5 Traits You Think are Autistic (But They're NOT)

so sometimes in my little online bubble I have a lovely Community here on YouTube and also on my patreon and Discord and it can start to feel like everyone everyone in the whole world understands autism on a super super deep level but then I go out in the real world and I use the word autistic and I'm hit with a response that reminds me that no that is very much not the case it can be a bit of a surprise sometimes and I find myself often wishing that the word autism that me telling somebody I am autistic conveyed more meaning instead it seems to bring to mind misinformation and stereotypes so here's a list of five things that are not actually signs of autism now you might be autistic and feel like some of these traits are things that you have but what I'm saying is these things are not necessarily inherent to being autistic I mean you could probably argue what is because autistic people are so different it's a spectrum but I say you could quite confidently say a lot of artistic people have sensory differences these points that I'm going to say not so much number one let me start with one of my favorite things that is not a trait of autism my favorite non- trait or my least favorite I don't know you know what I mean I feel like it's an important one lacking empathy this idea that autistic people lack empathy I've been saying for a while I want to speak about it in more detail so I'm going to do it I'm going to do it now unfortunately this is a really common misconception and I think it's one of the most harmful obviously lacking empathy has Prett pretty negative associations being cold being a psychopath maybe even being a serial killer kind of things that might come to people's mind when they think about lacking empathy it's a pretty stigmatizing stereotype for autistic people to carry of course there are arguments why you know being super empathetic is actually not always a great thing Paul Bloom wrote the book against empathy the case for rational compassion but in general if someone says you're a very empathetic person that's usually meant as a compliment it's usually kind of code for you're a good person and when someone says the opposite well it's not so much a compliment in 2004 clinical psychologist and Cambridge Professor Simon Baron Cohen he brought out an empathy test that was designed basically specifically to test empathy in autistic individuals called the empathy quotient or the EQ it contained a bunch of lovely questions including number 18 when I was a child I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen I can remember in primary school that there were times where people would try and stab worms with sticks and I don't think those people were autistic I don't know but I would often sweep in and try and save the day and it was highly highly stressful and was very high stakes in my mind I'm a big fan of saving worms not cutting them off but there are also questions about do you prefer animals to people whether you know what to do in a social situation and whether you dream at night for some reason Simon Baron Cohen did find that autistic people scored lower on this test than the controls although he did kind of admit within the paper that empathy is very very difficult to measure when he spoke to the autistic individuals about why they gave the answers that they gave they reported that even though they have difficulty judging explaining anticipating or interpreting another's Behavior it is not the case that they want to hurt another person when it was pointed out to them that their behavior was hurtful they typically feel bad about the hurt they caused and the researchers concluded that this made autistic people different from quote unquote un feeling Psychopaths because this hurt was accidental perhaps due to lack of social understanding Psychopaths might be expected to show the opposite profile being able to judge and predict how another person might feel even if they have little concern about that person's emotion as an interesting aside Baron Cohen decided not to use the EQ to test the empathy level of psychopaths he felt like a self-report measure for people who frequently deceive was not the best idea but I would have been interested I would have been interested to see their scores even if there was a bit of deception going on I don't know it has been proposed since then in other papers and this would kind of back up what Simon Baron cooh discovered when he chatted to these autistic people about their answers in the EQ that autistic people lack cognitive empathy potentially not emotional empathy cognitive empathy is where you use critical thinking about why someone might be feeling the way that they're feeling whereas emotional empathy is like feeling someone else's emotions and a lot of autistic people do talk about experiencing other people's emotions very very intensely to an overwhelming extent you know just as we can be overwhelmed by our sensory environment we can be overwhelmed welled by emotions as well and then the idea is potentially that people who are psychopaths are the opposite they have this cognitive empathy but they don't feel the emotional empathy side of things so some researchers see autistic people as having an empathy imbalance rather than an empathy lack but another theory for why autistic people might have been perceived as lacking empathy that was put forward by an autistic researcher is the double empathy problem perhaps autistic and non-autistic people alistic people are just so different that there's actually a communication breakdown and I mean when you think about it can you really say that most non-autistic people are super empathetic or even sympathetic to struggles that autistic people go through like sensory sensitivities most of us you know when we vocalize these issues and met with a kind of well it doesn't bother