" - the Developmental and Medical History Questionnaire which asks about education, occupation, physical and mental health, lifestyle, sleep, and gut health"
2/5
"- a questionnaire that measures autistic traits
The baseline questionnaire takes approximately takes 20 - 30 minutes, and can be saved at any point and returned to later."
3/5
They literally want to measure "how autistic" we are and correlate that to genes.
That's it!
No masking, no "environmental factors," just correlating old surveys created by cis white men to genes and demographics like education, as if that is all there is to quantify us.
4/5
They just want to get the cream of the crop autistics. Not those ones with pesky co-occuring conditions.
5/5
"Environmental factors" is a smoke screen. The databases they want to combine this with like SPARK don't have those questionnaires. They know it. They just aren't going to tell us that
On their application they had to select a category & literally selected
"Basic science study"
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This might sound like something one shouldn't admit,
But do you ever feel bitter watching people have a temporary injury who then recover completely without pain?
I feel like it's treated like a "phase"
while my permanent, mundane foot injury is the rest of my life.
A temporary understandable injury is something that people have sympathy for, attention, care.
Permanent injuries, chronic illness, eventually people just get annoyed, why can't you do X/Y/Z, you navigate the world differently forever. You can't do the things you did before.
I only realized this when I crashed my bike and hurt my shoulder. Things that make sense people don't mind.
When you tell them your surgery to decrease/get rid of your pain with walking, they just look at you saying "there's really nothing that can do?" completely stunned.
This was a great segment & I really want to talk about a feeling that was described by Ani Spooner regarding hiding her strawberry birth mark growing up.
It's not something I've heard talked about much but this feeling is something I relate heavily to as an autistic person. 1/18
In this segment about facial differences, she talks about how she was taught how to hide her strawberry birth mark by age 8. It took 1.5 hours to put the makeup on herself, so that people wouldn't see it.
By age 12, she started applying this makeup every single day.
2/18
She talks about how when other people saw her, they never knew she had that strawberry birth mark. And she said the thought of taking this makeup off was terrifying, because she had no idea if people were still going to like her or want to know her.
3/18
One day recently, I woke up, mostly awake, and I laid in bed for 3 hours afterwards.
I wasn't even comfortable. I was on my phone on twitter. But I just didn't want to Do All The Things.
2/13
What are all the things?
Sitting up
Getting dressed
Deciding on breakfast
Getting a bowl
Putting it on a desk
Eating the food
Thinking about work
Being anxious about work
Trying to motivate myself to work
Finding a podcast or music to listen to
An autistic person commented about the autistic burnout post I wrote
that they thought they were "faking it"
and I just think that entire comment encompasses what it is like to be autistic in this world.
You have been told so many times that X/Y/Z shouldn't bother you, or that you're a hypochondriac, or that you're [insert assumption here] that it's so easy to just believe it and tell it to yourself over and over.
Society conditions autistic people to gaslight ourselves.
The 6 months before I had an "official" autism diagnosis but knew from all the research I did I was probably autistic,
I just kept telling myself "Well you're just too anxious, people say you're a hypochondriac, you're just looking for something to be special about you!"