 This is your daily hydration reminder sponsored by this bottle. Good day fellow human, how are you doing today? My name is Thomas Henley and I make a lot of videos on autism, neurodiversity, mental health and all sorts of other related concepts. Today we're going to be addressing a very important issue which is what exactly is autism? In this video I'm going to be talking about both the scientific, psychological and medical sides of autism, as well as contrasting that with the experiential, socio and political side of autism, to hopefully give you a full overview of what exactly autism is. So let us talk about the basics. What exactly is autism? Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition. You are born autistic. You develop autism in the womb. You become an autistic person, you have an autistic brain. It's also lifelong, so it's not something that just ends at childhood. Autistic children grow into autistic adults and it's very heavily genetic, so if you are out there, if you have an autistic child, there is a pretty high probability that the genes have been gotten from somewhere. Autism is generally split up in terms of ASD 1, 2 and 3. There used to be characterised other conditions like Asperger's syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder amongst many, many other characterisations. Now it's ASD 1 and 2 split up based on someone's outward presentation and support needs. It's a spectrum, too. And I will get into what the difference between ASD and a spectrum is very soon. Autism can come with significant intellectual disability and some tends to be those who have an ASD 2 or 3 diagnosis. And it's primarily characterised as difficulties or differences in social communication, sensory and cognition. So it's someone's thinking, perception, things like that. The Tride of Impairments is probably one of the best representations of what autism looks like. I would like to highlight that it's a little bit more of a quadrant. We'll be getting into why that is. It has a very, very, very, very, very, very heavy crossover with conditions like ADHD, different neurodivergencies, as well as mental health. Autistic people tend to face disproportionate amounts of negative life experiences, ranging from bullying to addiction to SUI to a use, a lot of different things, which can make living as an autistic person very difficult, very, very high rates of mental health. As well as a lot of difficulties in terms of your working professional life, as well as your social life, dating, education, the list goes on. Anything involving other people, basically. So let's get into actually what is the spectrum. Most people in their minds are like, okay, I'm thinking of a spectrum at one end, someone's not very autistic, not autistic at all. On the other hand, they're kind of a lot more autistic in the middle. You've got someone who's sort of in the middle, middling autistic. That's the way that a lot of people view the autism spectrum, and it's an incorrect way of viewing it. The ASD level one, two and three is split up based on support needs, mostly. It's not related to the autism spectrum. It does serve both healthcare and social care function in terms of providing support, highlighting someone's needs, highlighting the things that may occur for them a lot more than perhaps the other groups. It can be quite an important aspect in terms of that social healthcare stuff. The actual autism spectrum is best characterised as sort of like a chart. I can't remember what the name for the actual chart is. I got a radar diagram, I don't think it is one, but basically you have different traits of autism which can be low or high in comparison to other autistic people. Things like eye contact, a normal posture, anxiety, social difficulties, speech differences, fixations, mental health, sensory sensitivities, a lot of different things, and each autistic person has their own unique profile when it comes to traits. For me, you might assume that I have no problems in life. I communicate very well, that's something that I'm pretty good at. I think even comparison to a lot of non-autistic people, but I do have significant issues when it comes to mental health. I do have a lot of hyper-focusing which sometimes leads me to neglect my needs. I do have a lot of sensory differences, sometimes poor eye contact, sometimes a lot of ticks. I do stim quite a bit when I'm in isolation. So there's a lot of different ways that it can manifest and you can't always see someone's support needs as well. You can't assume that, okay, Thomas is good at talking, he must be good at every other area of life. It's not how it works. We tend to have very, very, what's deemed spiky profiles. Some things we're very good at, other things not so much. I think that's a lot to do with our interests and also our ability to transfer skills between areas can sometimes be a bit more difficult for us. But let's go into the triad of impairments, which is a model which has been pushed by a psychologist called Lorna Wing, basically characterising the traits of autism into three separate categories, hence the triad. Communication being both verbal communication as well as non-verbal things, indirect things like tonality, facial expressions, body language, interaction, which means being appropriate or interacting with other people normally can be related to an interest in others, what they have to say, what their interests are, as well as something that was highlighted by Lorna as empathising, which I will expand on a little bit further because it's not completely right. There is also the imagination component, which sometimes is characterised as rigidity in thought and behaviour, and this basically governs someone's creativity, the rigidity of their thoughts and behaviours in terms of routine, rituals, their ability to tolerate change, the ability to sort of imaginatively play, which is kind of a weird one because when I was young I really enjoyed that kind of play. So there's a lot of aspects there. The reason why I called it a quadrant earlier is because there is a really glaringly obvious part of autism, which tends to be very, very consistent between autistic people, and that is sensory differences. Hyper hyposensitivities more or less sensitive to certain stimuli in your environment, very much dictates a lot of the ways I live my life, a lot of the supports that I need, a lot of my perhaps difficulties when it comes to the outside world. So let's talk about some of the caveats of this model. This is Lorna Wings model and Lorna Wings was under the assumption that autistic people lacked empathy, which is the myth, and we will go into why that is the case. A lot of autism has been mostly studied in children, particularly in white boys, meaning that people from different cultures, backgrounds, different genders and sexualities and things like that. I said sexualities. Sex might be a bit different. And a lot of the research has been done on white boys. So there's going to be a little bit of a bias in those cases. Social difficulties are mostly apparent in childhood, but also between autistic people and people who aren't. Neurotypicals or allistics, as people like to call them, people who aren't autistic, those difficulties are very, very apparent between neurotypes. For autistic people, communicating with other autistic people, it tends to be a lot more straightforward. It's when you mix the two together and sort of view it in terms of the neurotypical styles of communication being better that you see autism as a social disability, if that makes sense. Many autistic adults do reject some of the scientific concepts which I will be going on to talk about. But I do want to cover both the social and medical aspects of autism. So you have a whole picture of what autism exactly is. So let's talk about one of the aspects of the child of impairments, which is communication. Some people are nonverbal all of the time. They don't speak. They might