Appreciating autism

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If we understand autism as a different way of processing the world, then we can begin to appreciate that difference and recognise that autistic people don’t necessarily have to change, nor do they have to become neurotypical. We can appreciate autistic individuals for who they are and for their unique way of understanding the world. We know that autistic people suffer from anxiety, depression and so on. Is that inherent, or is that a by-product of the expectations that they are faced with?

We know that most autistic children are educated in mainstream schools, which gives them many opportunities, but in some cases, it means that they’re being taught by people who do not understand their autism. That can lead to teachers bullying a child. For example, when the teacher asks, ‘What’s the capital of France?’ The autistic child may pipe up and say, ‘Have you forgotten, Miss? You taught that to us yesterday.’ The teacher then thinks that this child is being rude and cheeky and is unpleasant to them. However, if the teacher understood autism, they’d realise that the teacher’s intention to test the child is not clear. The child is just honest and straightforward.

Improving awareness of autism

We need to have more appreciation of autism; we need to have more understanding of autism. We know from research that when a non-autistic person meets an autistic person, they typically make negative first impressions, but that changes if the non-autistic person knows that they’re meeting an autistic person. Crucially, it’s changed if the non-autistic person has a better understanding of autism.

We can change these negative perceptions by improving public awareness and understanding of autism, as well as appreciation. We must appreciate the whole autism spectrum, including those who have an intellectual disability as well as autism, and those who are highly intelligent. We can’t count someone’s value purely on the contribution they make to society in terms of talent or income; we must value each individual for being the person that they are. As we learn more about autism, I hope that this will translate into a greater appreciation and accommodation of the difficulties that autistic people face and the talents, abilities and assets that they bring to society.

How society can support autistic people

If we understand autism, we can make relatively small accommodations that will make a huge difference to an autistic child or adult. For example, in the school setting, we could allow an autistic child to abstain from being on the playground where it’s noisy and chaotic. Instead, we could allow them to spend their break times, if they wish, filing books in the library. That’s such an easy, small change. Yet, lots of schools are so rigid about every child having to do the same thing that they may refuse to make a small accommodation, even if it would lower the child’s anxiety, allow them time to decompress, take time after a social interaction to relax and bring their blood pressure down again.

Alternatively, take, for example, an autistic adult in the workplace. They should be able to wear headphones or ear defenders so that they can block out noises that distress them. These small accommodations can make a huge difference. Then, more widely, we need to think about things like job interviews. Are job interviews fair to autistic people? If social interaction is not a vital part of the job, why do we test the capacity to do the job by putting them in a social interaction like a job interview? Aren’t there better ways that we could test their capacity and be fairer to autistic people and their abilities?

Understanding autism in families

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It has been interesting talking to parents who have an autistic child and later find out that the father of the autistic child is also on the autism spectrum. I’ve learnt a lot from parents who then told me: ‘I know how to effectively interact with my husband now that I know that he’s like my son George, because I would never bombard my son with a lot of emotional content. If I want to get the point across to him, especially if it’s something that I do feel emotional about, it’s probably best if I just write him some bullet points on a piece of paper and leave it on the table so that he can process it in his own time. However, until I knew my husband was autistic, I would have all these pent-up upset feelings, and then I would bombard him with a big tirade with all my emotions on show.

Nevertheless, I now understand that when I do that, I’m giving him many tasks at the same time. He’s having to listen to what I’m saying, which is often not what I mean because I’m using figurative language and I’m trying to be diplomatic. He’s decoding that. He’s trying to watch my face: what are these facial expressions that I’m making? What do they mean? He will also observe my body language, watching my hands flailing around and thinking: what does this tell me?’

The husband is consciously processing all these different things that are more intuitive for a non-autistic person. For non-autistic individuals, the more information, the easier it is to understand somebody. However, for an autistic person who’s consciously calculating what all this might mean, that’s just overload. Therefore, that mum will learn how better to interact with and meet the expectations of a loving marriage with her autistic husband from knowing how to help her son.

Spoken and unspoken rules

Autistic people are often very law-abiding, almost to a fault. I certainly have autistic friends who, if the person in the supermarket queue ahead of them has six items in their basket and the sign on the queue says five items only, will get agitated and might give the person a good talking to. Autistic people living in a non-autistic world face challenges all the time. Society has unspoken rules that are meant to be maintained. While neurotypical people often get upset about those unspoken rules, autistic people get upset about the spoken rules.

