Hi, my name is Stephanie, and today I want to talk to you about misconceptions about
autism or autistic people. Now, I'm doing this video specifically this week in honor of world
autism awareness week or some people want to put it as world autism acceptance week.
If you like autism acceptance merch, I got some. You should check it out.
Either way, this seemed like the perfect time to talk about misconceptions. Now, I did do some
videos on myth busting autism from last year's world autism awareness week, so I'm going to
go ahead and link that up there for you because I wanted to try to avoid just repeating myself. So,
I picked some different ones for today's video and if you would like to see some other misconceptions
myth-busted, you can check out that video. Normally, world autism awareness week is
a week where I will be constantly posting, almost every single day of the week. However,
as you might have noticed, this year is a bit different. However, I am posting a lot,
just on Instagram. So, on Instagram, I've been doing mini collabs going live for 30 minutes
with different autistic people. Many of them are also creators on the internet. So, definitely
go over to my Instagram and check that out. You can actually see the replays of lives that have
already happened on my IGTV tab on my Instagram page, and there are some more lives coming up
this week so be sure to go over there, follow me, and set a reminder for any of the countdowns
that I have on my stories. Now, let's get started. "Autism is a new thing. When I was such and such
age, there wasn't a such thing as autism." Raise your hand if you've heard this one.
So, a lot of times people argue that autism is this newfangled thing that people have invented
over time or maybe has been suddenly caused out of nowhere, creating some sort of epidemic. Which,
quite frankly, as we have been going through a worldwide pandemic, I'm not really appreciative
of the word epidemic being used for autism. Either way, the point tends to be that, well,
it didn't used to exist. How is this a thing now? The problem is autism has always existed,
however the diagnosis, specifically, "autism" hasn't. Just like with a lot of things,
it's one of those things that people began to learn more about and study and then be
able to actually diagnose as its own thing. In fact, autism used to be considered a form
of childhood schizophrenia, and before that was probably lumped in with something people called
feeble-mindedness, where they kind of just took everybody with disabilities and mental challenges
and pretty much anything they didn't deem great enough for average society living and they threw
them in an institution and treated them horribly and just called them all feeble-minded and
just treated them like they were feral. As if they were less than human beings,
and they didn't bother, a lot of times, to really try to understand or try to really help
and this is a whole history that I'm sure I'll go into one day, but either way, it's always existed.
It just wasn't always called autism. "Autism is a separate entity from the person themselves." Now,
this can get into a tricky kind of situation where people get very upset because it also ties a lot
to language use. So, whether someone says autistic person or person with autism. I personally don't
mind either way of saying it. However, the reason a lot of people do care is because some people
will treat autism as if it's this separate entity from the autistic person. I've heard people say
things like, "we were fighting autism today," or, "autism won today," or, "we overcame autism
today," or stuff like that. The reason that this can be a problem is that the nature of autism is
not just some sort of thing on your body or something that came in infected cells that you can
eradicate and get some new cells and all things are all good. Autism has a lot to do with the
connections that are formed inside of the brain, and it has been tied to a lack of something called
synaptic pruning, which means there's a lot more pathways going on in an autistic person's brain
compared to a non-autistic person, and a lot of times our brains are actually bigger in mass as
well. As you might imagine, when someone is building up a bunch of different pathways
and their brain is working in a certain way, if you were to completely somehow take that away,
which I guess would be kind of like re-scrambling the brain and ... making these pathways that were
gone and somehow making ones where other people have them? This is why
the idea of curing or getting rid of autism is very sticky. It's a very sticky situation because
it's not that simple. Basically, if we consider our brain to be basically pretty much who we are,
it functions to tell us how we think, and how we perceive and ... what we do with the world and how
we interact with it and all these things, when you say you want to get rid of autism or treat
autism like it's an enemy, you're saying that literally the way that someone's brain is formed
is bad or it's the enemy. You're kind of saying, like, a part of that person and how they think and
how they perceive and who they are is bad. Now, a lot of times, people are actually trying to say
that the bad aspects of autism are the bad thing. That's what everyone is really striving to get
rid of, right? They don't want to see someone struggling with making friends and keeping friends
and handling themselves in social situations and all the sensory sensitivities and the meltdowns
and the, you know, elopement and all those difficult things that can come with autism. A lot
of people try to say that is autism. However, that is only a negative aspect, a negative side effect
of autism. So, it's really difficult to help people understand why it's not exactly popular
to say we want to get rid of autism, because it's just not that simple. Sure, a lot of people would
love to get rid of the negative aspects of something, but I'm pretty sure you would also
like to get rid of the negative aspects of yourself. But it's really not that simple,
is it? "Autistic people can't go to college." That is false. I currently am enrolled in a community
college going for an associate's degree as an occupational therapy assistant, for example. And
one of my classmates actually did express their surprise because their understanding of autism,
they didn't think that autistic people could go to college. And even people who have higher support
needs than I can go to college, they just need the proper supports and accommodations. There are many
people who have gone to college who are autistic who have come out with doctorate degrees and are
doing amazing things in their fields. In fact, I am honored to have some people supporting and
following me who are among those people. Now, if you want to hear a bit of a conversation on
the expectations placed on whether autistic people will go to college and kind of the supports there
and that kind of conversation, there's actually two mini collab live streams that kind of touched
on autism and higher education and supports over on my Instagram, so be sure to go check those out.