use pecs. So like, they might use little sound boards to communicate with other people, but they may not be verbal. Now, also, this can be situational. So I do experience spells of being nonverbal, sometimes called selective mutism, which is a bit of an annoying term because it can kind of lead you to think that you are selecting to be muted at certain times, which is not the case. It's unvoluntary. But this happens a lot for me, particularly during shutdowns or maldowns. Or if my processing is not good, my mental health's not bad. My mental health's a little bit too hard to deal with on a certain day. I'm more likely to go nonverbal. It can also be a difficulty understanding and implementing nonverbal communication, facial expressions, body language, tonality, all the things that we do to morph the meaning of the words that we say, or to communicate something without words. We can find that excessively difficult to understand, and also to use ourselves. This is why we have concepts like flat affect and vocal monotony. Flat affect being that we don't necessarily express how we feel on our faces. Important thing to remember, especially if you have an autistic person come up to you looking pretty calm, not looking too distressed saying that they are about to have a maldown. Good thing to take them seriously when they're communicated directly, even if it doesn't appear that they're in emotional distress. Another aspect is the vocal monotony. I think you could say the same for this one, except that we do tend to have a bit more of a flat kind of tone to our voice. We don't tend to have as many sort of inflections. We don't tend to say things differently person to person. I do. But every autistic person is different. Another aspect is monologuing, which you may have experienced if you've ever talked to an autistic person, and you've gotten on to a topic that they're very interested in, they might have long sort of, sort of conversations or speeches where they where they talk about different aspects of of an interest or their opinion on something tends to happen quite a bit. It's not so much of an issue actually, autistic to autistic. And this is kind of a common thing, common theme in this slide. But we can also have some difficulties when it comes to processing. So we can sometimes fall a little bit behind in communication, just because it takes us a little bit longer to process what's being said to internalize it, process what we're going to say and then say it. It's like a little tiny little bit of a delight, which can mean that we do tend to interrupt people because we won't say something we don't know when it's our time to speak or when it is our time to speak, it's kind of too late. And someone someone else is already speaking. There's a lot to do with, you know, as I've just said, the ability to like, process things in time, sometimes social communications is like two seconds break between one person finishing what they're saying and the person starting. So you got to be quick. And if you have processing delays, you may find yourself like interrupting quite a bit. There are significant levels of social anxiety and generalized anxiety amongst autistic people. It's quite highly comorbid. Century aspects definitely do play a big role in someone's ability to communicate. And so does mental health. And there are a lot of different factors involved in this someone socialized a bit too much. If there's too many sort of sensory things going on in the environment, which has caused them the stress, it can really impact on their ability to communicate. The important thing is, is that a lot of these things that I've been talking about, perhaps they're a little bit different. They're not necessarily always bad. And that, you know, if you listen to what I'm saying, you, you talk to an autistic person, you keep these things in mind, you probably have a pretty easy time conversing with them. It doesn't tend to be much of an issue when it comes to autistic people interacting with autistic people. And they have done some studies on this, you know, they kind of split people into three groups. One is wholly autistic, one's wholly neurotypical, and one's kind of a mishmash of both. They got them to perform like a teamwork kind of group task. They found that the mixed group performed pretty poorly and had some difficulties in communicating miscommunication. Whereas each of the separate groups actually performed equally well as each other. So it's a lot to do with those kind of misunderstandings, different lenses in which we view social interaction with other autistic people, you know, things like not using indirect communication, it's just not an issue for me. Even when it comes to things like monologuing, like my kind of style of communicating is that I talk for two or three minutes of a person processes of a person replies talks for two or three minutes, we kind of switch whereas typical kind of non autistic style of communication, very back and forth furry kind of bouncing off each other. I would also like to highlight that autistic people tend to explain their emotions, why they feel a certain way, how it feels for them, rather than expressing it. We do sometimes express it 100%. But we tend to sort of hinge a little bit further on that side of talking about it. On the topic of communication, let's talk a little bit about social camouflage, which you may have heard of masking, you know, something autistic masking, it's very much talked about a lot within the autistic community. It's a whole idea of hiding your autistic traits. Social camouflage is this big kind of umbrella term, which covers masking, assimilation and compensation, kind of like compensatory strategies to basically avoid being detected as someone who is different as an autistic person to blend in to appear more neurotypical. It's a lot more prevalent in women and girls masking just sometimes happen with with men. My experience particularly is that I only started masking when I went to university. When I found out they needed to try and make friends and craft a social life around me. I started masking in order to sort of fast forward that stop people from not talking to me because I didn't present similarly to other people. A lot of this is learned behaviors, particularly as kind of like a defense mechanism to avoid discrimination, to improve your social life and sometimes even your professional life, but also to blend in and prevent negative experiences from happening, which if you didn't know, autistic people definitely do experience a lot of disproportionate levels of negative life experiences. It comes with massive negatives to the person. So although it can be beneficial in some lenses over time of the long term, it can have some some really negative impacts when it comes to relationships, particularly friendships, work as well, mental health identity and also self advocacy, because if you're not advocating for your autistic needs, you're trying to blend in and be normal, it's it's not necessarily going to work very well. This leads to a lot of what we deem internalized ableism, ableism being kind of discrimination against what is disabled people. She's done a lot of different contexts, but internalized ableism you can imagine is quite inherent to masking quite a bit or camouflaging yourself because you are basically trying to be less autistic and making yourself feel bad and wanting to sort of conform and be less yourself. You know, obviously that comes with a lot of sort of harmful beliefs about yourself, your value as a human being, being your genuine true self. Obviously you're going to have some really big impacts. Let's talk about social behavior and we're going to cover quite a few concepts within the psychological kind of medical side of things, one of which you may have heard of which is theory of mind. This is the ability to put oneself in another shoes. Think about what they might be thinking, what they might be