Autistic people can also end up on the wrong side of the law for perfectly innocent reasons. I remember hearing about an autistic man who was walking through an inner-city when he saw a huge machete in a bin. He became anxious that somebody, such as a child, was going to cut themselves on this machete. So, he decided that the best thing to do was to take it with him, to wrap it in his jumper and put it in his coat.

He was quite agitated and unfortunately, he was stopped by a policeman who asked about this. His explanation didn’t satisfy the policeman, but, of course, he was entirely innocent. The policeman thought he was making up the story that he’d found the machete in a bin, although he was speaking the absolute truth.

When an autistic person commits a crime, they are very likely to admit that they have done it if you ask them. In prison, autistic individuals are also highly unlikely to be able to play the rules of the system – to go to the group therapy session, to make the right noises and to say that they’re never going to do that crime again. Moreover, I am sure that there are lots of people in prisons who have undiagnosed autism. Therefore, autistic people can have a difficult time in society, and we need much greater appreciation for them.

Ageing and autism

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I became interested in autism and ageing when my mother ended up in the hospital, and I could see that a hospital environment is an assault on the senses for anybody. Moreover, autistic people are often hypersensitive or hyposensitive to sensory stimuli. A hospital environment would be particularly horrible for an autistic person because they couldn’t control the brightness of the lights, the noise all around them and the invasion on their bodies.

When we are older, we rely on people advocating on our behalf. Thus, if you’re an older person in the hospital and you have a family who comes and requests for you to be moved to a quieter bed, or, your family notices that you are in more pain than it appears, then that’s something that the nurses and the doctors listen to. I began to think about the plight of autistic people as they grow old: their parents, who have been their lifelong advocates, may no longer be alive to support them. Who is going to intercede for that autistic adult who may seem rude to the nurse due to their honest or brusque or seemingly-unfriendly manner? After pondering this situation, I started to seriously worry about what happens to autistic people as they grow old.

Understanding autism in women

We’re under-recognising autism in women and girls, and that’s probably for three reasons. First, we stereotype autism as a male condition. When we see a girl or woman who’s struggling socially, we don’t automatically think: could this be autism? On average, girls are diagnosed later than boys. They often need to have some additional red flag, such as an intellectual disability or a behavioural problem to be considered for an autistic diagnosis.

Moreover, autism may look a bit different in women and girls. We know that women often have a specific interest that is focused on something that’s not particularly unusual. If a clinician is seeing a 15-year-old boy for an autism assessment, he’ll ask, what are you interested in? If the 15-year-old says, ‘I’m fascinated by Thomas the Tank Engine,’ or, ‘I’m fascinated by memorising the Latin names of every type of carrot,’ then the clinician will think, this could be autism. However, if the clinician asks the same of a 15-year-old girl and she replies that she likes horses, or she names an actress or a boyband, the clinician will probably not consider an autism diagnosis.

That’s one example where an autistic girl may fly under the radar because she doesn’t fit the stereotype. However, a clinician should ask more questions because it could be that the girl is only interested in one specific breed of horse and only in collecting facts about that breed; She doesn’t want to go riding or see the horses, she just wants to know everything she can learn about them or know everything she can about a particular actress.

We also know that autistic women and girls do a lot more masking and camouflaging on average than autistic boys and men. Another major problem is that historically, research has been conducted overwhelmingly with boys and men. What we know about autism primarily represents what we know about autism in males. We’re now addressing that with a lot more research that focuses specifically on autistic women and girls.

Discover more about

understanding autism

Carpenter, B., Happé, F., & Egerton, J. (Eds.). (2019). Girls and Autism: Educational, Family and Personal Perspectives. Routledge.

Zivrali Yarar, E., Howlin, P., Happé, F., et al. (2020). Ageâ€Related Effects on Social Cognition in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Possible Protective Effect on Theory of Mind. Autism Research.

Egerton, J., & Carpenter, B. (2016) Girls and Autism: Flying under the radar. Amington: Nasen.

Autism: a different way of processing the world