Insomnia

It's common for autistic people to either have trouble sleeping or be what most people might call a night owl. This is something I relate to and there is a neurological reason for it. I've always found it hard to get up on a morning unless there was a specific reason to get up such as school or work. There were a few periods in my late teens and early 20's where I found myself struggling to find work, and in these times I always found myself staying up later and sleeping in later because there was nothing that I absolutely had to get up for. Once or twice I decided to reset my sleep schedule by not sleeping on the night, but instead waiting until the following night when I'd go to bed at a "normal" time and then it gave me a decent night's sleep feeling reasonably awake the next morning. It didn't last too long though.

The reason for this is because the autistic brain tends to produce more melatonin during the day than it does at night, as opposed to a neurotypical brain that produces melatonin at night instead of during the day. Melatonin is the hormone that regulates your sleep cycle and is produced by the pineal gland in the brain. As you've probably gathered, the presence of melatonin is what makes you go to sleep, and when your melatonin levels drop that's when you wake up. The main factor that seems to trigger the release or reduction of melatonin is how light or dark it is. Autistic brains are often wired up to get this the opposite way around to the general population.

I've always had a tendency to not properly wake up until later in the day, but this really stepped up when I had kids, especially because my son was bottle fed so I did most of the night feeds. Even nowadays I find it hard to get up when my kids get up around 6:00 or 6:30am when they want me to get up. I try to drink tea (I don't like coffee even though it'd probably work better) for a caffeine boost but whatever I do I never really feel awake until just before lunch time. Conversely, my head feels by far the most awake and the most active around midnight to 1:00am. I've spent the last couple of years working until midnight until recently, which is ironic. I always feel exhausted early in the morning, but despite waking up still tired and mostly having no more than 5 or 6 hours' sleep I can't always sleep at night because my brain is too active. It's often around 1:00am that my brain processes things that have happened that day, and that I have a lot of ideas for things like blog posts or other things that I want to do. In fact, the custom vinyl figure of Christa Holmans that I made was a midnight idea.

I tried herbal sleeping tablets not long ago to try and help me sleep on a night because it was becoming a lot more frequent for me to struggle getting to sleep, but it didn't do much. I'm not sure if that's because I'm autistic but for whatever reason it didn't work. Because of things like autistic sleep patterns I think it's great that companies are moving to longer and later opening hours as well as more remote working facilities. It makes for an accessible society in terms of both customers and employees. Granted, we've mainly moved away from the standard 9-5 quite a while ago but there's still a way to go and there should be more out of hours access than there is at the moment.

I've always been quite good at sciencey subjects so I find things like the reasons for sleep cycle differences really interesting. If it's been just as interesting for you please hit the Follow button in the side bar and follow me on social media. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: Silhouette of a bed with a love heart on the headboard. Under the bed is the word "Autism" in rainbow colours and "Insomnia" under that in black.]

Self-Diagnosis

Self-diagnosis is something that I struggled with a little bit before I was formally diagnosed. Well, maybe saying I struggled isn't quite right, but I didn't feel comfortable in disclosing my autism while self-diagnosed unless I had to. I knew I was autistic before diagnosis but it felt like it might just be in my head so I didn't dare tell anyone except members of the online autism community who I'd never met. Obviously it's most likely not the case that it's just in your head so I wanted to go over some reasons why self-diagnosis is perfectly valid.

1. Autism is often overlooked in women and in minorities because it used to be seen as something that only occurred in white males. We know nowadays that literally anybody can be autistic.

2. Getting a diagnosis can be expensive in certain countries. Here in the UK it's done under the NHS for free, although there is also the option to go private.

3. The diagnostic person/team that assesses you might not be as knowledgeable or up to date as they should be. This happened to me when I was 1st assessed. They decided I wasn't autistic, so when I moved to a different area I had to ask to be referred again for a 2nd opinion where I finally got my diagnosis.

4. Even if you can afford a diagnosis the wait time for it is often ridiculously long. I can't remember how long my 1st assessment took, but I know my 2nd one was 18 months from my GP referring me to me getting my diagnosis.

5. Diagnostic assessment may not be physically accessible. I would imagine there's probably an assessment centre in most (if not all) major cities, but more rural areas might not have one meaning that you'd have to travel.

6. Your GP might refuse to refer you. This happened to me and I know it's not an isolated case. The GP I saw refused to refer me because she decided I didn't need to label myself. This is problematic for a few reasons, not least that it's not for her to decide. It's our own decision whether it's something we want or need.

