 Aspergios in Society is a Manchester-based documentary about the relationship between autism and mental health. Over the course of the filming process, I was introduced to a number of interesting autistic individuals and struck by the quality of these experiences and opinions, I decided to create a behind-the-scenes video series to showcase these marvellous people. This is one of them. Knowing those perspectives, it was a lot simpler than I expected. I was quite surprised that I got a big one questionnaire asking me all sorts of questions about how I behave from childhood and another one from my parents to fill in, and then a three-hour interview. I expected much more specific tests, much more akin to various psychometric tests I've taken over the years. Of course, what I didn't realise was that it was a structured interview. So I was quite surprised to be told that at the end of a three-hour interview that, yeah, I was diagnosed, I was autistic. Ah, how do you figure that one out? So as I said, I spent six months arguing with the guy. I can't be autistic because. Then everything he said can't be because, and as I reflected back to me, whatever my argument was, I pretty much proved to him that what he said was right in the first place. So despite my best wishes after six months, I just held my hands up and said, okay, I'm autistic, what do I do now? Start learning. I started with the resources that I was given by the diagnosticians and they're absolutely hopeless. I spent the first two years following signposted to signposted to signposted to signposted right around the country and back again. And basically there wasn't anybody can help me because they didn't expect to have autistic people that weren't learning disabled as well. So there was nothing to help me. So I finished up joining an embryonic local support group, which was just come down, have a cup of tea and a chat and see where to from there. And that developed into what is now Solved Autism, where we still do much the same, but we also meet people on a one-to-one basis, discuss how their diagnosis meets their experience as you've heard, and we get involved with solving the real-life problems that a lot of autistic people have on a one-to-one basis. So we will get between them and a landlord, an employer, a benefit system, local authorities, etc. Pretty much negotiate for either side to help each other to understand the other's point of view in the situation and hopefully mediate a solution. Mostly this is possible because despite what a lot of autistic people think, most NTs do want to help. They just have no idea how. So they're all too grateful once somebody explains the situation. Oh yeah, we can do that. And off they go. And the fascinating thing for me is that especially in employment environments, once the reasonable adjustments have been made for the autistic person and established, there were colleagues once as well, because what we've actually done is found a better way for that job to be done. For example, somebody being asked to process a great deal of numerical information visually needs more than one screen, and that applies whether you're autistic or not. So we acquire the double screen for the autistic person and very quickly the rest of the department wants them as well because they can see the advantage. And it occurs time and time and time again in many scenarios. We solve a problem for the autistic person and it's actually a problem that everybody else was sort of soldiering on with. But we seem to suffer these problems much more acutely than non-autistic people. And as a result, we are the weather vane for what's wrong. And that then leads us on to trying to educate non-autistic people as to how they can accommodate us. Because again, very often, people want to help, they just don't know how, and they're terribly afraid of getting it wrong. So the more education we can do, the more willing non-autistic people are to help out and pitch in and the better they can understand the kind of problems that we deal with. And this is basically what I do day in, day out, and for the last six years. That's the two questions. Try to give bangs for Bob. It just occurred to me that your life's on time. Does it matter? If you've got a good enough picture, I'll leave it. Question three. What kind of support, training, or experience around Lawson have you had? None. I spend the last six years listening to autistic people and listening to the problems that they have and how they often can't articulate the problem. And having to work with that. Fortunately, my own career and life skills are able to help a lot of these people express what they're struggling with and what they don't realise they have a problem with. But other than that, reading and talking to people that are supposedly experts of all sorts of description in the area. No formal training. The frightening thing is that more and more people seem to agree with me. More and more people seem to be taking on board as I'm saying, despite the fact that I have no formal qualifications. I certainly have no degrees in autism. It's just life experience and comparing my own experience with what I see in individuals. But the last six years has brought me into contact with possibly the widest range of people imaginable. We have clients who are what many would see as a classically autistic person. Fairly low skills in all sorts of directions. Relatively low IQ, possibly learning disabled by diagnosis and generally