Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I’ve recently had my first autism assessment (online) and towards the end of it I was asked to tell a story with 5 objects I’d chosen. I chose the first 5 things that happened to be on the sofa next to me. I was asked to tell a story with them & I just couldn’t. I told the assessor this & she said it was ok. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
I think that it is a very outdated type of test, based on the myth that autistic people do not have imaginations and also, as a consequence, do not enjoy fiction. So many autistics, me included, have wonderful imaginations and create their own worlds - a notable method of escaping the real world that is so often inimical to them. This form of escapism is found documented in autism studies, how it can be squared with a supposed inability to make up a short story about objects, defies logic. Not all autistics, of course, have particularly vivid imaginations, but some certainly do.
It's not about imagination in the book test. It's about having, or not having, the ability to understand or form abstract ideas. Giving you five random objects and asking you to tell a story is difficult for people with Autism. The book is as abstract as it gets. I Googled the tests after I took them and found this information. I have a wonderful imagination and often visit my alternate world, but I found the test impossible. The book had no story to me, just a random set of pages and I was bogged down with the small details and saw no story,
I rather suspect that, like most things, the ability to generalise and form and manipulate abstract ideas varies enormously between autistic people. Charles Darwin showed many autistic traits, but he was a genius at the inception and manipulation of abstract ideas. In my working life as a scientist I quite often solved problems using approaches that other people had not apprehended at all. I would have had little problem in making up stories about objects, I'm very glad that that sort of test formed no part of my autism assessment.