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I just watched Neuroscientifically Challenged’s YouTube video on autism – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBsTX2OVgI – part of a playlist on ‘Pathology & Disorders’

By watching the 2-minute video, I hoped to gain some insight into my neurology, or at least enjoy learning some new brain facts. I was disappointed, and left this comment:

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I have been binge-watching your 2-minute and 10-minute neuroscience videos for the last couple of days, and have found them very educational and enjoyable. I’ve only just dipped into the ’Pathology & Disorders’ playlist, and thought it would be interesting to know more about what neuroscience currently says about Autistic brains and how they are different from allistic (non-Autistic) brains (or at least what can be said in 2 minutes).

So I was dismayed to see my neurology so lazily characterised.

• Autistic brains are neurodivergent (differing from the neurotypical ‘average’ brain), not ‘disordered’. This is a biased value judgement.

• Having an Autistic brain is not a disease, so there are no ‘symptoms’. Traits perhaps.

• I don’t have ‘impairments’ in social communication and interaction. I simply communicate differently from neurotypical people. See for instance research by Catherine Compton at the University of Edinburgh: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286 and https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171

• So-called ‘restrictive and repetitive behaviours’ are actually either things that we’re passionately interested in, and things that give us pleasure, or coping mechanisms we resort to when we’re under extreme stress, which may go unnoticed by neurotypical people because of our very different sensory profiles.

• We are not ‘individuals with autism’. We are Autistic people. There are many reasons the vast majority of Autistic people prefer this way to describe ourselves, the main one being that most of us couldn’t imagine being, and wouldn’t wish to be, anything other than Autistic: there is no ‘autism’ we ‘have’ that we could do without.

• Talk of the ‘risk of autism’ plays to this idea that being Autistic is undesirable. (Oh, and the risk of being neurotypical is also strongly influenced by genetics!)

• My brain probably looks a lot like yours: it certainly isn’t made out of brightly coloured jigsaw pieces. The so-called charity that this imagery is linked to is reviled by the Autistic community. We prefer to use our own symbols, notably the gold infinity sign.

I hope you can take these comments on board in the spirit of constructive criticism. I really appreciate the rest of your videos that I’ve watched thus far.

#ActuallyAutistic #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs #neuroscience #pathology #AutismSpeaks

@actuallyautistic