struggling with life. But a client list also includes surgeons, engineers, local authority management. We even have the Human Resources Director of a major regional hospital who dare not mention a diagnosis at work because she's quite clear that it will be career suicide. And it frightens me that the very people you'd expect to be able to go to for support, the NHS, are the very people who take the most myopic view on what a diagnosis actually means to the extent of disbarring doctors and terminating senior managers. And I'm referring to specific cases of my experience. The general perception out there of autism, even amongst people who are classically trained, I would say is unacceptable. It's coming from a very pathologised, very myopic point of view. And they would do a lot better if they spent more time talking to autistic adults that can articulate their experiences and views rather than looking at some child, possibly with their own acute difficulties and trying to pick the bones out of something that is alien to them. The example I often use is, it will be like me trying to tell a mother of four about the experience of pregnancy and childbirth. There is no way I could understand it the way she does when people keep telling me about autism that I can't possibly understand it. Okay. So this is just to give the most common difficulties. So question four is, have you encountered any difficulties working with autistic or non-artistic individuals and what makes them different? We only really work with autistic people. But by that I am including families. At the end of the day, autism is a genetic condition. You inherit it from your parents, you pass it on to your children. There is no debate about that. However, how it expresses in an individual is very much subject to that individual's makeup and the environmental circumstances around that person. So it may well be that any given family, it's the most extreme individual that gets the diagnosis first. But in our experience, over six years, we have never come in contact with any family of an autistic person without being able to trace it, both horizontal through blood and vertically. So the parents, the grandparents, siblings, uncles and aunts, they all have characteristics that we can see. Yes, perhaps we ought to have a conversation. Now obviously, nobody needs to get a diagnosis unless they have problems that are severe enough to need support to resolve those problems. So yes, we know a lot of people who are even quite happy to accept that they may well be diagnosable. But their life is working for them, so why would they need a diagnosis? The difficulty with some can be that they tend to pretend they're normal against all the evidence, especially young people, teenagers and early 20s. They're so busy trying to live a life, trying to find out what life has installed for them. The last thing they want to be discussing is how they are different from everybody else. Much the same as any other teenager, to be honest. They just want to be whatever they see as being normal. They don't want to label. They don't want to be forced to accept help that they don't see they need. And unfortunately, they are so busy refusing this help, they often don't see the pitfalls coming until too late. Then we find ourselves in crisis mode trying to get under the axe before it actually lands. And we're not always successful. The biggest problem that we see from non-autistic people is as a result of working with them because of the involvement of an autistic person and they really have no idea. None whatsoever. They may have read a book. They may have seen a film. They may have heard about it. They may even have a relative with a diagnosis. But because they've not put any time into it, they've not put any time into understanding the individual. All they're left with is cliched preconceptions about what autism is supposed to be. And this very, very rarely matches with the experience. So they get it wrong time after time after time. We have people who should know better telling autistic people that they will need one of these or they need to do it that way just because they're autistic. Without any consideration that every autistic person is different, just as every other neurotypical person is different. We all have our own special needs and unless we have those met, we are going to continue to have problems. So the problem is much the same. Almost everybody universally is so sold on their preconceptions on whatever they see. It's difficult to get them to see it differently. But then this is my stocking trade. After all, I spent 40 odd years as a salesman. Okay, so we have four questions left. So as a sort of roundup to a story, we're really trying to understand the gravity of social versus biological intentions of mental health and autistics. Could you help us understand how relevant social science is? Social is all. Autism does not necessarily come with any physical characteristics. For example, I am diagnosed autistic, but I also have a measured IQ of 150. I have no physical defects that I'm aware of. However, I had to work very hard as a child to learn to catch a ball or to play an erratic games. But I spent hour upon hour upon hour teaching myself by practice with a ball against a wall. I wouldn't say I'm going to be able to learn how to live at any ball games, but at least I can play to some extent. So I wouldn't say that I have any problems. And I think that most autistic people struggle with