Sorry about the detour we took on the last post. I felt that I needed to set the stage for the main point.
As with all my posts, it is always triggered or inspired by something I saw or read. This one was inspired by a video of a non-verbal autism advocate named Payam.
When people talk about Sensory Based Motor Disorder, they usually think of clumsiness, abnormal posturing and repetitive behaviors. Payam brought up something that not many people are aware of, there are many other body functions that rely on your motor system and in his case, speech.
Autism is believed to be a problem in connectivity between different regions of the brain. The poor connectivity then manifests in many ways producing the spectrum of sensory, motor cognitive and emotional symptoms seen in ASD.
For Payam, he has so much he wants to say but can’t get it out of his brain into the motor movements required to speak. When people see him and other non-verbal Autistics, it is immediately assumed that they do not have the intelligence to produce speech. Just listen to his words in this video and you will see that he is far from having a low IQ. His vocabulary could put many native English speakers to shame.
If not for aids and accommodations provided for him, he would not have been able to thrive and live to his fullest potential. People would assume that he was intellectually impaired when being measured with standards set for neurotypicals.
I’d also like to link the lecture that introduced me to Payam. It was a lecture given by Dr Clarissa C. Kripke about Autism and Sensory Movement Difference.
She mentioned that we need to stop seeing Autism as behavioral problems and start thinking of it as neurological. When we see it as behavioral, we focus on trying to change the response rather than creating accommodations to the deficit that minimizes the distress and anxiety associated with it, enabling the Autistic person to thrive.
This is one of the reasons why most Autism advocates reject the widely used ABA program as it aims to teach people with Autism to overcome their traits by punishing it rather than accepting it as something that cannot be changed, but can be managed.
The traditional understanding of Autism needs to change. New research has uncovered so much but the understanding of Autism is still lagging behind. People still prefer believing that people with ASD just need to practice and habituate to “overcome” their symptoms instead of accepting that accommodations go a long way to help make life more bearable.
These Are the Contents of My Head 