 Good afternoon! Aspie Legion, welcome back to another video with Mr Thomas Henley from the Asperger Scruff Channel. Today we're going to be talking about mental health and autism. What do you get when you combine it? A big mess. Big goddamn mess. That's the truth. I'm going to break down the videos into five key points. Five reasons why autistic people struggle with mental health conditions. All in the video, stay tuned. There is no doubt at all that autistic people struggle with mental health more than your average person. With extremely high rates of suicide, a high likelihood to have a severe mental health condition, one in three, mind you, and a tendency to be bullied more and socially isolated, it's hard to not see the reasons why autistic people struggle with mental health conditions more, more. I'm sure there are going to be some people out there getting triggered by this. It's like, I'm not autistic. My mental health is bad. I know, I know, I understand. I'm just giving you some reasons why we struggle with it more, in general, more than people. Okay, I'm not putting this very well. I'm not saying your mental health condition is not as bad as autistic people's. I'm just saying this could be the reason why we struggle more. And it's been scientifically proven, statistically proven that we struggle a lot more with mental health conditions, considering how severe it can be for a large proportion of those autistic people. So, number one, number one reason, number one, autistic people tend to feel alone, tend to be isolated, and tend not to feel like anyone understands them from a young age, meaning that around the ages of teenage hood going up into early adulthood, maybe even further than that, we feel like outcasts. We feel like no one understands us and that we don't particularly understand anyone else. Because of this, a lot of autistic people can develop hate towards other people. This is very apparent in some of the communities that I have browsed through in my time on Facebook. There is a tendency for autistic people to develop some jaded view on the world and the people that inhabit it. Now, you can understand that. If you spend your entire life feeling like nobody gets you and that people bully you for being a little bit different, whether it be how your brain works, what you say, your body language, all of that plays into a key part of why people tend to pick on autistics. Because of this, a lot of autistic people can develop a mental barrier, a mental wall to protect themselves from other people, other people's opinions and thoughts, and hurtful speech, hurtful bullying. One of the ways that mental health professionals deal with depression and anxiety is by talking to them, you know, doing things like cognitive behavioral therapy, or just counselling. Those are some of the more common things that mental health professionals use to deal with those conditions. With this sort of ingrown and core belief that nobody really understands them, CBT and therapy and counselling can be significantly less effective for autistic people. Especially if these counsellors or mental health professionals are not trained in autism, they're not. They don't have a good awareness of what autism is, how it's different. Mental health and autistic people is different and it should be treated as a separate thing, but it's often not because there's not a lot of autism specialists that offer mental health treatment for autistics. Number two, Mind blindness. Mind blindness is a concept at its basic level of not being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. If you want to learn more about mind blindness, go check over my video, I'll probably put a link up there if you want to check it out before, but if not, it's a difficulty in understanding someone else's perspective. It's sort of an ingrained thing. It can be learned, obviously, but naturally a lot of autistic people cannot do this. You may call this being more single-minded, but to an autistic person it is more of a natural ingrained thing. It's not like something that they want to shove out purposefully, it's just something that happens. Combining this inability to see life from any other angle, but your own, with a negative depressing view on life. It's not hard to see why having this mentality and being negative and having these conditions could take its toll more considerably, meaning that people are not going to be able to help, people are not going to be able to get into their brain and tell them that it's going to be okay, tell them that this is going to work. If an autistic person doesn't think something will work, you're not going to convince them unless you lay out mass amounts of facts and you try and convince them. And a lot of therapists, a lot of people, people in their friendship groups, their parents, people who they're in a relationship with, it's not going to be easy to help them see a different side to their life, a different side to the negative view that they have of themselves and the world around them. Number three, one of the biggest things for me when I was a child, little 14 year old Tom walking about, I don't know why I'm saying little, I was quite tall, it's probably around the same height as this, I don't know, I was quite tall. One of the biggest things for me was emotions, plain and simple, through analysis of my own life, my own internal workings and the research that I've done and the people that I've talked to on the spectrum, emotions seem to be something that autistic people struggle with. I believe that we need a lot higher of a threshold of emotion in order for us to notice that we are feeling something, meaning that we can experience and perceive very strong emotions, but when those emotions are lower, when they're sort of background, we really struggle to get a grasp at them and understand what they are. It took me an absurd amount of time to try and understand what emotions were, I had to like logically dissect why that happened, I had to like look into the different neurotransmitters and how they feel and try and figure out what they were and because of this I believe autistic people really struggle noticing their emotions and you can understand why not being able to understand what emotion you're feeling is going to affect you, it's going to affect your ability to explain the state that you're in to other people, but it's going to be hard to explain to your friends, to your parents, to your family, the same thing, that you are struggling with this type of emotion, you are struggling with anxiety or you're struggling with depression or you are happy or you're sad at certain points in your day, you know, psychiatrists and psychologists try to get you to do a mood journal, it's going to be quite difficult if you don't know what mood you're in, let alone the scale of how much you feel that emotion, this can also mean that psychologists and psychiatrists and the people who are trying to treat these mental health conditions don't really understand the extent to which the person is suffering with them, combining this with our low ability to express how we feel through our body language, you know, we have to learn them for our tone of voice, everything to do with that is a very important aspect of expressing emotion and if we can't do that and if we can't get across how much we are suffering