the perception that because they are autistic, they will have X, Y, and Z problems as a matter of course. Not necessarily so. Some do. Some don't. Some are brought up to expect to have them become habituated to behaving as if they do. And I think that's very unfair. The social model of disability is the most applicable to autism because there is nothing disabling per se about autism. It might make life more difficult, but so might having red hair or grey eyes. I don't know. I don't have either. So I can't comment. Society would stop expecting us to behave to a standard that they think is normal and just accept that we are the way we are with all our twists and turns and abnormalities. They would start to realise that none of the things they see as being different matter. They just don't matter unless we're harming ourselves or somebody else which is very rare. Yes, meltdowns are a problem, but so is epilepsy. Nobody worries too much about an epileptic. They know what to do and they just deal with it when they find one. Ditto with an autistic person in a meltdown if people would have a little bit more information and just be a little bit more charitable. They would be able to deal with meltdowns quite easily and we could all get on with our lives. But society is built on perceived norms. We learn to at least be concerned about people who are perceived as not like us. Either they're shorter, they're taller, fatter, thinner, different colour, different hair, different race, or different religion. Because going back to our early stages we learn that people who are different from us will likely to be competition for resources. In this day and age that's ridiculous. We all have more resources than we know what to do with. There are plenty to go around so why should we fear somebody who appears to be different? Purely and simply because we haven't developed past that stage. Hopefully civilisation will override that. Hopefully education will help civilisation to override that. And as most of the great religions teach us all to live in peace and harmony with each other I'd like to think there is hope for the future. Custom and practice doesn't support that hope. We need to educate non-autistic people in the right way to understand how autism works, what it is, what it isn't. And we also need to educate autistic people that all of us are different, but none of us are broken and none of us are wrong. Has working with any autistics or non-autistics enlightened you to any perspectives that you otherwise wouldn't have had yourself? Every day one of the beauties, I won't say joys because sometimes it can be quite difficult of working with autistic people is that everyone is radically different. They talk about a spiky profile that doesn't even begin to touch the reality of the way autistic people are. There's always something new to learn about every person and from every person, but there is also the joy that I have never come across a nasty autistic person. I've never come across an autistic person that would steal. I've never come across an autistic person that would tell lies either to harm somebody else or for their own advantage. We just don't have that very self-interest streak. We seem to be much more focused on what is right and proper. Would I like it if somebody did this to me? So it really is a revelation every time I speak to an autistic person the problems they deal with, how they perceive those problems and how they perceive the interactions with other people. Now as a salesman I'm trained to look into people's motivations and what problems they're actually facing and unpeeling that on you is always revealing. And daily I find myself reflecting on my own behaviour and my own characteristics and learning more because they've been put into contrast with what somebody else is doing. So as much as I spend my time helping other people in itself it is an education for me. A lot of things that you're saying and I'm resonating with myself quite a lot. Questions, I've got two more questions left. Many adult autistics believe autism makes up a big part of their personality. Can you start over again on this part of it? Many adult autistics believe that autism makes up a big part of their personality and it's something to be celebrated as diversity. Others believe autism is a disability and has many other effects on it. What are your opinions on these two stances? I have to ask, who are the kidding? Who are they trying to convince? I struggle to understand the practical application of autistic pride events much as I struggle to understand gay pride or anything else. Who are you trying to convince that you're proud? And if you have to force pride that hard are you actually trying to compensate for something that is not there? Yeah, I'm autistic. I'm completely comfortable with that. I haven't still worked out the entirety of what that means for myself but I could never have been any way else. I have no idea what it is like to be any way else because I've never tried it. But I do know that I'm a fairly good person. I try to do good stuff. I'm a fairly competent person as I can do a lot of things that a lot of other people cannot do and I can learn. I always maintain that there is nothing I cannot do other than get pregnant and fly under my own steam. Everything else I can learn if I apply myself to it. And this is prone to be the case over the last half century. I've learned all sorts of things from people, about people and also about