically?”

The unconscious masking is so ingrained into us that the assumption is often “if I behave Autistically, things will be better”. Which in its own way is a conscious expression of masking in order to avoid the traumas which masking created in the first place. It follows a cycle of imposter sydrome. Doubting one’s identity, because you don’t flap your hands, or because you are considered “sociable”. I am not ashamed to admit that I have been formally identified twice because of this.

We share commonality but when you’ve met one Autistic person, you have met one Autistic person. Our life experiences (like it or not) shape who we are. The concept of unmasking can oftentimes (in my experience) create somewhat of a secondary identity crisis. You unconsciously consider yourself not neurotypical enough, but also not Autistic enough. Further from this, we can see exaggerated expressions of the Autistic Self as a way to project acceptability within the new environment in which we now exist. Also, as a way to deter potentially harmful environmental interference.

We become angry, and rightfully so. We may notice that we have been too passive, we are given a licence to lean into stereotypical Autistic expression. There is nothing wrong with that. One could say that we try on the Autistic mask because this is how we have been conditioned to behave.

It is still very much an unconscious projection of acceptability in order to keep oneself safe. So therefore, we do not unmask in the way that many think we do; we do not peel of our face to leave by the bedside at night time. You are already authentically Autistic.

It takes time, but what we can do is become more aware of our environments and reframe our own experiences thus far, which eventually, hopefully, leads us to exist in a way that is least taxing on our internal resources but also keeps us safe.

References

Adkin, T (2022) What is monotropic split? Emergent Divergence. emergentdivergence.com

Gray-Hammond, D & Adkin, T (2021) Creating Autistic Suffering: Ableism and Discrimination. Emergent Divergence. emergentdivergence.com

Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C., & Tchanturia, K. (2019). Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80-89.

Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52-60.

Tanya Adkin 5 Comments
Oct 21 2023
Neurodiversity: The Basics

Within the Autistic community, much of the basic theory that exists within neurodiversity studies is taken for granted. For newcomers, it can feel very overwhelming to understand as this body of ideas has been growing for decades. This page aims to take some of the core ideas and explain them to newcomers.

What is neurodiversity?

Neurodiversity is a subset of human biodiversity. It refers to the diverse range of neurocognition that occurs amongst humans. The concept was credited to Judy Singer (1997). However, it has since come to light that the INLV community is where the term originated.

One of the common misunderstandings of neurodiversity is that it refers exclusively to people who are Autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent. Neurodiversity actually refers to the entire range of human neueocognition, including those that are seen to perform neurotypicality.

What is neurodivergence?

A neurodivergent person is an individual who can not perform neurotypicality. The term was coined by Kassiane Asasumasu (2000). Some incorrectly believe it refers exclusively to those born with a neurological difference such as Autistic and ADHD people, but it reaches further.

Neurodivergence also refers to the full spectrum of mental health conditions as well as traumatic brain injury and epilepsy to name a few. If your brain functions differently, for any reason, congratulations! You’re neurodivergent!

What is neurotypical?

A neurotypical person is a person who can comfortably perform neuronormative standards of the predominant culture. As these standards change from culture to culture, it is generally considered that neurotypicality is more of a performance than a distinct neurotype itself.

Some have incorrectly positioned neurotypicality and neurodivergence as binary opposites to each other. A better way of understanding neurotypicality is as those whose neurocognition affords them privilege within the predominant culture, with the understanding that no two brains are exactly the same.

The difference between person-first and identity-first language

With autism dominating most of the discussion within the general neurodiversity movement, it is unsurprising that Autistic community language preferences tend to take precedent.

Person-first language would be “person with autism” whereas identity-first language would be “Autistic person”.

The general consensus amongst Autistic people and in much of the discussion around neurodiversity is that neurodivergence is an integral and defining part of our being, and thus, we tend to use identity-first language.

The neurodiversity paradigm versus the pathology paradigm

The neurodiversity paradigm takes a social model approach to disability with any disabling aspects of neurodivergence being attributed to societies failure to accommodate our needs.

The pathology paradigm takes a medical model approach to disability, with neurodivergence and it’s associated struggles being attributed to medically relevant illness in need of intervention by healthcare professionals.

The core aim of the neurodiversity movement is to shift the world’s general understanding into the neurodiversity paradigm.

The theory of monotropism

Monotropism was conceptualise by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser as a conceptualised framework by which Autistic neurocognition could be understood. In the time since it was conceptualised, it has also come to be applied to ADHD.

Monotropism explains that Autistic and otherwise montropic people have an attentional style that tends towards singular, highly detailed attention tunnels. It has been used to explain ideas such as Autistic inertia as well as to understand the complex presentations of Autistic burnout and psychological wellbeing.

The double empathy problem

The double empathy problem was proposed by Damian Milton (2012) as a solution to the perceived lack of empathy in Autistic people. It suggests that due to differing life and cultural experiences, neurodivergent people have a different use and interpretation of language, and that both neurotypical and neurodivergent people struggle to fully empathise with each other due to these experiential differences.

It frames the perception of Autistic people lacking empathy and appropriate communication as a function of the power imbalance between neurodivergent people and those afforded privilege by the dominant culture and socioeconomic structures of a given society.

Neurodivergence and functioning labels

In the 1980’s, researchers began using the terms “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism” to differentiate between Autistic people with an intellectual disability (IQ score below 70) and those without. Sone that time functioning labels have been applied to a number of forms of neurodivergence and disability.

People within the neurodiversity movement generally avoid the use of these generalised terms as they are inaccurate and harmful. Functioning labels are used to gatekeep support and deny autonomy. They also fail to capture the dynamic nature of being neurodivergent, where one’s needs can change from day to day, or really over any period of time.

Some (including myself) have noted that functioning labels really only measure ones functioning within the socioeconomic system of their culture, and as such are inherently ableist. These arguments also have a connection to the dislike of the term “aspergers” when referring to Autistic people.

Why Autistic people dislike the diagnosis of “aspergers”

Hans Asperger (for whom the diagnosis is named) was a Nazi doctor in the Second World War. His work included establishing which Autistic people were of use to the German nation, and which were to be considered a burden. Those deemed useful (whose particular profile of needs would go on to be named “Aspergers Syndrome”) were spared from the gas chamber, while those deemed not to be useful were killed.

Autistic people, and the neurodiversity movement in general, reject Aspergers as a discrete sub-category of autism not only because it is linked to the atrocities of world war two, but also because in essence, it is another form of functioning label that plays a similar role to the term “high-functioning autism”.

More will be added to this page over time.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
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