"Autism has to be glaringly obvious for any random person on the street to recognize for it to be
really autism." Now, I don't know why, but there's this strange thing that people really enjoy doing,
and that is deciding for themselves the criteria of autism. Some people feel that if you can make
eye contact, you don't have autism. If you don't act exactly like their autistic nephew,
you don't have autism. If you're able to talk to a camera, you don't have autism. If you're
able to speak out of your mouth, you don't have autism. So, there are a lot of strange criteria
that random people decide somehow makes someone autistic. The thing is autism isn't always
noticeable right off the bat. Not everyone is constantly stimming. However, once you get to
know somebody, you might start to see it. It's really not fair for people who don't know someone
to try to armchair diagnose and decide whether their autism is legit enough for that random
person. It's really the job of a professional to go with the DSM-5 guidelines to be able to
diagnose someone, and those are the criteria. In fact, if you are interested in the actual criteria
for someone to be considered autistic, I have a video for that, too. "Autistic people just need
more discipline to be able to act right." This is a surprisingly common thing I've heard, that
somehow autistic people just aren't disciplined, and that's why they don't act normal or act
right in situations. And how dare they interrupt people or get up out of their seat when it's not
time to? And they should just get a whoopin', or they should just have a timeout or something
to tell them to, to do the things the right way. But that's not really how that works.
I don't know how one would be able to discipline the sensory sensitivities out of someone or
discipline the social anxieties and inability to pick up on social cues out of someone or how to
just somehow make them not see the world the way that they do by disciplining them more. That's
just not how this works. "Autism is a behavioral disorder." Autism is actually a developmental or
even considered a neurological disorder. You might actually find sources that call autism a
behavioral disorder, however that is incorrect. It might help you to understand that a lot of
people make these mistakes thinking that autism is just behaviors because it is the behaviors
that people see that they rely on to be able to make diagnosis. At this point in time, there
isn't a particular reliable way to determine that someone is autistic. There are definitely things
people are working on, including retina scanning and spit tests and stuff like that. However,
not all of that has really become mainstream or proven reliable as a common diagnostic tool. So,
at the moment, the way of diagnosing autism is by going through kind of a checklist of behaviors,
things that we can observe and see happening in that autistic person, especially when we're
talking about non-speaking autistic people who have yet to find a way to communicate reliably,
who can't just tell you kind of what's happening on the inside. So, people then assume that the
behaviors that are described as markers of, hey, that person has autism or that person is autistic,
they think, oh, well, if we get rid of the behaviors, we get rid of the autism. Or,
oh, it's a disorder that's just about those behaviors. And that's just not the case. You can
force someone to act as normal or neurotypical or whatever else as possible, but that doesn't mean
that in those moments that person isn't autistic. They're still autistic. Their brain is still
mapped the way that it's mapped. You've just managed to make them not act a certain way for
a certain amount of time. This is kind of the approach of things like ABA therapy and other
behavioral based therapies for autism. It's really a fundamental misunderstanding of even what autism
is. So, those are some misconceptions about autism or autistic people. I hope that this week you've
been learning about or hearing more about, at least, autistic people. Maybe learning more about
their experiences or just about what autism even is during this world autism awareness week. Again,
I highly stress that you should go over to my Instagram and check out these mini live
collabs. They're just 30 minutes. If you want to, the ones that have already aired on IGTV, you can
scroll past, like, intro and just get the little pieces that you want. But hearing from a variety
of different autistic people is really valuable and really insightful, so I highly encourage you,
again, to go check those out. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you
enjoyed it. If you did, go ahead and hit that like button and let me know your thoughts about this
in the comments below. Have you heard these misconceptions? Did you have some of these
misconceptions yourself? Let me know all about it. If you are interested in autism-related topics
from me, you can go ahead and hit that subscribe button. I try to upload every Thursday at 4 p.m.
central standard time. Thank you to everyone who supports me here on YouTube as YouTube members,
my patrons over on Patreon, and a special thank you to my spaz tier patron,
Philip Noah. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you're having a
wonderful day/week/whatever else, and I will see you in my next video. Bye!