As sometimes happens to me, a chance comment today got me dwelling in a fixated way on statistics and trying to get a clear perspective on how they align with, deviate from, absorb, or exclude level one (‘high functioning’) autistics.
Basicslly it concerns who in the population is not working, how voluntary or involuntary that is, where there might be complexities of overlap between ‘I’m not up to that but even if I was I wouldn’t want to’ etc. And initially I incorrectly assumed the small collective figure for all these people to be the 4% stated to be UK unemployed.
However, I soon discovered that ‘economically inactive’ (a term I’d somehow never heard before now) more accurately covers what I was after, and it seems that that’s about a quarter of working-age (post-16, pre-retirement) population on average. So of course my next question was ‘how are the high functioning autistics scattered through the sub-groups in this overall figure?’ Most specifically within the complicated dynamic infographic in this: [sorry the site won’t let me paste but the article and infographic are called ‘who are the millions of Britons not working’ and is on the BBC news site. ] Are economically inactive autistics exclusively within ‘other’ (seems a very small subset of overall EEs if so) and if not then have they been lumped in unhelpfully with ’sick’ (because of what NTs would call co-morbidities)? Or is there diffuse scatter throughout with no chance of emerging into any clear subset of its own? Finally, and crucially, any anecdotal stuff in this thread (as well as thoughts on the actual stats) would help me gauge a little better what the overall situation is. I work, full time, in one of a very few jobs I’d ever have managed that in without burnout or breakdown. And I assume that the supposed 15%-25% I notionally belong to for employed autistic level ones still applies? Thanks for helping me through this bout of hyper focus, should you choose to add a comment!