me or H that's a bit strange maybe you're overreacting sort of response I do think it is difficult for neurotypical people for non-autistic people to empathize with the autistic experience maybe we simply just don't get each other and then unfortunately this is framed as autistic people having a deficit lacking an empathy some people believe that autistic people lack theory of mind this is your ability to understand that other people have a different mental state to you I personally wonder if the theory of monot tropism might explain this this is a theory of autism that again was put forward by autistic researchers it's essentially the idea that autistic people are very tunnel visioned we have Minds that love to focus on fewer things at a higher intensity at any given moment and sometimes when you are in this very intense Flow State it is like the world around you Falls away it's difficult to remember the world around you it's difficult to remember the passage of time and sometimes in the moment it might be kind of difficult to remember that other people exist and this is not an autistic person trying to be mean we still love you but our interest often can be very absorbing and it can be difficult to care about anything else in the moment we ignore things like our own hunger signals as well I'll leave my video about monot tropism linked if you want to know more about that autistic tunnel vision before I get onto the next point which is a really important one Speaking of misinformation misinformation is of course rampant online that's why today I'm very glad to be partnering with ground news again ground news is a really unique up and website that Aggregates news from over 50,000 sources allowing you to compare how different Outlets cover the same story and then form your own opinions ground news will tell you the bias who owns each source and each source is given a factuality rating if we take a look at this story JK Rowling says she regrets not speaking out sooner on trans issues ground news has over 40 sources to look through we can sort them by their factuality here and the ground news bias distribution feature tells us that 48% of the sources lean left and 30% lean right the times who lean right have reported this as JK rolling why I decided to stand up for women in their article JK Rowling is presented as a victim and refers to herself as a heretic if we take a look at the left articles like this one from The Advocate they focus more on JK Rowling's transphobia and how loved ones asked to her not to share her views the article notes her adamant disapproval of new hate crime laws in Scotland designed to protect LGBT individuals important topics like LGBT rights and neurode Divergence are often misrepresented I love how ground news puts all S size of a story in one place it makes reading the news and navigating the media a lot less stressful and it also encourages independent thinking I'd really encourage you to check out ground newws at ground. news/ now watch if you do sign up through my link you can get 40% off on limited access with their Vantage plan I really do believe in their Mission I think it's much needed in our current political climate where so many of us are exposed to so little outside of these algorithms that are designed specifically for us we're not hearing from the other side necessarily number two another thing that is not necessarily a trait of autism being a genius being a Sant having a photographic or tic memory photographic memory being when you can recall chunks of text with extreme precision and then an tic memory usually is a thing that children experience and it's when you can recall images almost perfectly usually it refers to images these things are not things that all autistic people have I would say these are traits that most autistic people do not have and someone in my life recently said the whole everyone is a little bit autistic thing and they're used having a photographic memory as an example of an autistic trait that somebody might have you know to make them a little bit autistic I also at the start of this year came across this clip from comedian Matt R he brought out a Netflix com comedy special at the start of the year which was very controversial he opened it with a domestic violence joke and he also had a section about a person with Down Syndrome that made me super uncomfortable in fact Matt R has said numerous kind of dodgy things around autism and disability but he does have this one clip related to autism that most people seem to see quite positively even autistic people it's captioned on Tik Tok they really are better than us in every way which gives me like cringy Facebook meme Vibes but okay does anybody here have any autistic children do you really yeah how far on the Spectrum would you say he is is it little by little or is he like he's non-verbal he's nonverbal he got it yeah what's his what's his thing that he's really good at um so he's hyperlexic hyperlexic what's that he's very very good with numbers shapes colors luckily she seemed quite happy to be given this moment to share something positive about her child but I feel like why should the little boy have to have some sort of superpower Matt R talks about autism within his Netflix special as well and within that he talks about how God almost gives disabled people a special gift to make up for the fact that they're disabled he says if you pay attention God always finds a way of evening things out God always replaces a negative with a positive anytime you see anyone who is born less fortunate in a certain aspect you don't got to worry about that because God's going to bless them with an attribute a quality about themselves sometimes even a skill set sort of levels that playing field out a bit and he talks about his autistic nephew and how he is blessed with the ability to paint despite the fact that he struggles with