Incredible PhD:
“To classify certain groups of people as disordered or abnormal, as defective or deficient, serves to justify and facilitate the control and subjugation of those groups, their silencing and scapegoating, and sometimes their extermination.“
https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Nick_Walker_Dissertation.pdf

“The first point is that autistic minds process information differently from non-autistic minds, and autistic people thus have a fundamentally different experience of reality than non- autistic people”

“First-hand accounts of autistic perceptual experience, taken in the aggregate, form a remarkably consistent picture, while the extensive body of research on autistic neuroanatomy, by ironic contrast, has thus far been wildly varied and inconsistent in its findings”

"This dense proliferation of minicolumns produces a condition of “hyperconnectivity”, in which cortical neurons in the autistic brain fire more readily and “form connections with other neurons more readily” than cortical neurons in the non-autistic."

hyperconnectivity gives the autistic brain “a higher than normal capacity for processing information”, meaning that any given stimulus is likely to generate a greater, more intense, and less predictable overall effect within the autistic brain than within the neurotypical brain

"In the vivid metaphor of autistic autoethnographer Dawn Prince-Hughes (2013), “being autistic is simply being human—but without the skin”"

"In autistic children, however, the chaos, intensity, and extreme complexity of autistic sensory experience seems to overwhelm this socially oriented topology of salience to varying degree - essentially reducing
the amount of cognitive “bandwidth” that young autistics have..."

... available for the developmental task of picking up on and internalizing all of the social cues and myriad cultural norms and subtleties of social performance and interaction that non-autistic children internalize from an early age."

"Then, because they can’t perform non-autistic norms of social interaction well enough to blend in, autistics tend to be rejected socially by non-autistic people from an early age, which deprives autistics of opportunities for positive social interaction"

"Perhaps the most significant example—and certainly the most ironic example—of poor understanding of autistic subjectivity leading to poor autism related theory is the widespread mischaracterization of autistic people as being deficient in empathy or in theory of mind"

"Critics of the “theory of mind deficit” view of autism have persuasively argued and demonstrated that this theory is based in flawed research methods, flawed interpretations of data, cultural bias and prejudice, circular logic, and highly dubious assumptions"
THIS OMG.

"rather than a sound and objective analysis of available data it reflects a social power imbalance in which the reciprocal communication challenges that arise between two groups of people who think differently from one another

—in this case, neurotypical people and autistic people—are blamed entirely on the alleged deficits of the group that holds less social power."

"The genesis and persistence of this multiply flawed “theory of mind deficit” canard may be traced in large part to the fact that many neurotypical researchers and putative “autism experts” themselves possess “a limited theory of other minds”"
Crying because it's so true.

"Much of autistic experience occurs in the liminal zone in between the unbuffered experience of the complexity of the informational field and the chunking of that experience in accordance with learned schemata. Challenging as it can be to navigate...

—particularly in social contexts in which near-instantaneous chunking and conformity with normative schemata are expected and demanded"

"this liminal zone is a space rich with the potential for extraordinary insight and perceptual magic."

This is the most comprehensive look I've ever seen at what Autism actually is.

The overflow theory seems so plausible when sensory information is so overwhelming it causes dyspraxia in many forms - it explains stimming so well.

Just read this omg...

This... omg this.

Just read this whole thing. This is the most amazing PhD. It talks about humanistic approaches. This is where all successful and life affirming Autistic therapy seems to work from my discoveries. This PhD is incredible. It's what I'd want to write.

The section "A World That Didn’t Want Me" is especially brutal to read though. This is our experience. Even if we managed to "blend" in.

TW / CW // abuse, eating disorders, childhood

This... passage. I've had a few. But I never can focus on them. Moments where I seemed to cease to exist when staring at something so aesthetically pleasing to me that time itself stops. This is happiness to me. Even though I don't have a neurotypical look about my joy.

I've never felt more understood. My world is constantly being rebuilt endlessly and I have to make order out of chaos - when I am depleted of resources I need strict order. I was never allowed to stim so I had to use all my resources on that. Knowledge is my best emotion.

I'll stop posting, but this is literally the most important part I have read so far. When you destroy us - we lose ourselves. I could learn math. I could play piano. I have dyscalculia, and dysgraphia BUT I can overcome it.

"the de-armoring process initially tends to bring to the surface all the feelings that were bound into or locked up behind whatever layers of armor are being released. So my chronic depression was supplanted...

...at first, not by a consistently better emotional state, but by an increase in anger and emotional volatility."

So it can end? There is hope?

"I had felt for so long that there was something missing in every aspect of my life, that I was missing some crucial piece. It turned out that what was missing from my life was me: the embodied dance of my authentic autistic self, which I’d long ago lost and had now regained."

The cruel irony of the puzzle piece to me is that is the part they took away.