Published on 12, July, 2020
"Autistic people often experience difficulties with social communication. It’s so common, in fact, that it’s one of the central criteria for an autism diagnosis.
For as long as we have been diagnosing autism, doctors and researchers have regarded social communication difficulties as autistic “impairments”. But in more recent years, research has begun to show that – just like autistic people have been saying for a long time – communication breakdowns go both ways.
In other words, neurotypical people can have just as much difficulty understanding autistic people as the other way round. This is now sometimes referred to as “the double empathy problem”.
In my new book, Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World, I draw on linguistics, the study of language, to look at the double empathy problem a little more closely. And I consider how autistic and non-autistic people can better communicate with each other."
theconversation.com/how-autistic-and-non-autistic-people-can-understand-each-other-better-234320
firemonkey said: neurotypical people can have just as much difficulty understanding autistic people as the other way round.
The author mentions autists then switch to a label of neurotypical - asuming this was not intentional (my experience with ADHD and bipolar people has shown they do not have the same level of social issues as autists) then the subject of the book is effectively expecting the 98% of the population who are non-autistic to adapt to the 2% who are.
To put it in context, if there were a group of 100 people there would, on average, be 2 autists in there. Each one would most likely struggle to comminicate with the group in the same way of the others and would probably also struggle to communicate with the other autist.
Even reducing this to 50 people per autist, is it fair to expect all 49 of them to make adaptations because of the 1 autist?
I'm not suggesting that they should do nothing, just highlighting the scale of the situation we find ourselves in.
How would you redress the balance? Would you even want to?
Just trying to get the discussion going
It seems as a society we are far more willing to make life easier for those with physical difficulties , than we are for those who have a mental illness and/or a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Agreed.
Physical difficulties are much easier for people to see and identify with so they can actually consider themselves in the same position.
When it comes to invisible disabilities such as autism, MS etc then there is always a suspicion that it is an act or that the person is actually crazy in some way.
Even within the scope of neurological conditions, autism is so varied and fickle (especially as some can mask and act "normal" sometimes) that we are very hard to put a description on that people can understand or empathise with.