Kieran Rose The Autistic Advocate - Understanding Autistic Masking

The piece around professionals having misinformation and perpetuating myths around masking in terms of like a surface level understanding of it.

Is there anything you want to speak to there for, say, any professionals that are listening that maybe might change the narrative?

I think...

It's so difficult because there is such a level of misinformation out there.

And even the more contemporary kind of narratives are still full of misinformation.

So when I first started kind of engaging academically in the masking narrative, I was very, very young.

But there was already a very set and fixed narrative around kind of masking is this behaviour where you put on a mask, you navigate for a situation, then you take it off again and everything's hunky dory kind of thing.

And so even now, it's been Amy Pearson, who I wrote the book with, and I and a few other kind of prominent autism researchers are very trying very hard to kind of steer this huge great big ship that's been created in a little bit of a different direction that does incorporate things like stigma or identity development has much more of a social narrative not just a psychology narrative and you know to contextualize this all and i think So what I would ask of professionals really is firstly to accept and understand that this is a real thing because there are still many many professionals out there and as we have seen I don't know how much you've seen in the UK news recently but like literally that narrative is still very very predominant that This is all a made up thing and if you can engage in this kind of behaviour then you're not autistic and it's ridiculous.

Absolutely ridiculous.

There is a

huge

wealth of evidence that these processes and these mechanisms exist inside and outside of the autism narrative.

That's the key thing here.

These are human behaviours and we have a wealth of evidence for that.

Certain prominent researchers haven't engaged with that research.

So I have very limited and narrow views of how things are.

And so that's the kind of first thing is to even just recognize that this is a very real thing that's happening.

But the second part of that is often then when there is a recognition that this is happening because it's engaged with superficially, it becomes a narrative of, well, if we intervene to train the behaviors out of these kids, then they won't out like that.

They won't need to do that.

Or it often comes from if we put in things like a few reasonable adjustments, maybe if labels are scratchy, we can let them wear a different jumper and stuff like that.

So when you think about what I termed as an ecology of stigma earlier, walking into an environment like school, for instance, where you are a human being who has completely different needs to everybody around you in terms of your communication, your sensory profile, your behavior, the way you exist, the way you use your attention, and like all of these things are very very real differences in autistic children but they're not recognized fully as that there still comes this narrative of well if we put a few reasonable adjustments in everything will be wonderful but actually what that is is like it's taking a cup and scooping a little bit of wrongness out of an ocean of wrongness and then throwing that wrongness away.

And you're still left with the ocean.

So putting those little things in places.

And what I'm talking about here is that if we were going to the extremes, we need a fundamental restructuring of our education systems and the professional systems around them.

We absolutely need that thing.