feeling, why they're doing what they're doing, what perspective they may have on a certain situation. This is this idea of theory of mind and it tends to be from the literature it tended to be a lot more apparent in childhood. Why did it come across? They found that there's a few reasons, but these are some of them, that autistic children tend to like joint attention, so being able to talk to an autistic child and say like, hey, look at that over there, or like looking in a certain direction. A lot of neurotypical children will naturally kind of look at you and then follow your gaze, see what you're looking at, where autistic children, not so much. There can also be a delay in passing the false belief test and deception test when compared to neurotypical children and they tend to say and do things that might be hurtful to other children's feelings a lot more. The important thing there is that it's not necessarily this kind of malicious act, it's a lot to do with basically understanding when somebody is not having a good time and attributing that to things that we've done. In adulthood we don't tend to have problems understanding autistic people as autistic people, only neurotypicals, only all those stick individuals and it makes sense. It's a little bit easier to relate to somebody who carries the same neurotype as you. If you have someone who is a lot different to you, tends to be a lot of misunderstandings, it's a bit harder to relate with the experiences that they may have and this is a two-way thing and this is where this idea of double empathy which comes a little bit more from the social kind of sociopolitical realm of autism basically says that both allistic, neurotypical and autistic individuals tend to have a difficulty relating or understanding, empathising with each other obviously differences but the key thing is from both ends, it's not just looking at autism and saying they've got an issue, it's the context of it, it's not with all over autistic people just with neurotypicals. Leading on to talking a little bit more about empathy we have this theory put together by Professor Simon Byron Cohen and his researchers at Cambridge. This theory is called the Empathising Systematising Theory, the ES, and it's basically based on the discrepancy between someone's empathy and their logic but it can also be seen as having different cognitive styles. A higher systematising score is related to autism so the higher that is the more likely that they're probably autistic. Systemising at its basis is understanding the world based on systems, facts and rules. Empathising covers both cognitive and adaptive empathy which we are going to go on right now. Does this still promote the empathy myth? I don't really think so, I think it's a lot more nuanced than that and there is another theory which we are going on to which is cognitive versus adaptive empathy basically separating out the different elements involved in empathising. Cognitive empathy is the ability to identify someone's emotional state without being told so through indirect communication. I kind of think, oh indirect communication, you said autistic people struggle with that. Do autistic people have cognitive empathy? Adaptive empathy is the ability to act appropriately once emotions are known. Now the interesting thing here is that I think with trying to explain cognitive versus adaptive empathy Simon Byron Cohen was basically comparing the profiles of autistic people and psychopaths. Seems like a very strange comparison but bear with me. Cognitive empathy tends to be lower in autistic people meaning that we can struggle to identify what emotional state someone is in unless they tell us. The adaptive element which I would argue is kind of more of our mainstream idea of what empathy is. We don't tend to struggle with that and sometimes it does tend to be a little bit higher even just because of experiences that we have. We tend to understand what it's like to be discriminated against and being different and all that kind of stuff might have a bit more tendency towards adaptive empathy whereas psychopaths, you know another neurodevelopmental disorder, they tend to struggle when it comes to adaptive empathy so they don't act appropriately once emotions are known but they have a very very high propensity for using cognitive empathy so they're aware of how you're feeling and they can even use that to sort of manipulate you in all sorts of different ways and they also don't care so they will act appropriately. Very big difference between the two kind of very well demonstrates differences between these types of empathy in a non-scientific view just looking at it based on like mainstream ideas of empathy. Cognitive empathy is not empathy, adaptive empathy definitely is what we consider to be empathy. The cognitive element is just noticing it and autistic people do tend to struggle a little bit more with identifying some of the emotions. There is actually a test that you can do it's called the eyes test basically presents you a bunch of eyes and tries to get you to identify what emotion that pair of eyes is demonstrating. Interesting thing, I scored very low on it when I first did it when I was a bit younger. In adulthood I scored a near perfect score so there is definitely room for us to become better at cognitive empathy, to learn, to interpret other people's actions and behaviors a little bit more accurately over time. Let's talk about a really another really important aspect of autism which is electrophymia which does delve a little bit more into that kind of emotional components of autism. It's not very known about even though the co-occurrence of autism and electrophymia is very very high. It's basically a difficulty noticing and categorizing your own emotions which is incredibly impactful in a number of different ways. You can imagine if you struggle to notice that and categorize the emotion that you're feeling can make regulating said emotion proactively very very difficult, can also make things like making decisions, relationships self-advocacy a lot more difficult. I like to describe electrophymia as a somewhat threshold condition. Most people they'd be able to tell when the background levels of anxiety are there, you know like 10, 20, 30, 40 percent anxious perhaps whereas for us we may not notice those background emotions so easily but if it gets to a point where it's high enough might be like 60, 70, 80 percent anxious we might be able to go hey oh I'm getting a little bit more anxious but that threshold is is is high-rub so it means that those background emotions can be relatively unnoticed by us, can make things very difficult. The weird thing is that it is massively co-occurring with autism but it also is with PTSD which you know as I said negative life experiences happening to autistic people kind of makes sense to a certain degree is it biological who knows is it due to experiences who knows I'd argue that perhaps there is quite a large environmental social component to this and I do want to expand a little bit more on self-advocacy because if you can imagine in a confrontation if somebody has said something or told you to do something or suggest something that you don't particularly know how you feel about but you just say okay and you just kind of go with it it can make it very difficult to sort of advocate for what you want if you don't know exactly how you feel about something it may take you quite a while and actually a lot of sort of retrospection in the hide site to to really dissect exactly how you feel about something can take us a lot of time and it can also make it quite difficult for us to connect how we feel because we can't notice that with an event making things like psychological support very very difficult as well as those relationships decisions self-advocacy and that brings us on to our next topic which is pathological demand avoidance something that can occur a lot more in autistic people someone who