Politicians Make Ordinary People FEEL Autistic

When autistic people are pushed too far, we melt down. What happens when populations suffer in the same way? Politicians who do inexplicable things or make self-sabotaging decisions allow the confused folks watching to feel a taste of autistic disconnection. The way many people feel about some contemporary political figures is a great analogy for one of the most significant barriers to understanding & communication between neurotypical people and autists: The Double Empathy Problem.
At the time this video was made, then UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had made a crucially counter-intuitive decision which contributed to him & his party losing the UK general election a few weeks later...
#EngageAutism #AutismAcceptance #actuallyautistic

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[Stoitism]

What a great analogy.

I was only diagnosed about 14 months ago. An analogy I came up with to describe my experience was that going through life undiagnosed is like playing a game where everybody knows the rules except you. And nobody will tell you the rules. And when someone tries to tell you the rules, they don't make any sense. And then when you try to join in anyway, everybody gets mad at you for doing it wrong.

Now I'm diagnosed it's still kinda like that but I don't have to try so hard to play the game. I can play my own way :)

[skootergirl]

Neurotypicals: How can he talk down to us? we're not stupid?

Neurodivents: I wonder how that feels like ?!

[NeurodivergentMom]

8:12 the connection you made about how autists are quicker to push back against something that feels wrong which large populations only do after they’ve been pushed too far is a totally new way of thinking for me. 😮. Thanks.

[deretti]

Your channel is the best in explaining the subjective experience of autism that a lot of autistic people have difficult explaining and neurotypical people in understanding because most of the time they never feel them. It is not an easy thing to do, good job!

[karenholmes]

There's a lot to be said about the idea that we are not as different as we believe ourselves to be. It is like we are living an exaggerated existence. Autistics have exaggerated emotions, exaggerated misunderstandings, exaggerated sensory responses, exaggerated processing issues. It is like we are living our lives turned up to 11 (if you're familiar with the Spinal Tap reference). I think this is why so many of the things that could be done to accommodate us would actually be beneficial to neurotypicals. The things that make us meltdown are the same things that neurotypicals find annoying. We would all be better off if we expected less multitasking, used less fluorescent lighting, and reduced noise pollution. We would all be better off if our culture was more direct. Just because you can tolerate something doesn't mean you should be expected to.

[dancecommando]

I really enjoyed the connection/parallels between public disillusionment with their material conditions and the politicians who ought to be serving us, making the public feel autistic. They're so out of touch

[mrsm]

I never thought I'd learn a lesson about autism from Rishi Sunak, so he's good for something 😄 Great video as always Quinn.

[MrAndywills]

The last person, with honest intentions, to enter the Houses of Parliament was Guy Fawkes.

[Catlily]

Rich people don't know what it is like to live with scarcity. But most of them do experience fear and loss.

[jo]

Great analogy, thank you.
I feel being hungover works as an analogy for sensory overload, atleast my bf understood me immediately.
Whenever we host or attend something social with lots of family (birthdays and the likes), we spend a couple of days afterwards taking care of our ‘hangovers’. The bigger the event or pressure, the bigger the ‘hangover’.

[ItsDrMcQuack]

That's one hell of an analogy, and very well explained

[thewatcher]

Another similarity might be how it feels to be gaslit. In fact, I think autistic people are a major target of gaslighting, and can end up thinking it was just a neurotypical person being neurotypical. I don't believe this is the case though, I don't find gaslighting is or should be considered normal. Autism is a convenient way of shifting blame, because the autistic person can get singled out and be the example of why they're the problem, not the gaslighting, and how is the austistic person supposed to know for sure when they're gaslit? Even neurotypical people struggle with this one because it's designed for anyone and everyone.
Trauma from this kind of behaviour can also be hard to detangle from autism because trauma has a number of symptoms where anxiety and dissociation can make socialising more awkward and difficult, their nervous system is dysregulated, so on and so forth. It would probably be hard getting a diagnosis when there's more at play. If it's possible some people are getting diagnosed as autistic when they've suffered trauma, it would make it more likely to discredit the person diagnosed and in some cases getting justice is even harder. Austistic people have often got a strong sense of justice, yes? A gaslighter tends to be the opposite, and they know how to work a courtroom. A person with known mental health problems rarely get listened to in the court of law, it's only in recent years they've had a voice at all in the court of public opinion.

Thankyou for the milder and politically safe (imo) example of how autism feels.

I got my ASD diagnose a couple years ago as an adult. As I was listening to this video and you told the background (which I hadn't seen in the news before) I realized that I didn't wonder about Sunak's behaviour and that my brain had automatically started thinking of probable reasons for it. And then I realized that it's likely a mechanism I have subconsciously developed to make more sense of the world ("they must've had their reasons, so I can try and guess them"). Thank you for opening my eyes :)

[humbleweirdo]

That was really well thought out. Here's to shortening the divide between neurotypicals and autists🍻

[greenghoul]

My family has a history of mental illness and I have a friend who's bound to a wheelchair who was treated cruelly and ostacised by her family and the government refuses to care, the tories will regret this whenever there is an election in the future past anyone who cares about Rishi Sunak or remembers him because this just solidified my hate for them even more, they will never care about the cruelty and abuse of my sisters and family

[erinjohnson]

I recently read about ambiguous discrimination places a double burden on minorities, and I feel like the double empathy problem may well be a key component of it.
And yeah, almost everyone can have the experience of gaining weight and feeling queasy sometimes - but it doesn't follow that "everyone is a little bit pregnant" 😂

[josephmartin]

Brilliant explanation of how interaction feels. If this vid reaches one who hasn’t understood!!! Hope it goes viral!

[billyLego]

As an Autistic, looking at the title I was baffled at first, but how you explained it. Really captured it well. Thank you.

[loverainthunder]

I'm ready for this episode. Super interesting.

[nephistar]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Quinn.