Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

Real Social Skills)

It’s pretty common to feel awkward or out of place the first time you meet someone new or attend an event. Unless a serious red flag occurs, I recommend giving a new space three visits before you conclude it’s a bad fit.

our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a “nuisance variable” that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room). This means we can both be easily di

Though ADHD is not believed by professionals to affect emotional processing and social skills development directly, one prominent experience among ADHDers is rejection-sensitive dysphoria, feeling intense panic and distress when receiving negative (or even neutral) social feedback from other people. Because ADHDers find rejection so terrifying and

Forty-six percent of Autistic adults who underwent ABA therapy as kids report having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the experience.

Online and in games, cause and effect are clearer than in “real” life.[41] It’s easy to ignore subtext or nonverbal cues and focus only on shared tasks and clear, measurable outcomes.

Autistic person might instead be lost in their own head, and fail to draw a connection between their coworkers departing and the need to check for hunger within themselves.

Some are assumed to be too “high functioning” to need accommodations, but actually suffer deeply from a lack of accessibility and support.

We are hyperreactive to even small stimuli in our environment We have trouble distinguishing between information or sensory data that should be ignored versus data that should be carefully considered We are highly focused on details rather than “big picture” concepts We’re deeply and deliberatively analytical Our decision-making process is methodic