has a pathological demand avoidance profile tends to react overly negative to demands and expectations put on them it's a lot more apparent during childhood although it can be just a little bit more nuanced when it comes to adulthood for people with pda perhaps being a little bit more indirect softening language asking for help or inviting or just stating can be effective to avoid placing a demand or expectation upon a child or an autistic person one of the more common misunderstandings about pda is that it's related to having a really high ego it could be seen as just being annoyingly difficult when people are telling telling you to do something it could also be seen as trying to be like a control freak or someone who really just wants to be the boss that's what it comes across as but it is a lot to do with people's expectations it's a lot more to do with aversion to expectations so the expectations that people put on us causes stress causes to act in kind of like a fight flea phone freeze response people react differently to it for me it's a lot more internal for other people might be a bit more external could look like avoiding situations where you're around that person who's giving you demands could look like telling them off saying no it could look like just freezing not doing anything a lot of ways that it can it can come across especially in adulthood an interesting part of pda for me is that although i really dislike having expectations and demands put on me i also really dislike doing the same to others so this kind of goes against this idea of being a control freak it's very much just for me personally striving for independence or autonomy persistent drive for autonomy i guess in sort of a weird way it's probably not an issue but i really struggle with making demands of other people giving expectations because i know how that would impact me pda individuals might struggle in the workplace within relationships especially especially if it's not understood or it's not known about so we've talked about social behavior but what about imagination and rigidity rigidity of thoughts and behaviors there is a stereotype for autistic people that we tend to be very good at maths physics and coding there's kind of very sort of mathematical system kind of based disciplines not a lot of subjectivity and sort of creativity involved but the majority of autistic people that i come across tend to fall a little bit more towards the side of creativity than the side of logic and systems a lot of the special interests that people have tend to be very much within fantasy i've also seen a lot of creators who produce a lot of really cool artwork a lot of videos some movie makers some singers there is a mountain of creativity within the autistic community but why is autism described to be a lack of creativity and rigidity our creativity tends to be in a little bit more of a controlled way meaning that in order for us to be creative we need certain boundaries sometimes for myself i do need some kind of guiding principles when someone asks me to do a piece of work but within those boundaries that someone set for me i can be creative this means that rules in imaginative play games have to be established it's not so much of a kind of fluent sort of transient experience for people who play autistic kids especially when using imaginative play it is actually something that i used to engage in quite a bit when i was younger which is very strange kind of think back on the experiences that i've had my best friend at the time we used to play like mums and dads and we would go like go to work and we'd come home and we'd do she'd do some like cooking i used to play a lot of those games although it was another game that i played in primary school where it was like a kind of a mutant zombie game where one person would kind of run around usually me to be honest as like the mutant and everyone would have to be like shooting them and yeah i used to engage in a lot of imaginative play but they always tended to have some level of like rules to it or else i would get a bit uncomfortable get a bit annoyed the thing is with a lot of these awesome concepts if you turn things around on its head and switch your perspective it seems almost the same from from the other side so what i mean is society can actually be extremely extremely rigid with its social norms with its social rules which autistic people do tend to challenge and break out of a lot so from one angle people might see our kind of rigid behaviors and routines and perhaps creativity which which needs some bounds as being a little bit too rigid whereas when we look at society we see all these social rules that seem immovable seem just constant throughout all of the interactions that we have it's quite rigid too and the thing is rigidity could just be described having quite low trait agreeableness one of the big five personality traits that's talked about a lot within psychological research possibly possibly but what about routines and rituals something that's very very integral to the autistic experience living a good life as an autistic person tends to be helped a lot if you have a stable routine the reason for this is that we tend to find uncertainty quite difficult we like to know what's happening what we're going to do why we're doing things and we can also find changes quite difficult to manage as well so whether it be small kind of on the fly changes whether it be lots of different changes stacked into one or very very large changes it can all have varying impacts on our mental health routine does reduce uncertainty and that's why we tend to gravitate towards it rituals are a little bit different and I'd like to give this example of an individual that I know I go to this I go to the gym with them they give them some kind of free PT sessions when we get back they make me a steak and some chips it's kind of like a trade-off but they have a particular ritual when it comes to stuff after the gym so we go to the gym we come home I get a shower and stuff they have dinner ready they put the dinner on the table and they always have to finish cleaning all of the dishes before they come and sit and eat afterwards they will go to the exact same spot every single time they'll put the stuff in the dishwasher they'll set the phone down and they'll just kind of clean the teeth while they're playing a game and it's very very consistent and to outsiders it might look a bit strange it might look like a bit unneeded a bit overly ritualistic but to us it's very much like a habit it's like a learned pattern and we have to do everything in the correct order and if we don't do it in the same order every single time it can sometimes cause us stress this is where the overlap with obsessive compulsive disorder comes in which I'm not going to expand on too much but I think it's it's a very good thing to keep in mind because there is also overlap with OCD another really key aspect to autism which isn't taught about enough is monotropism the tendency for a single thing to draw our attention in entirely this is a theory that was crafted by autistic researchers like actual autistic people doing research some believe that it does reflect on a lot of the behaviors that we as autistic people have I watched a recent video from I'm Autistic Now What which went into this idea of monotropism and how it could contribute or sort of impact and cause some of the behaviors that we may have as autistic people I did agree with quite a few of those and agreed that it'd definitely be a factor involved in it I don't think it's wholly representative of the reason to why we're autistic but it's a very good component to help people understand what it is like for us most people have polytropic minds meaning they can focus on multiple things they can switch attention easily back and forth they can switch tension for a second and then jump straight back into what they were doing for someone who has a monotropic