speaking it's like we sometimes use these special talents that some autistic people have in order to make ourselves feel better to convince ourselves almost that they have value it's okay to be weird and disordered but only if you have something that you're really good at and extra bonus points if that's something that can be monetized but maybe it's just okay for disabled people to exist regardless I don't know just a thought maybe the autistic people are okay okay maybe now it is true that some autistic people have incredible memories and some autistic people are sants a svant being someone who is usually classed as having a form of neurodevelopmental disorder which could include being autistic but then they also have a so-called island of Genius they have an area or multiple areas in which they have some remarkable ability the most obvious popular culture example of this and perhaps the thing that's influenced Matt R's thinking here is the 1988 movie Rainman however the guy who was the original inspiration Kim Peak was not actually autistic himself instead the bundle of nerves that connected the two hemispheres of his brain was missing and that perhaps resulted in his neurons making unusual connections and led to this remarkable memory that he had he memorized over 6,000 books he memorized maps and could tell you how to get around anywhere in the US and he could read super fast because he would read one page with his left eye and one page with his right eye it's really amazing but again he was not autistic and about 50% of cases of sant syndrome are connected with disabilities or central nervous system conditions other than autism anywhere from 0.5% to 10% of autistic people might have Savant syndrome but I mean even if we go with 10% that means 90% of autistic people do not have svant syndrome but if you speak to the general public for 5 minutes you'd maybe think that that percentage was quite a bit higher we all Geniuses what I think confuses people is that very many autistic people do have intense interest and this can lead us to get very very good at whatever we're interested in not necessarily genius or like Sant levels but we can still be pretty good at stuff but it is important to remember that autistic people can have any level of intelligence and we can have intense interest in basically anything you could become obsessed with a TV show or with playing video games we're not all learning Maps off by heart some of us are playing The Sims and that is okay that is valid I mean this genius stereotype can kind of sound like a good thing like the Matt RI clip most people talk that as pretty positive you're being nice about autistic people for once someone's being nice yay but I also think it could be harmful as well it could make autistic people feel less worthy less autistic if they can't recognize some sort of incredible Talent OR skill in themselves and this woman Alex actually speaks about how she had a lot of self-hatred following her autism diagnosis and I felt like I'm autistic but not even the good kind of autistic they have amazing mathematical abil ility like the cleverest people ever who can work for NASA or something these amazing Minds that contribute to the world and in groups I used to go to people would often say that autism was a superpower and I used to think where's mine it's like I'm autistic but I don't have the superpower part and that made me angry but Alex does seem like a pretty amazing person she's following her dream of being a photographer and all of this brings me on to my next point being good at mths is not a trait of being autistic again this is something that I have heard as a suggestion of why particular person might be autistic in real life oh they're really good at maths they might be autistic there are many neurotypical or alistic meaning not autistic people in my real life who are very very good at maths there are many who are bad at maths there are many autistic people that I know including me who are certainly not MTH Geniuses I got an A at school but that was just pure perseverance not a single bit of natural ability and my very very intelligent non-autistic stepdad helped me with studying for hours and hours and that's who I owe that a to 100% I like most of the autistic people in my family have always been drawn more to words than numbers I've always loved reading and writing I worry that autistic Minds that are drawn to language or theater or arts or sports are at risk of going undiagnosed as I did and we know that potentially half of all autistic people in the UK are undiagnosed if you are autistic you're kind of more likely to have another form of neurod Divergence as well I have a dyspraxia and an ADHD diagnosis as well as being diagnosed autistic another form of neurod Divergence that a lot of autistic people have is disc calcula which is very simply put kind of like dyslexia but with numbers 60% of people with dyslexia do have difficulty with numbers and there are a lot of dyslexic autistic people but even if you don't fit the criteria for disc calcular autistic people can become interested in anything when you hyperfocus on a thing you're much more likely to become super good at that thing and that thing will not always be maths or science or coding or engineering sometimes it will be and there are studies that show that people who have a superior mathematical ability are more likely to be autistic we can be drawn to detail to patterns to creating order so I think that makes a lot of sense but it is inaccurate to assume that all autistic people will be good at stem I think I'm autistic but just like the bad parts of it you like I can't compute numbers or remember dates but I'll make you feel weird right like you drop a bunch of toothpicks I can't count them but I'll give you a shitty hug now I don't know if this guy if this comedian is actually autistic but I think probably quite