7. Under the UK's Equality Act 2010 a diagnosis is irrelevant when asking for accommodations at work. As long as you meet a set of criteria your workplace are legally obliged to offer reasonable adjustments for you with or without a formal diagnosis.

8. Some autistics might feel shame or fear around getting officially diagnosed. This could be because of how they personally view themselves and/or autism, it could be due to family pressures, or any number of reasons that they might want to quietly keep their identity to themselves.

9. Some people simply might not want to chase a formal diagnosis, but be content in self-identifying as autistic. Fun fact: Tim Burton has identified as autistic for years, despite not being diagnosed.

10. Nobody knows you better than you!

There is concern within the neurotypical community that with self-diagnosis of autism people will use it as almost a fashion statement, or irrationally jump to conclusions about their own neurotype. I think these concerns are quite reasonable if you're looking from an outside perspective like neurotypicals will be, so I wanted to quickly address both sides to close this post. I want to reassure neurotypials that jumping into a self-disagnosis like that is a rare occurrence. While I'm not saying that everybody who self-diagnoses does so correctly, it's usually more about identity and isn't something that's taken lightly by most people. We take a lot of time, research and soul searching before we diagnose ourselves. And that leads me onto my point addressed to self-diagnosing autistics or those considering it. It's best to take your time and really think and research what autism is and whether you identify as autistic. There are a ton of autism resources online in the form of blogs (like this one!), YouTube channels, Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags and so on that are dedicated to helping anyone and everyone understand and accept autism. There's nothing wrong with self-diagnosing, but all I'm saying is do your research and stay informed.

If this list of reasons for self-diagnosis being valid has been helpful please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: "World Wide Web" logo (a black globe logo with "WWW" running through the middle) on a white background with "Autism" underneath it in rainbow colours, and "Self-Diagnosis" beneath that in black text.]

Guest Post: Autism In Women

I've got another guest post for you this week. This time it's by Vicky of Actually Aspling who is a brilliant and very active autism advocate, a fellow northerner, and has a Vaporeon tattoo on her arm which I love! You'll find her own blog here, and she's ActuallyAspling on both Twitter and Instagram. I realised that one of the biggest areas I haven't discussed yet is autism in women so I asked Vicky to write a piece on it for me since I'm not really qualified to talk about it properly due to being a man. So here we go with Vicky's thoughts:

I honestly can’t remember much from my childhood, only what I’ve been told from my parents, things are quite blurry in that sense. From what I know I was quite passive as a small child, and didn’t have many friends, and to be honest that hasn’t changed much.

I’d say being a girl definitely heightened my experiences in some ways, and for that reason I went undiagnosed for many years. Our understanding of Autistic women and girls is ever-growing, its evolving, and we are learning every day, but sadly it came too late for me.
High school for me was a nightmare, everything went wrong, and I stood out for all the wrong reasons. You could say I was a typical Autie girl. I clung to all my friends, I copied their behaviours, hoping I could survive the school day. It didn’t work. As a result, I camouflaged even more, changed my interests and created a whole new persona, something which many young Autistic girls feel they have to do to pass as Neurotypical. The issue is, we shouldn’t be pressuring Autistic individuals to do so, we should be teaching them, giving them the skills to be themselves, and allowing them to unmask.

Honestly, I think one of the reasons I was undiagnosed for so long is because of this mask, I had created a person who could fit in, who could pass as neurotypical, I appeared ‘normal’ or ‘high functioning’ to some. But the thing is, every Autistic woman is different, just like every Autistic person is diverse, its not one size fits all. I also think the understanding of trait presentation was lacking, especially in medical services.

I remember the first time I went to my doctor, I told her I think I could be Autistic, and I could tell by her face that she didn’t believe me already. So, what did she do? She printed off a biased, probably outdated questionnaire from her computer and proceeded to ask me a set of questions. One of which is ‘do you have friends?’ to which I said yes, and that I did like to go out with said friends. And of course, that meant I couldn’t possibly be Autistic, because we all know Autistic people cannot possibly have friends. I came across as quite social, again like the typical autie woman.

Eventually I sought a different opinion, and I was referred straight away for an assessment. This was fantastic, the only downside? My assessment was completed using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), an outdated tool which lacks empirical sensitivity, it is biased and its methods do not reflect traits which are often displayed in women and girls. It’s a tool which follows stereotypical ‘male’ traits. However, I eventually did receive a diagnosis, after years of camouflaging and comments that ‘women can’t have autism’.