mind like myself, my autistic self I can experience intense stress anxiety when separated from something that I am engaged with so if I'm in a really big sort of state of hyper focus I'm really like wanting to get a project done I can find it very difficult if someone like asks me to do something or wants to talk or wants to do something else or wants me to do another piece of work which isn't what my plan was and this is somewhat to do with like a routine having certainty like throughout the day it's nice for me to know okay I do this and then I do this and then I do this and then I go to bed that's what works for me when when things start getting jumbled up and after like reach and sort of manage and spin the plates on a lot of different tasks it doesn't tend to go very well it also interestingly places a responsibility on others for not working with our brains meaning that this is not some this is an inherent trait and this is not something that we can change meaning that other people should be aware of it they should be aware that we might need a bit more time to finish what we're doing we might need a little bit more preparation and this is why when it comes to teaching autistic children and parenting that you have time as you say okay look here's a timer a little sand hourglass whatever you want to call it I think it's an hourglass isn't it yeah when this when this is finished we move on to another thing kind of gives us a bit of a a preparation time to transition from one thing to another it's kind of like pushing someone into cold water versus sort of allowing them to acclimatize slowly to it and sort of approach it in their own time that leads us nicely into our next couple of terms which is autistic inertia and hyper focus what is hyper focus hyper focus is a state that we get ourselves into and we are very very very very very very focused on completing one thing or doing one thing people do get into these states we call it like the flow state but for autistic people we do have a tendency of taking a little bit of time to get into doing something new it's kind of like the idea of inertia like it takes us a while for our train to kind of start moving but once we get to a point where we have been doing it it kind of goes on and on and on we spend more hours we concentrate harder as time goes by it gets more and more and more intense the train gets a little bit too fast you know the train gets like hey guys been working for like 10 hours probably need to gel and so you have to break slowly you have to slow down you can't just grind immediately to a halt by putting the brake on that's how bad things happen so it's it's an idea of inertia it starts off as something that makes it hard to engage with a task initially but after a while it can make it hard for us to break away from said task hyperfocus can be both productive and unproductive depending on what you're focused on you can imagine a little bit different between doing a project at work and playing a video again but those are two examples of hyperfocus it can be extremely useful being that you can really really focus in on what you're doing it was really really helpful for me when I was competing as an athlete to stay very focused very consistent all of autism traits really helped me in that arena but it can also be somewhat detrimental it can be somewhat harmful the main issue with this is that when we are hyperfocused we tend to ignore our needs a lot more autistic people tend to have inter-receptive difficulties not introspective inter-receptive meaning that we struggle to notice our bodily signals of hunger first even going to the toilet sometimes as well meaning that if we are hyperfocused for a long period of time and we don't break away from it we're very like monotropic and we're wholly focused on this thing we've got all this inertia that's building up then it can be very difficult for us to kind of break away and say like oh you know have a moment to ourselves and think oh I'm a little bit hungry or I'm a little bit thirsty you add on the inter-receptive difficulties it can mean that we can go you know for a day or maybe for a couple of days just not fulfilling those needs which is not a good thing it can also really empty our tanks at the end of the day you know the energy demand is just there's no getting away from it it might be a superpower it's kind of like a a formerly one car but you can't change the tires you know you just go full speed until the tires are worn down and all of this hyper focus and this inertia and the monotropism makes transitioning from thing to thing really really difficult transitions are a really really big thing for autistic people for me they tend to be a little bit longer than average like it takes me a bit of time to transition from one thing to another compared to most people but when my mental health is really bad when I have really significant burnout it's even longer it extends even further and it can really eat up into the time that I have in the day if you imagine I have a lot of different small tasks that I have to do hopping from small tasks to small tasks you know if that's like a half an hour transition between each of them it's going to add up so for me I tend to try and keep my transitions in my working day as minimal as possible as straightforward as possible in order to avoid those transition difficulties that I have and that does bring us on to the slide of executive functioning and transitions what is executive function well it is the mental processes that enable us to plan focus our attention remember instructions and juggle multiple tasks successfully successfully being the important word that I can do it but just really really poorly executive function autism can manifest in a lot of different ways it can be things related to hygiene to planning to life skills to multitasking at work there's a lot of aspects that make life a little bit harder and a lot of them tend to be around executive functioning it tends to be a lot more of an issue when there are lots of small tasks as I was saying before if there are a few big tasks that we can kind of tackle at once and then move on to the other one it tends to be a lot easier for us but if there's lots and lots of different subtasks that we have to do and we have to hop between each of them it can definitely become very very difficult for us this impacts me massively I find that a lot of the difficulties that I have tend to come in the executive dysfunction category things I do obviously have sensory differences and a lot of other differences but the executive function tends to be a good whole marker for how my brain is doing how my mental health is going during the week during the month transitions cause a lot of issues emotionally and definitely take a lot longer to do especially during those burnout periods as I said impacted by mental health and other stresses sent to an environment what my social battery is looking like and the thing is that these things can be adjusted for they can be adjusted for and supported even within the workplace you can have reasonable adjustment you can have PA support things like that to help in the workplace and out of the workplace obviously having support implemented benefits things like that can definitely help manage that more boring multitask kind of maintenance side of life but we've talked about rigidity and routines and inertia and focus and monotropism really cool really cool video to watch if you haven't seen it already let's talk about the sensory world the diff the world of sensory differences I say sensory differences because one common theme that tends to happen in the autistic communities that we relabel things that are inherently like negative sounding into something that's a bit more positive or neutral so sensory processing disorder turns into sensory differences and it's kind of got a good reason to why because these differences in our sensory environment can be