Open Society

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True empathy means accepting an experience, even when you will never share it

A lot of people have contacted me to say that they’ve struggled with well-meaning people saying, “I have that too”, when they’ve tried to explain what it’s like to hav…

Join the Conference to Restore Humanity! 2022: System Reboot. Together, we will reimagine and recreate systems that support students and teachers toward a greater purpose and motivation.

22% of autistic women are hospitalised because of their mental health by the age of 25.

There are some really cool things about autistic culture like our love of samefoods, special interests (SpIns), infodumps, stims, autigender.

Celebrity chefs, food writers, and home cooks have sneered at pre-cut produce. They’re dismissing those of us with disabilities

This handbook, the first of its kind, provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of Critical Autism Studies and explores the different kinds of knowledges and their articulations, similarities and differences across cultural contexts and key tensions within this sub-discipline. Critical Autism Studies is a developing area occupying an exciting space of development within learning and teaching in Higher Education. It has strong trajectory within the autistic academic and advocate community

Research suggests that there is a high prevalence of interpersonal violence and victimisation within the autistic population, and that this accounts for poor me...

Background Autistic children and young people (CYP) experience oral health (OH) inequalities. They are at high risk of dental disease and show significant levels of unmet need in relation to OH and ...

At the end of my first post on autism and complex PTSD, I emptily promised a follow-up article pondering the nature of flashbacks vs. meltdowns. Many autistic folks also have C-PTSD (= more or less…

I’m sitting at my desk at work.

It wasn’t a bad day, in fact it was pretty good. I had worked a little overtime and was bringing some dinner home to my wife. There was a Chinese place that we hadn’t tried, and I wanted to do something nice for my wife. I placed my order, waited about 10 minutes, and then […]

Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com Photo © 2017, Maxfield Sparrow [image description: a turtle in the middle of the road on a hot, sunny day. His skin is dark with bright yellow stripes and his shell is ornate, covered with swirls of dark brown against a honey-yellow background. The turtle is rushing to get across the street and his back leg is extended from the speed and force of his dash toward freedom.] I hate meltdowns. I hate the way they take over my entire body. I hate the sick way I feel during a meltdown and I hate the long recovery time—sometimes minutes, but just as often entire days—afterward, when everything is too intense, and I am overwhelmed and exhausted and have to put my life on hold while I recover. I hate the embarrassment that comes from a meltdown in front of others. I hate the fear that bubbles up…

AutismEMS: Autism preparedness for EMS professionals. ---- AutismEMS provides information on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) for first responders, emergency medical service providers and medical directors. Designed for EMT, Paramedic, prehospital RN, EMS physician level practitioners, information also is appropriate for other healthcare providers, including those that work in emergency department or ECUs.

Judy Endow, MSW www.asperger.net www.makinglemonadestore.com Meltdown behavior is quite common for those with Autism Spectrum Disorders. And, indeed, the most frequently asked question by parents and educators is: “What do I do when my child has meltdowns?”  When the meltdown is occurring, the best reaction is to ensure the safety of all concerned. Know that explosive behavior is not planned but instead is most often caused by subtle and perplexing triggers. When the behavior happens, everyone in its path feels pain, especially the child. Stages of Explosive Behavior So, what exactly is explosive behavior? In my book Outsmarting Explosive Behavior: A Visual System of Support and Intervention for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (Endow, 2009), explosive behavior is defined as having four distinct stages, followed by a clearly defined recovery period. In addition, the physiological fight/flight mechanism is triggered immediately prior to the explosion. In this model, the four stages…

Dinah MurrayNational Autistic Taskforce, London, UK For Fred R. Volkmar (ed.), Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders 10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_102269-2 Synonyms Attention tunnelling; Ecological model; Resource distribution Definition The idea of monotropism makes most sense in terms of a basic model which sees minds as made up of active interests shaped by their histories of paying attention in […]

This book is about what it means to be a part of the autistic community. Autistic people wrote this book. Some autistic people are j...

Autism is a developmental disability that affects how we experience the world around us. Autistic people are an important part of the world. Autism is a normal part of life, and makes us who we are.  Autism has always existed. Autistic people are born autistic and we will be autistic…

ASAN intern Lydia Brown originally published this article on their blog Autistic Hoya under the title The Significance of Semantics: Person-First Language: Why It Matters. At the Adult Services Subcommittee's final meeting last Wednesday, much to do was made about semantic disagreements -- "ASD individual" versus "individual with ASD," and…

This was written in response to this article which was written in response to my first article: You can read my first article here: *CW: ABA/Autistic Conversion Therapy, abuse, torture (including g…

I abused children for a living. It didn’t look like abuse. It didn’t feel like abuse (at least not to me) but it was definitely abuse. I see that now. Back then, I actually thought I wa…

The Double Empathy Problem suggests that communicative difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are due to bi-directional differences in communicative style and a reciprocal lack of understanding. If true, there should be increased similarity in interaction style, resulting in higher rapport during interactions between pairs of the same neurotype. Here, we provide two empirical tests of rapport, with data revealing whether self- and observer- rated rapport varies depending on the match or mismatch in autism status within a pair. An additional opportunity afforded by these data is to examine the effect of the autism status of the rater on the perceived rapport between matched and mismatched pairs. In Study 1 72 participants were allocated to one of three dyad conditions: autistic pairs (n = 24), non-autistic pairs (n = 24) and mixed pairs (n = 12 autistic; n = 12 non-autistic). Each participant completed three semi-structured interactions with their partner, rating rapport after each interaction. Non-autistic pairs experienced higher self-rated rapport than mixed and autistic pairs, and autistic pairs experienced higher rapport than mixed pairs. In Study 2 (n = 80) autistic and non-autistic observers rated interactional rapport while watching videoed interactions between autistic pairs, non-autistic pairs, and mixed pairs (n = 18, a subset of participants in Study 1). Mixed pairs were rated significantly lower on rapport than autistic and non-autistic pairs, an...

Dr Damian Milton discusses the theory of double empathy and the implications for practice

Dr. Catherine Crompton is doing ground-breaking research on autistic social dynamics and communication, so we were thrilled to interview Dr. Crompton about her work on Information Transfer between Autistic and Neurotypical People during INSAR 2019. We were fascinated (and gratified) to learn about her findings that when there are communication disconnects between the two groups, it tends to be a mutual hiccup rather than an autistic-specific problem. Shannon Rosa of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism (TPGA): I’m speaking with Dr. Catherine Crompton from the University of Edinburgh. Catherine is working on a project that examines whether performance on cultural transmission tasks varies, depending on the diagnostic status of the social partner, which basically, if you want to summarize that in layman’s terms? Dr. Crompton: It means that we’re looking at how autistic people interact with other people, whether that is different, depending on whether the person they’re interacting with is also…

This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. The opinions expressed on this site are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.   This research is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse…

“Dandelions, tulips and orchids: evidence for the existence of low-sensitive, medium-sensitive and high-sensitive individuals. https://t.co/W35EeEMdPU”

Translational Psychiatry - Dandelions, tulips and orchids: evidence for the existence of low-sensitive, medium-sensitive and high-sensitive individuals