we are not going to receive the treatment that we need or the level of treatment that we need, when I was younger I had very, very, very severe depression and anxiety, mild depression and anxiety I was given until I started doing something stupid, you can sort of fill in the blanks there but that's quite an important thing and it's one thing that needs to be taken into account. Number four, low self-confidence, now not every autistic person have low self-esteem, have low self-confidence but I'd say a quite large majority of autistic people who have mental health conditions like anxiety and depression will have low self-confidence and to be honest that is just an integral part of having a mental health condition, whether you're autistic or not but because autistic people struggle picking up social cues, struggle understanding the environment around us, the social situation that's occurring around us, we don't, we're not always sure about what people's intentions are, what people think, why people are doing something, there can be a lot of mystery to us, it can be very stressful to try and dissect exactly what's happened in an interaction, more so when it's something so important like telling someone that you are struggling with a mental health condition, it's really hard for us to know who are our friends, who actually care about us, because of this combination with depression and our tendency to feel unsure about situations, communicating and trying to get help from our parents or family, our friends or relationship person, the person that we're in a relationship with can be really difficult, many autistic people will isolate themselves, cut themselves off from other people just because they feel like nobody cares about them, I know this is a thing that happens with anybody with a mental health condition but when you are autistic and when there's so much uncertainty about social situations this is sort of, this is very much amplified, this feeling, and the tendency to self-isolate is quite high in autistic people as well, even if there are some people around us that seem like they want to help, seem like they want to meet up with us, seem like they want to talk to us, it may not be so apparent for us to a larger extent and that may be the reason why, one of the reasons why we struggle so much with mental health conditions. Number five, the last one, we're nearly at the finish line, keep going, keep going, keep climbing, keep running, whatever, keep speeding along in your racecar, it's a strange metaphor. There is a concept called masking in the autistic community, if you don't know what masking is, masking is the act of acting like you're not autistic, it's the act of copying other people, researching about how other people work, and implementing that into your daily life so that people don't realize that you're different. Autistic people have a very strong understanding of how to mask what we're feeling, mask that social anxiety in order to better interact with people, mask our unique quirky attributes that may be considered to be strange or weird, and because of this, because of our immense skill in hiding how we truly feel, hiding mental illness, whether it be severe or moderate or mild, can be a lot easier for us, it makes sense because if you're already good at masking all of those things for your entire life around everybody that you meet, what is masking how you feel inside to that? It's going to be extremely easy, and that is not a good thing, it's not, especially if you do have severe mental health conditions, and because of this, that's one of the biggest reasons why I think autistic struggle with mental health conditions. Plain and simple, we don't talk about it, we don't feel like anybody wants to talk about it with us or help us. All of those things, all of those five key points interact with each other, and for that reason, those reasons that I've gone through, I think autistic people struggle with mental health to a great extent, and it is a terrible thing, and I'm definitely not trying to minimise just how much mental health is affecting you if you're not autistic, I'm just saying that there are some shocking statistics, and you can look them up, just type in mental health, aspergis, mental health, autism, there are lists and lists of facts and statistics, there are lists and lists and lists of stories, books, blogs, youtube videos about mental health in the autistic community, so if you are struggling with mental health problems and you are autistic, consider these things, consider the things that I've gone through, are you doing any of these, do you think any of these apply to you? If they do, work on them, work on these things, I'm being completely honest when I say that all of those things applied to me four or five years ago, it took me an extreme amount of time and effort to try and break down these barriers that I've put up, that I put up over my life trying to cope with the bullying and difficulties that I had in school, feeling like I didn't belong anywhere, feeling like I didn't understand myself and my emotions, and all of those things are very difficult for us on the spectrum, work on those things yourself, try and figure out how you can better treat yourself, how you can better open up yourself to treatment opportunities, open yourself up to conversations, to discussions with other people, despite how you may feel like they don't understand, just be open minded, although not everybody is autistic and they don't particularly understand what life is like for us, everybody can empathise to some extent, and if someone is willing to talk to you and willing to help, you must take that, you must take it and you must hold it dear to you, you must try and take people for what they say, if they want to help and they're offering you advice, try and take it on, do your own research, best thing that you can do, do your own research, honestly, it really helps, thank you very much for watching everybody, I know it's been a long video this time, I know it's clocking on to about 30 minutes but I'm gonna cut it down as much as I can but if you enjoy the video make sure to like it, you find it just a little bit helpful, a little bit relatable, there's gonna be a burp in two of these videos now, make sure to like it and if you want to see some more videos from me on a regular basis, make sure to click that subscribe button so that you get updates when my new videos come out, make sure to ask you, I forgot about it, make sure to click that little notification bell as well because then you will get notifications and you won't just be, my videos won't just be lost in the void of YouTube, make sure to check out my social media accounts, add our spur just grow for all of them, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, go check them out if you want to of course, you can dislike the video if you want to, I don't even need to say it, you've probably done it already, you've probably clicked off, why? I don't know, life is cruel, life is tough, being on the spectrum has its downsides but it also has its upsides, we can get over this mental health condition, we can push through it, it'll take some time, it'll take some effort but you can do it, you can do it, I believe in you, thank you very much for watching everybody and I'll see you in the next video, see you later