a lot of us can relate to this although I personally don't feel like I've just got the bad parts of autism I feel very proud to be an autistic person but I'd have certainly had times where I've wished I was better at stem one thing I do wonder about is how this whole all autistic people and Math's genius thing interacts with the Assumption which is point number four that all autistic people are Bor boys yes simply being a boy is not a sign that you're autistic wow who would have thought it but still so many people who watch this channel have been told they don't look autistic and usually when someone says something like that they'll compare you to a person who they feel is really autistic and usually that person is their nephew or their cousin or their neighbor's son they're usually mailed they're usually a white little boy now according to the CDC as of 2020 one % of 8-year-old girls had an Autism diagnosis and 4% of 8-year-old boys had an Autism diagnosis so it is true that still boys are much more likely to be diagnosed as autistic particularly during childhood but the CDC did also find that a disproportionate number of girls and also black children had a co-morbid intellectual disability they had an intellectual disability as well as being autistic which is a potential indicator that there are more autistic children without an intellectual disability who are girls who are black who are slipping through the cracks because typically people without an intellectual disability are more able to kind of blend into society and go undiagnosed or be misdiagnosed with some sort of mental health condition instead in 2020 the CDC did note that the number of 8-year-old girls being diagnosed as autistic was higher than ever before it went over 1% for the first time the continued increase among children identified with ASD particularly among non-white children and girls highlights the need for enhanced infrastructure to provide Equitable diagnostic treat treatment and support services for all children with ASD I'm very interested to see how this prevalence changes throughout my lifetime interestingly I think this whole all autistic people are geniuses and also all autistic people are white middle class males I think these two stereotypes are very interconnected back to Simon Baron Cohen again in 2015 he had this piece published in the lsip which just has the best title ever it's called autism maths and sex the special triangle it's just pure poet it really is thank you very much for that Simon kind of made my day so this is the same dude who did the empathy test for autistic people he's also the same guy who in 1997 came out with what's sometimes called the extreme male brain theory of autism this idea that females have a more empathetic brain and men have a more logical systemizing brain and being autistic means that you have a logical systemizing non-empathetic brain so therefore autistic brains are more male this special triangle from 2015 sort of expands on this idea we have autism at the tip of the triangle and then we have sex on the bottom left so in this context we mean your sex is male and then on the bottom right we have maths sorry to any Americans if it bothers you how much I'm saying maths instead of math does that sound weird to you I don't know probably does so he was kind of putting forward this idea that being a boy being super good at maths and being autistic those three things were sort of inherently linked his evidence for this special triangle is that boys are much more likely to be be diagnosed and because he also said that men are more likely to win big prizes for mathematics he used the field medal as an example which can we just say was first awarded in 1936 I don't know if I feel like 1936 was necessarily the best time for women's rights but you know maybe that's just me still since 1936 to present day only two women have received this award but I think it's important to note that we're still not necessarily living in the best times for gender quality when it comes to stem specifically and maybe particularly mathematics one of Baron Cohen's critics neurobiologist Gina rippen she extensively discusses the reasons in which women might choose not to participate in stem in her 2019 book The gendered Brain going to put it down because it's heavy she points to a study of 9-year-old children which assessed both their ability in maths and Science and also their intention to study maths and science at a higher level and the girls were less likely to associate themselves with math and maths type words and they were more likely to associate both with males the girls also had a much stronger intention to drop maths did this just reflect the fact that they were struggling with maths No in fact there weren't any sex differences in the grades the children were achieving so sadly 9-year-old girls think maths is not for them and that they will probably give it up even though they are performing as well as their male counterparts Gina points to many similar studies in this book I'll leave it linked down below if you want to check it out for yourself it's all in chapter 10 what was discovered in that study Rings true for my experience I do feel like I felt like math was overstepping slightly like it was slightly not for me and I got an A like I can't have been that appalling I wasn't a genius but I can't have been that bad in science I usually did pretty well in science I got basically full marks in all of my science exams but had absolutely no intention to carry on I do think if I went into education now I mean I am studying a science degree I'm studying psychology at the moment but if I went to you know a levels now I most certainly probably would I wouldn't take maths but I probably would take one or two science subjects I feel like my mindset around it has changed quite a bit I do think when you're a child there can be this sort