So many young girls are going both undiagnosed and misdiagnosed due to outdated tools, a lack of sensitivity and an absence of knowledge. Its about time that things change, we need a new perspective on Autism, but hey, I’m working on it!

[Image description: Vicky sat in her garden cross-legged holding a blue mug with both hands. She has short-ish light brown hair and is wearing a blue t-shirt, blue Christmassy trousers and white socks.]

Well Known Autistics

It's a common misconception that autism is an epidemic that's affecting more and more people as time goes on, not unlike the real pandemic that the world is in the middle of at time of writing. The truth is far from it, and autism has always been around throughout human history because it's just a natural form of diversity. People often thing of diversity as physical things like skin colour, gender and so on, but there are mental forms of diversity as well, which is the basis of the neurodiversity movement encompassing autism, ADHD, dyslexia and so many more conditions.

With that in mind, there are of course figures throughout history who were autistic even before autism was discovered or thought of as a thing. I believe that a significant number of them made some form of significant contribution such as Einstein, Darwin, and who knows how many more. I wanted to look at some of the more well known people of recent times to show what exactly we autistics are capable of in a wide variety of fields, and to help bust the myth that autism is nothing but a disability. So let's get started with undoubtedly the most influential autistic to my own life:

1. Satoshi Tajiri
For those who don't know, Satoshi Tajiri is a video game designer/director and the genius responsible for my first recognised special interest, Pokémon! It all started with his special interest in collecting bugs and how collectors would capture them in a similar way that Pokémon trainers capture Pokémon. When Nintendo's Game Boy was initially released Tajiri imagined bugs crawling backward and forward through the game link cables from one Game Boy to the next, pioneering the idea of trading between players and working together instead of just playing against each other.

2. Dan Aykroyd
The star and creator of Ghostbusters took inspiration from his fascination with parapsychology and the paranormal to create what was apparently a fantasy epic before it was toned down on the fantasy elements and became the Ghostbusters that we all know and love today. He originally wrote the role of Peter Venkman for his close personal friend John Belushi to portray, but following Belushi's death he re-wrote it for fellow autistic Bill Murray instead.

3. Tim Burton
Tim Burton has never been diagnosed as autistic, but he strongly identifies as such which makes him self-diagnosed. He's known for his heavily gothic and weird influences in his films such as Edward Scissorhands, Alice In Wonderland (2010) and of course Beetlejuice, the cartoon of which I loved as a kid. And without Beetlejuice giving Winona Ryder her breakthrough role in 1988 she might not have gone on to star in a more recent favourite of mine in Stranger Things. While I can't say I'm a huge Burton fan myself, I'm certainly grateful for Bettlejuice.

4. Susan Boyle
From what I can remember hearing at the time, the news stories painted Susan Boyle as a bit of a laughing stock in her local area when she first appeared on Britain's Got Talent in 2009. When she first stepped out on the stage there was obviously something different about her that (I would say wrongly) put the audience and the public on edge. But when she started singing in her audition she showed how brilliant she is at what she does. She came in 2nd place in her series of BGT although it's arguable that she was the real star. Ironically enough she was only beaten by Diversity. She's since gone on to release a very respectable 8 albums and winning numerous awards.

5. Hannah Gadsby
Hannah Gadsby is one that I've only recently heard of within the last year or 2 when I saw her Netflix special Nanette. The show was actually written shortly following her diagnosis of both ADHD and autism, and was also written as a response to Australia's attitude at the time on same-sex marriage. The show has been described as ground-breaking and I'm sure her work will continue to break down barriers for the rest of her career.

6. Lewis Carroll
I've seen many autistics online theorise that not only is Lewis Carroll autistic, but also that his greatest creation Alice's Adventures In Wonderland is based on his own efforts to understand the neurotypical world as an autistic person. There is a darker side to this one though because it's been debated whether Carroll's preference for the company of children over adults comes from his difficulty in communication (it's often the case that autistic children prefer the company of adults, so it makes sense to me that the opposite could also be true), or whether there's a more sinister motive behind it. It's worth me also making clear that to my knowledge there is no further evidence of whether he was or wasn't a paedophile, and that I'm only explaining that it has been debated.

7. Anthony Hopkins
The man best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter has led a troubled life, which has only in recent years been explained in part by a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. There are lots of other factors to his troubled life such as family issues, bullying, addiction and so on, but his autism is likely as much of a contributor as anything else, especially for a person of his generation.