both positive and negative given what exactly that sensory stimuli is there tends to be two sort of categories that we fall into one is hypersensitivity and one is hyposensitivity so hyper more hyper less sensitive it's not super sight super hearing super smell super taste it's not an enhancement of our sensory organs it's more about the interaction of the input that we get from those sensory organs like our ears that goes into our brain and kind of becomes a bit amplified or dulled down so it's a lot about the interaction between our brain and our sensory organs this varies a lot between individuals although some do tend to be a lot more common like noise and light hypersensitivity tend to be quite common we have this idea of sensory defensiveness which is an important aspect to consider you might find that some autistic people really do like that feeling of heavy pressure you know they might they may get like a weighted blanket or or like a weighted toy that really helps them regulate but when it comes to getting hugs from people if people initiate and they just go and hug that person they can often respond pretty negatively to that whereas if you were to ask them they might give you a hug this is a lot to do this idea of sensory defensiveness and the good analogy for this is okay you really really like cold water swimming okay so you're kind of getting you're getting dressed at the side of the lake or something like that and one of your friends just comes and just drop kicks you straight into the freezing cold lake now you like swimming in the lakes and the coldness and all of that stuff but that wasn't very pleasant if it's kind of a shock to the system it wasn't predicted predicted it's not something that you prepared for that's an idea that's a good comparison of what sensory defensiveness can be like for an autistic person it's not necessarily the actual stimulus that causes us the issue it's more about a lack of control over what's entering our sensory world so defensiveness is a really cool important point to remember there's also this idea of sensory seeking versus avoidance and these are kind of characterizations of the types of behaviors that someone might have so for me I'm very hyposensitive to deep heavy pressure so for me I find a lot of deep heavy pressure really relaxing whereas I tend to struggle a lot with bright fluorescent lights so I tend to avoid them it's not necessarily like a characterization of what type of person someone is it's more about the actual behaviors that someone has and characterizing that behavior also the intercepted difficulties which we've touched on strangely related somewhat to elexifamia I imagine that kind of emotions and feelings do somewhat blend in to our experiences like with our bodily needs to some degree interesting to talk about perhaps not today we also have these sensory supports and aids that you might find a lot of autistic people using a lot of it tends to be mitigating sensory stimuli so like sunglasses ear defenders noise-canceling headphones like I've got in those types of things which kind of mitigate unwanted sensory input or at least like lower it down a little bit so it's tolerable you can also have other things which do provide input um some people it can be very helpful like fidget toys you know a cuddly blanket you know perhaps a dressing gown that I tend to get on now and again those those can all be things that that kind of help us stay level severs at the same time and of course sensory adjustments and these are things that are external so it's not necessarily modulating yourself to reduce that sensory stimuli you're changing your environment you're making your lights dimmable you're making them the hue more warm in the light you are soundproofing a room you're doing these adjustments to make the environment just inherently less sensory rather than trying to modulate it yourself and these are things that can be done in the workplace in supported living and also in your own life in your own home and I highly recommend you do if you haven't and on the subject of sensory stuff how could we not talk about stimming when speaking about sensory things of course stimming what exactly is it stimming is a repetitive noise or behavior that is done over and over again to self soothe funnily enough neurotypicals do this as well everyone does it to self soothe or a lot of people do you might find yourself now and again biting your nails or like rubbing your hands together or perhaps what's another one that people do biting their pen lids or clicking their pen or twizzling it around in your hands these are all what we would consider to be little stims little stims so they're kind of a bit unnoticeable most people do them they kind of slip under the radar a little bit when it comes to big stims these are the more stereotypical things that are related to autism that people think of when they think of autistic people rocking flacking your hands making noises echolalia sort of repeating things over and over again these things are done in order to regulate ourselves and quite often a lot of our stims I've found the ones that tend to be hyposensitive so not very sensitive we tend to need some level of input from them when we stim you know finding our hyposensitivities and sort of fulfilling those needs can actually do a lot for regulating ourselves good example for me I'm hyposensitive in my vestibular system so that's to do with my balance and so I don't really get a lot of input from my balance spinning around in a circle golden it's like ecstasy these can also be really complex and not necessarily stereotypical little stims these could be things like stim dancers that you know a good creator who's been on the podcast a couple of times or TNL they do the stim dancers pretty cool I also go to the gym which you can imagine got the headphones in got a bit of auditory whatever you call it auditory stimulation got the movement sort of moving the body the repetitive doing a bicep curl so they can't be complex and they don't necessarily have to be these kind of singular things that we do over and over again could be just a repetitive thing that we do that calms us down that suits us there is also this idea of multi-sensory stimming which I've heard about from a couple of people talking about it on Instagram basically the idea is that you mix and match different stims that you have one good example would be listening to some music that you like over and over again and watching a music visualizer while you're looking at it you could be wearing a weighted blanket at the same time so you're compiling different stims from different areas into one kind of stimmy thing one that I really highly recommend anyone to do is if you're okay with the water of course and if you feel that you can do this safely like I love to just sink myself to the bottom of the pool and just like set myself off just like spinning I absolutely love that it's like the the noise reduction from the water as well as like the weird kind of gravity feelings it's just really nice and lovely and I really really enjoy it especially if there's like light coming through the water you can see like the streams of light great sensory experience the thing is with stimming is that a lot of people want to get rid of it because it looks weird abnormal and so not okay not good a lot of waters and advocates including myself will advocate for the use of stimming so even if it's something that you've been taught out of I highly recommend you actually get yourself back into trying to find some stems that are good for you because you will find that by meeting some of your sensory needs your functionality in other areas of life will improve and perhaps even your overall mood good example would be like oral motor stimulation you might find that you're just constantly snacking all the time but you're not necessarily hungry that's kind of weird right this is a lot to do with your oral motor needs