technology. Don't forget as a salesman I have to walk in and speak to senior engineers most of the time about stuff that they have been steeped in for decades and get it right. So I have to learn and I have to learn quickly but I also have to have the confidence to say I don't know but I promise you I will do tomorrow. And I think this is a more appropriate approach to autism. It's a slightly different life journey to the one that most people embark upon but it's still a life journey. Autism is not a death sentence. Autism is not an accolade. It's something you're born with so you did nothing to deserve it. You shouldn't get a pat on the back for it. Neither should you be criticised either. What you might be criticised about is how you address what you were given by nature. Did you work to make the most of whatever you got? Did you maximise your talents? Did you try to pull up whatever deficits you might feel you have? Have you worked at being a better person? If you've done all that to the best of your capability I don't think anybody can criticise you in any direction. If you haven't then you tend to pay the price yourself. So whether I'm proud or ashamed of being autistic is purely my perception and I think both are wrong. Autism is a fact of life like being male or female you're born to it. So it really is a good question. There's nothing to be proud of but there's nothing to be ashamed of either. So this last question's sort of the round up the last thing on the documentary. Sorry. I'll give you the question first. If you could change something about the way society deals with autism what would you change in terms of socialising? Are you going to have a conversation about that before I answer it? Okay. I have to say that the concept of special needs requirements for autism are just alien to me. The best person I've ever come across for dealing with autistic people professed to know nothing about autistic people but she was just genuinely kind accepting non-judgmental and seeking to help. It didn't matter whether you had autism or learning disabilities or were in a wheelchair she was just there. What can I do to help? Are you okay? Now if the rest of the world would actually start adhering to the various religions that they profess even if it's just humanism and became nicer people autistic people would have all the help they need. What we need is space people to cut us a little bit of slack not expect to measure up to their expectations of how to behave a little bit of tolerance for the times we have a wobble if somebody has a couple of drinks at an office party nobody condemns them for the rest of their career about being a little bit silly after midnight so why should anybody condemn a autistic person for doing something that they may not have known was an issue? If the world was a nicer place autism would not be a problem we would just be people slightly different but we'd just be people that is the biggest thing autism needs a nicer world to live in so as I often say fenties would just jump planet we'd be fine So is there anything that you'd like to say that you haven't already said? Masses I can go on for hours probably gathered from the emails sitting in 80 on a wide range of subjects but it seems to be what works and this is where I come from I am about outcomes not interested in processes I don't care what the form says you should be doing or shouldn't be doing has something happened that has made somebody's life better if not you've wasted your time and it really doesn't matter what the various diagnosticians and theorists say if it hasn't made somebody's life better it's a waste of time who would you like to pick on first? Is that all you want to say? No I can go on I can talk about the greater mind stratism strategy I can talk about the various boroughs the myopias that are built into learning disabled teams that are often all there is out there to help us that some diagnosticians are realising how inappropriate the weight of perceptions from learning disability are to autism however I would also add that I'm starting to understand how badly appreciated learning disabilities are and how we probably should be having more of a conversation along the line of neurodiversity I have been absolutely flabbergasted with the capabilities of some learning disabled people I have met through working with combined learning disability and autism teams people that are not supposed to have an intellect are saying things to me that I would not have expected possible they're clearly grasping subjects that should be beyond them but because they may have a communication difficulty or they may have a difficulty in formulating the thoughts and articulating them somebody has written them up as learning disabled and put them at the back of the store to be kept out of the way and because they get diagnosed this way very early in life by the time they reach their teens they're very often habituated to leading part of their life very much attenuated in terms of human nature in its fullness so it's not surprising that the stigma of learning disability continues because I think learning disability is at least as misunderstood as autism so let us stop dealing with the pathologies let us stop dealing with the diagnosis let us try and maximise the individual to be the best they possibly can be and I think a lot of the people we throw into the scrappy now will surprise us That's awesome I'd love to hear you talk forever By the time you're on