Sound dampening a space, especially at home, can be helpful for a lot of reasons: Many autistic people have auditory sensitivity, and sounds can be a reason for sensory overload.
Category: Accommodations
All humans deserve to be able to do energy budgeting in ways that make sense for us, and I hope to see the day when support for autistic people toward this end is considered a matter of basic ethics and decency.
For instance, autistic inertia means that it’s harder for autistic people than it is for other people to stop, start, and change activities.
After your loved one receives a diagnosis of Autism, people may bombard you with (possibly unsolicited) advice for next steps. One such step you may actually want to consider is to seek the services of a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP).
Autistic people process our senses differently, and that’s okay! Autism makes us who we are, and sensory processing is an important part of being autistic. People should try and understand autism and how it makes us different, instead of trying to change us.
Autistic children endure a lot of ‘behaviour analysis,’ usually done by non-autistic people who are not trained to interpret autistic behaviour and motivation.
There are far too many examples of autistic people being arrested or sectioned, let alone reprimanded or ostracised, for having a meltdown—a reaction to difficulty and stress that is normal to our way of being, but not nearly well enough understood by others.
“When an academic writes accurately about aspects of autistic lived experience in their research, some people grumble. “All they needed to do was ask me and I would have told them,” some will say.”
The next time you are tempted to tell an Autistic person their interest is silly, trivial, a waste of time, weird, or pointless, stop—and remember why we love what we love. We are somebody, too, and we must be respected, protected, and never rejected.
It’s important to remember that when an autistic person is struggling or having aggression, they are not being “bad” or trying to do something to you personally—even though it can feel like that, especially if they’re screaming at you or making you angry.