There are countless more autistics scattered all over the world and all over history, but these are just a few of the ones you're likely to be familiar with and how they've contributed to modern society. For more autism content please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: A black 5-point star with a gold border on a white background. Under the start is the word "Autism" in rainbow colours, and under that is the post's title "Well Known Autistics" in black.]

Anxiety

If you're a regular reader, or if you've read some of my older posts, chances are you'll know that alexithymia is one of the autism-related conditions I've got, which basically means I have difficulty expressing my own emotions in words, and sometimes even understanding them at all. So with that in mind it's hardly surprising that I'm only now starting to realise that I suffer more with anxiety than I ever thought I did. It's funny how things like this can be there and affect you without you even realising it. I can only remember a couple of times where I've noticed the classic symptoms of anxiety such as nausea, sweating palms and so on.

I've never been the most confident of people but I think there's much more to it than that. I'm always doubting myself, wondering if I'm doing the right thing, wonder if I/what I'm doing is good enough etc. For example, most of the time when I hit the Publish button on a new post I immediately wonder to myself if I've just written a load of crap. Someone on Twitter a while ago once said something that resonated with me quite a bit. They said that perfectionism isn't good because it's often driven by anxiety. I consider myself a perfectionist and I never thought of it like that before. One of my old jobs was preparing route packs for a distribution company and my my supervisor once praised me on how immaculate they are, but said I'm making them too perfect and spending too much time on it when I should be getting each one done as quickly as possible. This is most likely driven by anxiety that I want to do the best job I can because I don't want to get in trouble so I make it as perfect as I can, but that takes more time than they like. I ended up being made redundant from that job but my perfectionism isn't something I've ever been able to change. I'm very rigid in that sense, which is a classic autism trait. When I do something I has to be perfect, and more importantly it has to be right.

As far as I can remember I've always been one to look quite negatively on myself as well as things that could happen. If there's something that I can see a potential negative outcome for I usually spend a lot of time thinking "what if" although I like to think I'm also good at balancing out the positives and negatives and looking at the probability of each outcome. Whenever I get a notification for something on my phone, if the notification shows the first few words of the message I usually have a feeling of dread as though someone is definitely going to have a go at me, or give me some bad news or something. Somehow that doesn't tend to happen if it doesn't show the start of the message in the notification, and of course my feeling of dread is always wrong. There was one time recently where I'd done something wrong that annoyed my wife, and I spent a while thinking I'm a moron and what if she hates me and all those kind of things. This is when the logical thinking kicks in - sometimes on its own, sometimes deliberately. I start thinking that she's human and that she's an emotional and anxious person herself, and she'll calm down eventually, and whatever I did definitely doesn't warrant a divorce. I know she reads my blog so I just want to quickly clarify that I've never thought she was going to divorce me, but just using that as a worst case scenario that I can rule out to reassure myself.

When I first asked my GP back in 2017 to refer me for a second opinion on an autism diagnosis she refused and gave me the details for a self-referral mental health service that I then contacted, and they concluded that I had social anxiety. While I don't deny that I'm very socially anxious the help they gave me was a waste of time mainly because autism still wasn't addressed as the underlying cause of it. You may be wondering what difference it makes as autism isn't something to be treated or cured, but to a certain extent a diagnosis of autism can make a world of difference because it can be very validating and gives a much simpler way of explaining how you are to other people: "I'm autistic." Not that it solves anxiety - social or otherwise - but it certainly helps in my experience. They booked me in for CBT therapy and after a couple of months I realised it wasn't working and stopped. Shortly after that I went back and saw a different GP who then gave me the referral that lead to my diagnosis.

At the moment I'm fine with my anxieties because they don't cause much of an issue, but who knows - after lockdown is over my situation will most likely change so I may need to revisit CBT or a similar therapy depending on how things go. At the time of writing my employer are expecting me and the rest of my home working team to return to the office after lockdown (I've worked from home for a couple of years and we were supposed to return to the office in early April until the pandemic happend). At lot of people have come and gone in the office since I started working from home, so it'll be like going into a completely new environment when we eventually do go back. With that said, my son will be starting school in September which might give me more downtime to decompress and process things, so we'll have to see how it goes.

So there you have it. It's definitely possible to have anxiety without realising it, and I think it's safe to say that goes for almost any mental health issue as well. I'm still unpacking my anxieties bit by bit, but I hope what I've unpacked so far has been insightful and interesting. Please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: Silhouette of a person on a chair, hunched over slightly holding their head. There are bubbles showing thoughts entering their head including "Don't," "Can't," and "What if..." Under the silhouette is the word "Autism" in rainbow colours and "Anxiety" in black under that.]