Atypically Autistic –
‘You don’t look autistic to me’.
The stereotypical view of autistic people is that we are all like Rainman or Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory; somewhat oblivious to what people think about us and all nerdy loners.
More recently there has been an understanding that autism can present itself in other ways which leads to a very different type of autistic personality type than was traditionally thought. This has been termed the ‘female presentation of autism’ and does appear to affect many autistic women, but other autistic people also relate to this autistic profile. In this talk, we will look at how women and others who do not fit the traditional autistic profile have been missed, mis-diagnosed and misunderstood.
Atypically Autistic –
‘You don’t look autistic to me’
Axia Post-Diagnostic Support Group
April 2019
Sarah Hendrickx
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Nice one Sarah! This really does begin to quite simply explain (all) people’s complexity in terms that I think most people could relate to. But I also like the fact that it has comedy and informality, and elicits from the group. I will be sharing this with a few people. Does someone actually have to type in those subtitles, or are they automatically generated form the audio track? But I should probably investigate that for myself. I opted for subtitling because I think your audio levels are set a bit lower than some Youtube posters, and I’m in a very noisy environment. I found it best viewed full screen so that the subtitles didn’t interfere too much with the presentation slide texts. And I didn’t really get to hear enough of the audience feedback. But I can always watch it again for those two things.
Hi Senor,
No, I didn’t type the captions, I believe YouTube uses Googles speech-recognition technology to automatically create them.
I set the volume as high as I can without it causing “clipping” (distortion) on the audio. The recording is from a condenser microphone worn by the speaker, and frankly I’m surprised how much of the audience responses are recorded. Although the audience are informed these talks are being recorded, these aren’t “public meetings”, so personally I am always a little concerned about peoples privacy.
I also resonated a great deal with this brilliant presentation and thought Sarah’s idea of renaming “male and female” to “zero and one” a much more appropriate expression of the different ways in which autism may manifest and present itself.
All the best,
Dream
That speech recognition seems to work quite well. Just a few small problems like trying and not quite getting the right spelling to Dolmio Sauce.
Dream, I think the sound issue is just that my headphones are slightly incompatible with my tablet/laptop. I listened again in the evening and heard just about everything Sarah said, and quite a lot of the group interaction too. So please don’t take my previous comments too much to heart.
Funny thing is, I spent some time running a small venue PA hire. Like the presentation said, loud noise was something I tended to accept in say a concert context, but I also found it incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. And so gave it up with almost no warning to others I was working with. All very similar things to both the 0 and the 1 profiles; but also no consistency in when & how it happened. A very mixed 0 & 1 profile, but constantly different on different days
I relate to this presentation so much I’m tempted to call it something like the Presentation of the Hidden; but I would also not want to detract from the very real need to highlight why many women on the spectrum have remained largely hidden.
Thank you for a very insightful presentation. Thought that with the 0 and communication re monosyllable etc, ‘at rest’ I am generally a ‘0’ but when trouble hits again eg at work, I may switch to a ‘1’ and get criticised for giving too much detail, not getting to the point… Social in a big group with monologs and lack of ‘switching’ often a nightmare.., but then neurotypicals are also guilty of this?
Social seems ‘dead on’, ie ‘sadly you are not going to be accepted’ and better to be relaxing in 0 mode or with people who are ‘uncooler’ or older.Church and housegroups on the other hand are full of a broad range of highly sociable accepting people…