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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2023
Neurodivergent practitioners challenged the idea that autistic people are poor at peopling
In short
At the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, neurodivergent practitioners argued that the way they relate to people is a strength in their work, and that the communication problem is often a mismatch.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
The stereotype was put to the practitioners directly. Dr Judy Tang, a neuropsychologist, facilitated a panel at the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne with Dr Naomi Malone, Raelene Dundon and Tamsin Jowett, all of them neurodivergent practitioners. When the conversation turned to their work, Tang observed that the four of them had landed in people professions, and that stereotypically, people would think neurodiverse people perhaps were not the best when it came to peopling. She asked the panel how that could be challenged.
The answers that followed treated relating to people as something neurodivergent practitioners do differently, and in some respects better, and placed the difficulty in particular kinds of encounter. The captions do not mark who is speaking through most of this part of the session, so the answers are reported here by what each speaker said about their own work.
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Sources the story draws on
- The double empathy problem (opens in a new tab), National Autistic Society (Dr Damian Milton)
- Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective (opens in a new tab), Autism (Catherine J. Crompton, Danielle Ropar, Claire V. M. Evans-Williams, Emma G. Flynn and Sue Fletcher-Watson)
- Access to employment: A comparison of autistic, neurodivergent and neurotypical adults' experiences of hiring processes in the United Kingdom (opens in a new tab), Autism (Jade Davies, Brett Heasman, Adam Livesey, Amy Walker, Elizabeth Pellicano and Anna Remington)
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