because you're eating because you're trying to get that chewing sensation so if you were to switch that out with some gum or another alternative or like a chew toy but you can get lots of autistic people have them you can get some quite discreet kind of mature looking ones as well and using that instead of snacking you will find that your tendency to go and grab snacks might decrease so I'm all for non-harmful stimming stimming that doesn't impact a person negatively anyone negatively even if it's the person who's doing it it's very important that we see this as a very effective way for autistic people to self-serve and regulate themselves and taking that away from an autistic person who already struggles with those impacts of like alexofymia and a lot of different anxiety sources sensory sources social sources saucy saucy and just getting rid of someone's like emotional coping mechanism just because it looks weird is just a very silly idea so we like non-harmful stimming 100% let's talk a little bit about the hot button topic which is meltdowns and shutdowns yeah one of the most searched terms on youtube about autism autism meltdown adult autism meltdown boy girl having autism meltdown why do people just really really want to see autistic people having meltdowns why actually is that meltdowns are very different to your idea of what a panic attack might be like or even a tantrum when you look at kids it's not the same it's kind of like your brain is short circuiting rather than you're getting like a shot of adrenaline that you would have with a panic attack meltdowns can be triggered in a numerous amount of ways whereas panic attacks tend to come from anxiety tend to come from an initiator so once a problem is solved it tends to be that our anxiety kind of levels out and drops back to baseline whereas with meltdowns once it is triggered it can go on for a significant amount of time even if the problem is fixed these actions that people do during meltdowns can be both involuntary and voluntary for me my own experiences I tend to go very non-verbal I experience a lot of physical ticks I can't really think properly I feel like I'm being trapped within my brain a lot of kind of nervous energy and electricity going through my brain it's very dissociating it's a very vulnerable feeling to go for a meltdown and these meltdowns for other people could come with things like outburst of emotion like anger things like that that's not something that I've experienced as I said ticks height and sensory sensitivity it can increase even higher when we're going for a meltdown and executive dysfunction becomes even more worse so it can make it very difficult for us to kind of function get ourselves to do things it can take us a while to transition a lot more time to transition from one thing to another lots of stimming things related to that meltdowns are not fun but the kind of nicer more hidden cousin of the meltdown is the shutdown and the shutdown in my eyes is a lot more preventative and internal there may be less kind of verbal stuff involved like the person may become non-verbal and very dissociated so it's kind of like they've just checked out of an environment a conversation and they just can't talk they just can't react to things they're very still it's like they're internalizing all the stress that they've had and just going into this this like shutdown mode where they just they're trying to stay in stasis in order to prevent them from getting into a meltdown situation it's it's a bit difficult if you've had experiences perhaps very intoxicated you'll understand what dissociation feels like just imagine that but without the intoxication and the non-verbalness as well it can also sometimes come with extensive selective mutism which is a very strange term because it's not selected in any shape or form it's very involuntary in a lot of cases that can also happen like in shutdowns in meltdowns quite a lot for me but also outside of them sometimes as well so this wouldn't be a Thomas Henley video without talking about the medical and social model of disability really really important way of framing exactly what autism is why it's disabling why it can be difficult for a lot of autistic people to be autistic so let's compare these two models the first model which is something that probably everybody is aware of which is the medical model and this places the blame of disability on the condition the condition that the person has which kind of makes a lot of sense for a lot of conditions it's like okay you've got a virus you've got you know you've got a virus you obviously have a problem from that virus you know it's not caused by social environmental factors you know impacting your health due to the fact that everyone knows that you've got a virus you know it's it's quite plain and clear that this is how things work and the medical system is based generally to highlight deficits to highlight problems in order to fix them treat them cure them when it comes to autism it becomes a little bit more nuanced because it's based on traits it's based on having a different brain and you kind of get yourself into a tricky situation when you say okay we need to cure this type of brain well do these people want to be cured do these people see it as an inherently negative thing some people do some people don't the thing is it's a very subjective kind of nuanced thing the social model places the blame on the environment that interacts with said individual who has a disability or condition the social model of disability is extremely applicable to autism I've done some some sort of preliminary research a few years ago as part of my student documentary I looked into like the link between autism and mental health conditions there is some genetic, biological evidence for anxiety and epilepsy from what I saw at the time there could be some more research out there at this point there is a really large feed-in from our environment our social environment into our quality of life a lot of the areas that we struggle in the workplace education relationships friendships any kind of interaction with another human being can sometimes be very very difficult for us and we do disproportionately experience a lot of negative life experiences which are pretty horrific and I'm not going to go into too much but I highly recommend having a look at those things around bullying discrimination a use not very good so there's a lot of aspects to our environment our social environment impacting our well-being as an autistic person and not necessarily just because we're autistic just because the world isn't built for us I believe that if we made a lot of adjustments in those really key areas of education the workplace psychological support then autistic people would have a lot better of a time in life our systems are not adjusted for us a lot of the time you can even have situations like you have in the US where one of the reasonable adjustments for the workplaces to be fired for your job if you can't manage to adjust for this person which is absolutely ridiculous so you have places like the workplace you have situations at school when kids are just coming home being bullied and missing time off school you know situations actually going in and trying to find employment whether to disclose autism or not that's kind of the golden question a lot of vulnerability to manipulative and controlling and dangerous people as well and so that there is a lot of social environmental factors which interplay into the difficulties that we have as autistic people personally my experiences in life have definitely contributed towards the development of my mental health conditions and bar my mental health conditions being autistic is fine for me it feels okay like I don't feel inherently disabled from from being autistic it only really becomes an issue when my mental health is bad of course a lot of people will assume because you're autistic you're disabled of