THINKING PERSON'S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Autism news and resources: from autistic people, professionals, and parents
Joseph Krauter is an autistic writer and tech worker who was diagnosed as an adult, while serving time at San Quentin Prison in California. We talked with Joseph about how his life could have been different with earlier diagnosis and supports, the difficulty of receiving an autism diagnosis while incarcerated, and how his life has changed since both his autism diagnosis and his re-integration into society.
Autistic people tend to benefit from acceptance much more than from awareness, as awareness is passive whereas acceptance is a choice. Here are ten ways you can honor Autism Acceptance, and autistic people of all ages.
Autistic brains can be in danger of overload while grocery shopping. When that happens autistics needs a quiet space—fast. But there are usually none in big stores.
Retreat isn’t just a quiet room, it is an explicitly neurodivergent space. Nothing about us without us, right? It’s a place to stim freely, drop the mask a little, and find some neurodivergent kinfolk.
I need regular doses of solitude to recover from sensory onslaught. This doesn’t mean I am anti-social. I’m deeply social, but I do need a fair amount of downtime.
Pro tip: it’s fine to want to understand your autistic friends’ sensory and accommodations issues, etc., but please don’t frame it as a “Gotcha.”
This checklist is for people who aren’t autistic (or whose autistic traits differ from those of their child/charge) to understand what may upset an autistic person, and cause them distress.
For a person with heightened sensory sensitivity, clothing and accessories can make or break an entire day out; here are suggestions for clothes, accessories, and miscellaneous accoutrements that might work.
I truly do not know why some parents don’t want to listen to autistic adults. There is so much good autism information for parents from autistic adults, and so much of it is freely available, and yet the parents choose not to know.
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.