of like ick associated with things that you don't feel are for your gender like you know how boys are like ew pink and like maybe don't necessarily want to go to dance classes or feel a bit embarrassed or shameful about that I feel like potentially there was a bit of a similar things with with Matt it's kind of like a I don't know that's not girly enough so weird how we kind of absorb these subtle messages in that same study of 9-year-olds boys didn't actually show any gender stereotyping when it came to math which is super interesting because I might have assumed that guys kind of felt like women didn't belong in stem I'm sure there are some who do but it seems that they're just sort of chilling doing their own thing kind of oblivious actually women who kind of feel like they don't belong in these spaces and are kind of obeying some sort of UNR rule some sort of line that we don't cross and I think this is why people are always shouting about representation and why it's so important we need to see people that we relate to in these positions in order for us to be able to you know see ourselves in these positions for us to be able to relate for us to feel welcome and apparently the UK is a shortfall of about 40,000 people in stem so there are certainly spaces there maybe there is some sort of biological reason why boys are more likely to be autistic than girls maybe sex does come into it I don't know but girls can most certainly be autistic too so number five public perception of autism is really weird because alongside this Math's genius mad scientist stereotype we also have this idea that all autistic people are incapable all autistic people are children all autistic people cannot function independently there are lots of people who seem to believe that the only people who are genuinely autistic are autistic people who also have a comorbid intellectual disability however about a third of autistic people have an intellectual disability which means if my math is correct don't quote me on it 2third of autistic people about 2third of autistic people do not have an intellectual disability and as I mentioned earlier autistic people who don't have an intellectual disability are less likely to be diagnosed autistic and there are potentially over a million people in the UK who are autistic who are currently undiagnosed so of course I'm not trying to say that autistic people who do have an intellectual disability are not important onethird of autistic people is still a lot of autistic people there are a lot of autistic people who do have an intellectual disability and there are a lot of autistic people who have very high support needs those people do not deserve to be marginalized dehumanized or left out of the conversation so many higher support needs autistic people suffer so much and receive such inadequate support from their communities in this country it is so bad almost every time you go on BBC News there'll be a new horrific story about the treatment of autistic people within Mental Health Services often autistic people who do have higher support needs it's horrendous but again I do think it is important to remember that autistic people can have any level of support needs and even though most autistic people are not suran we can have very extreme strengths and weaknesses this is often called having a spiky profile so you might have an autistic person who is incredible at learning foreign languages and picks them up so fast but they struggle with their motor skills and therefore they can't do up their buttons on their own you can be really talented in one area but still really really need help and support from others basically it's important to remember that just simply knowing that somebody's autistic doesn't tell you anything about their support needs their IQ their intelligence their skills their special interests their talents autistic people can be so different from each other and we should always tailor the support we offer to the individual not just like some generic idea of what might be helpful for an autistic person and it's also important to acknowledge that both underestimating and overestimating an autistic person's capacity can be pretty harmful again thank you so much to news for helping me make this video today if you would like to get 40% off the advantage plan I would really recommend it it's pretty affordable anyway you can go to ground. news/ nowart if you like this video you might like another one that I made which was about things that actually are traits of autism kind of the opposite to this like obscure traits of autism that are often overlooked I'll leave that one linked on screen if you would like to join me over on patreon if you would like to see more of these videos then I will leave it linked in the description you don't have to at all obviously but I do have a load of exclusive videos on there and podcast episodes and I also post outtakes for basically every video and then you also get access to the Discord server as well where you can chat to other autistic people and you can join that just by joining the lowest here which is $4 per month it's an unbelievably amazing place I can't really comprehend the fact that that exists and like last year when I opened it up in October I I never could have imagined it would be anything like what it is now and I'm just very very very grateful thank you all so much and thank you to everybody who's just here on YouTube commenting and all of that stuff I absolutely love doing this and I hope I get to keep on doing it for a while that's that's the scariest thing the idea that that I might not be able to keep on keep on you know researching things like whatever Simon Baron CO's been up to and telling you about it it's you know it's the dream come true anyway thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in my next video really soon bye [Music] [Music] [Music]