this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
1173 points (95.4% liked)
Autism
6892 readers
6 users here now
A community for respectful discussion and memes related to autism acceptance. All neurotypes are welcome.
We have created our own instance! Visit Autism Place the following community for more info.
Community:
Values
- Acceptance
- Openness
- Understanding
- Equality
- Reciprocity
- Mutuality
- Love
Rules
- No abusive, derogatory, or offensive post/comments e.g: racism, sexism, religious hatred, homophobia, gatekeeping, trolling.
- Posts must be related to autism, off-topic discussions happen in the matrix chat.
- Your posts must include a text body. It doesn't have to be long, it just needs to be descriptive.
- Do not request donations.
- Be respectful in discussions.
- Do not post misinformation.
- Mark NSFW content accordingly.
- Do not promote Autism Speaks.
- General Lemmy World rules.
Encouraged
- Open acceptance of all autism levels as a respectable neurotype.
- Funny memes.
- Respectful venting.
- Describe posts of pictures/memes using text in the body for our visually impaired users.
- Welcoming and accepting attitudes.
- Questions regarding autism.
- Questions on confusing situations.
- Seeking and sharing support.
- Engagement in our community's values.
- Expressing a difference of opinion without directly insulting another user.
- Please report questionable posts and let the mods deal with it. Chat Room
- We have a chat room! Want to engage in dialogue? Come join us at the community's Matrix Chat.
.
Helpful Resources
- Are you seeking education, support groups, and more? Take a look at our list of helpful resources.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It really depends on the way someone's autism effects their social skills. Not everyone has the capacity to learn these skills, Autism does create a skill cap for many people.
It's also a question of involved effort. I was in a form of ABA therapy as a kid and I was capable of learning to identify sarcasm and read social cues, so I did.
But it doesn't come naturally to me, it requires a level of concentration and conscious processing that I don't hear non-autistic people discussing. It causes headaches and migraines and after a few days of work, using these skills every minute of the day, I'm exhausted and struggle with basic tasks at home. I don't have these same issues with exhaustion or conscious processing when I'm with other autistic people (I work in disability programming, I coordinate/admin 3 days a week with mostly neurotypical people, and run programs 1 day a week with mostly neurodivergent people, and there's a big difference on how much "effort" it takes to understand people in those two environments)
Not saying it's not worth learning. If you can learn these skills they are incredibly important and at the bare minimum they will keep you safe.
But as a society we need to accept that for a small subset of people with disabilities, these skills are unachievable, and reasonable accommodations will still need to be made, and for a slightly larger subset, accommodations may still need to be made on occasion because while someone may have these skills, they might not have the cognitive capacity to employ these skills 100% of the time.
I’m sorry what? This is a new concept in neurology to me: a new type of nervous system that cannot learn beyond a certain point?
Every time I hear the current “wisdom” about autism, I thank god I wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood.
I told my dad I trained my cats to sit and wait quietly for dinner. He said “but you can’t train cats”. I said “You can train anything with a brain”.
Same way here, I am deeply skeptical of this “skill cap” concept you just mentioned. Is there any science on that?
I think the reason the idea of a "skill cap" feels instantly incorrect is because there is obviously no point at which any human "stops learning". There will always be more to learn an more that someone (autistic or not) can learn.
The skill cap applies to specific metrics of measuring skill gain.
A large number of people with "level 3" autism who are non verbal will never learn to communicate verbally as fluently as non-autistic verbal people, even with decades of supportive education. But that doesn't necessarily mean they have a "communication skill gap", there's a lot of communication skills that can and will be developed with the right support. But expecting someone in that situation to "try harder" and "learn to talk" is unrealistic, when the more achievable goal should be "learn to effectively communicate".