katie

I remember a great deal of detail when it comes to the physical environment at school but not so much to do with the people and the social interactions. I could still draw you a detailed map of my first school but the people are an intermingled concept.

I felt a great deal of worry regarding most things and some things a young girl isn’t usually aware of – such was my enquiring mind. It is not typical for a seven year old to be worried about a myocardial infarct (heart attack) but I was. I devoured information of quite an academic and adult nature but lacked the skills to process it or relate to it in an appropriate emotional sense. This disparity between my social/emotional and intellectual development seems to me (in hindsight) to be the source of many of my difficulties.

Amongst my peers, especially in my early school years, I had few if any constant relationships with any individuals and was fairly easily led. I remember being in the library or the art room during breaks, usually pursuing personal projects.

A number of times at my first school I was approached, usually by boys, and asked to do things that were socially inappropriate involving ‘rule breaking’ and exhibitionism. I wasn’t so much bullied during this time but exploited because of my social naivety.

The give and take of friendship was an elusive concept; things just seemed to occur around me. People used to come up to me and say ‘you are my friend now’ and just as easily walk away and say ‘your not my friend anymore’. I was left standing there thinking ‘and the point to that was?’ My parents arranged ‘play dates’ including a disastrous joint birthday party with a girl called Emma. Emma was a pretty, popular, blue eyed girl with blonde ringlets and not very nice to me at school. Party guests followed her around and had a marvellous time, while I sat there uncomfortably trussed up in scratchy pink fabric and pig tails longing for shorts and a t-shirt and a bit of peace and quiet.

I was an anxious child, and experienced a great deal of physical discomfort because of this anxiety. Frequent stomach pains, shortness of breath, palpitations which are common with panic attacks. These panic attacks would often occur at times of transition such as going from the classroom to the ‘withdrawal’ room for T.V. time or ‘Health Hustle’ – a physical fitness routine to music –Note: 25 kids dancing around you to a song called ‘popcorn’ can be terrifying if you have sensory integration problems and poor body awareness.

Early School Years

Small chapters on Autistic life and discoveries
Please scroll down.....

In my early twenties I read a book called Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams and I began to realise that Autism could apply to me and I finally felt as though I had an answer to the difficulties I had been facing intrapersonally and interpersonally.

Many answers had been proposed across my lifespan including Epilepsy, Personality Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Conversion Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. My trips to Doctors to try and find an answer to my unusual mental states and behaviours began in early primary school and continued well into my twenties including periods in children’s hospital’s, general hospitals and finally a psychiatric facility at the age of 19 where I was a patient for some months. Accordingly I had tried many medications ranging from anticonvulsants and antidepressants to antipsychotics.

Shortly before reading Nobody Nowhere I had discovered cognitive behavioural therapy through which I had begun to release myself from acute anxiety and obsessive thoughts brought on by the stress of adolescence. Without the disabling effects of acute anxiety I was able to complete some tertiary education and begin to look for work. I secured my first full time job, a traineeship, at the age of 26. After just over a year in the work force I found myself practically unemployed again, so I answered a job ad for an arts facilitator to work with people with Autism Spectrum disorder. I got this job and began working with people on the spectrum. Very soon the autism spectrum became an all consuming passion. With my new found passion came many ideas for working with people on the spectrum but as I was unqualified in this area much of my enthusiasm fell on deaf ears.

I decided that I wanted to be heard so I needed to obtain these qualifications. So began my journey to university. I enrolled in a degree course in Disability Studies and found an academic niche. At university I met a woman who was a lecturer and PhD in Autism. She approached me as she was taken by my academic skills and after getting to know me over a period of time she asked me whether there were any other people in my family who were autistic and gifted. She had come to the conclusion that I was indeed on the autism spectrum. At the age of 30 I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by the same diagnostician who diagnosed Donna Williams with Autism.

HOME

The Apple Mac in an IBM world
Imagine you work in a company that runs networked IBM computers and you have the only computer with a different operating system such as Apple or Linux.

What does this mean for you?

It may mean every time you get a file from your colleagues and try to open it is not formatted properly or it is unreadable. Imagine that many of these files were vital to your operations and as a result of not being able to read them or only receiving part of them you were not able to fulfill your position in the company. Then imagine that your computer has trouble operating properly even as a stand alone unit. You have a number of programs that are supposed to run simultaneously but when you try to do that programs keep shutting down. You also have databases in which information is stored but you can only access this information one database at a time so it is difficult to cross reference or combine different types of information.

Autism is somewhat like this, the autistic brain is like a different operating system that doesn’t process information in the same ways that a typical brain processes information. The neurotypical (normal) brain is like the IBM system and the Autistic like the Apple or Linux. They are both computers but because of their differences they don’t share all of the same language. What is particularly difficult for the autistic brain is the processing and combining all of the social parts of communication, particularly its non verbal components. This is because like the computer described earlier the autistic brain has difficulty running two or more programs at once so whilst a person may be able to pay attention to the sound of someone’s voice they do not have the capacity to simultaneously observe facial expression or body language or conversely by paying attention to the visual details of a person’s mouth they miss the content of the speech. Sometimes the brain is unsure about which information to process with its limited resources so it shuts down all of its “programs” leaving the person confused and anxious and unable to communicate. And like the computer I describe with its isolated databases, being unable to cross reference information also means that people may have problem combining different types of information such as fact and feeling, self with other, and thought with action.

For the person with autism an effective education is like a software upgrade for the computer described, it allows people to make better sense of incoming information, helps improve simultaneous information processing. Effective educators present information in a format that can be understood by the person with autism typically this is a visual format ranging from pictures to words or combinations of both. People with autism prefer routines so that they can predict what types of information they will be required to process and when and so that they can prepare themselves for this interaction.

What this translates to in daily life is somewhat of an uneven profile of talents and difficulties to be explored by the autistic and his or her supporters.

Being Autistic

Finding Out About Autism