course you're gonna have a low quality of life hey not so fast why is that the case is it not because of all of these social environmental factors which are impacting us extremely negatively across the board I think so I think there's a really large contributor from that side and that is why I talk a lot about the social model of disability but what about the positives we've talked a lot about different theories different difficulties that we may have what about the positives I'm gonna list through a few of them maybe give a bit of context to a few of them focus and attention to detail you know we were talking about inertia, hyper focus, monotropism really lasering in something that we're focusing on lateral and divergent thinking I was talking before about creativity a lot of autistic people seem to be very innovative and having the ability to kind of tie pieces of information together really well into new concepts directness and proficiency with direct communication logical abilities it's very much something that I think I've taken it took an IQ test before I scored really badly when it came to maths but I think I'd scored a near like a pretty pretty solid like score on the logic side of things I'm very happy about that creativity as I've said spiky skill sets which could be viewed to be a negative but we tend to be so like min max you know if we're starting a game like an RPG game you know some of our stats would be like through the roof and some of them would be like way down there we tend to have a very kind of spiky skill set and that could be seen as a good thing could be seen as a bad thing we're kind of like the specialists of the human world memorizing or retaining facts 100% tend to have a really good long-term memory especially for things that we're interested in I know a lot of autistic people can talk about all the different flags and all different sports that all the country is doing really like large amounts of information I find it very very very interesting communicating well with autistic with other autistic people is also a really good positive and being accepting of differences you know you grow up being different to a lot of the people that you're around and so when you spot someone who is a bit different you tend to be a lot more forthcoming and speaking to them to understanding more about them you don't necessarily always jump to certain judgments about who you're going to talk to or not you see someone who's interesting like hey that'd be a cool person to talk to see someone who's kind of on the sidelines at a social event they seem like the one to talk they seem a bit down you know you go over and talk to them see if they're all right you may be struggling with the center in social environments so these are some some really clear positives in in my head the last thing that I want to cover before we round up this lovely video is neurodiversity this is the concept that basically covers the natural variations in the human brain and is all about celebrating or accepting our differences in the initial sort of time that this is created it tended to be mostly focused around autism and ADHD and it kind of used to be kind of like a sort of a counter movement to this idea of disability the counter movement to the medical model nowadays it's just kind of a recognition that people are different think of that as as you wish neurodivergent being a person neurotypical being someone who is doesn't have any neurodivergencies so doesn't have any any condition there's just regular old joe neurotypical uh neurodiverse is a kind of like a characterization of a group so get a group of an autistic person two neurotypicals it would be a neurodiverse group it's more of a characterization for a group of people is this a neurodiverse place for example but with this massive umbrella you can obviously think of a lot of circumstances where differences in the human brain are just wholly a really really bad thing wholly negative and that's one of the issues that I have particularly about this idea of including everything under neurodiversity even though it's true and it's kind of to the definition this would include things like psychopathy epilepsy schizophrenia lots and lots of different things which just don't seem to have any upsides and tend to impact the person wholly negatively no gray areas just black and white this is a bad thing why do we consider that to be a natural variation in the human brain and not something to be fixed helped with cured treated it's difficult you know as I was saying before you know differences in the human brain going to be a lot more new ones than treating sort of infectious diseases even so you've got to really think about why this concept is around now and I'm not really sure any reason to why neurodiversity is around now other than to characterize a group of people basically people are different neurodiversity does allow us to challenge the norms to act more naturally and to live differently which is something that I really really enjoy this is this is this aspect of living as yourself to advocating for yourself and the way that you want to interact with the world which I'm all for I think this is a really really great aspect to this idea of neurodiversity we want to have this acceptance of the way that we are mold our life around the things that we're good at try and get support things that we're bad at all this kind of stuff really really positive kind of changes to someone's life important and advocating for someone's way of being when the world thinks that they're disabled and wrong can be really really powerful so learning more so you've gone through this very very long video learning all about the ins and outs of different autism concepts I hope this has given you a bit more of a clear idea of what it is like to be autistic it's kind of been a pretty long crash course and what exactly autism is so I hope you have found it useful so far life quality is a really big issue and it really does need to be tackled socially just need to put that out there we need a lot more social change to I mean it's it's current the state of life for a lot of autistic people it's really really bad and I wish that things would change if you do want to learn more you may be thinking to yourself oh I really relate to a lot of the things that Thomas is saying today you can try taking the test which is called the autism quotient test I think there are some others out there that you can check some others that might be perhaps a lot more pushed for by by the autistic adult community you can research into the medical and scientific literature if you would like and you can also join an online community I really highly recommend YouTube and Instagram if you're not on either of those I highly recommend that follow the actually autistic communities have a look at the types of posts that people make the types of videos really try and learn like try and understand your traits try and learn from their experience try and pick up some self-improvement some changes that you can make to your own life which have been beneficial to other people self-advocating within work life and relationships and also unmasking and also probably the biggest one don't want to put out there shameless self promotion watch more of my content let me know down in the comments if you find this helpful share like subscribe get this stuff out there and if you want me to produce more videos like this on a more consistent basis you can always support me for as little as 99p or one dollar over on YouTube you get a little membership badge next to your name and there will be some exclusive content coming out at some point within the members group so if you want to be a part of that part of the sort of the ignition of the Thomas Henley YouTube channel I would really love to have your support and I would be eternally grateful all right guys hope you have a good day and I shall see you in another video see you later