Masking - Autism Explained

hey guys you know it's been a few days um dealing with things i i was trying to stay busy over like the past week but it clearly didn't uh work out the way i intended to um birthday was five days ago now and it's i don't particularly enjoy it i it's a thing doesn't really matter for the purposes of this video but i believe the last video i had left off not saying uh what the upcoming video was going to be if i did that's not what i'm meant to do um because i didn't know and a few days after that i'd come up with an idea and tried recording the video several times and this is currently the seventh time doing so um so if you're seeing that uh yeah that's so many times i've done this video approaches crap i had um mentioned that there is a interesting tendency among the autistic to uh group together into three sort of havens uh for employment now one of them sounds a little bizarre unexpected kind of thing now one of those makes complete sense that's stem sometimes people say tech more specifically but stem i should surprise absolutely nobody that's the big stereotype is nerdy tech nerdy science person yes this validity to that i'm not gonna argue against it i'm one of those guys not everybody who is autistic is but that stereotype's not invalid another one of those that people don't really think of but when you do think on it it makes a lot of sense is trade work you're working with specific details you have a specific task you got to do your level of interaction with others tends to be lower um not if you're in a union but if you're an independent contractor you're working with a few people here and there typically just the customers maybe you got um one or two people working under you as a hand makes a lot of sense actually the other one that confuses people so much is acting now there's numerous autistic actors i've debated going through the whole list or whatever but the thing is it's boring and dry is all hell when i do that because i don't watch much tv you can go look up these one of the more interesting ones because i think he's a fantastic actor is sir anthony hopkins dude is a great great actor but he's far from the only one as weird as it might seem the autistic are actually overrepresented in acting now if you've been watching this it's probably not that surprising how that might come to be there's still probably a little bit but i've been describing a lot of things that are not rooted in behavioral problems they're not rooted in trouble under um not knowing how to behave appropriately they're rooted in things that are going cause differences in behaviors different perspectives but they're not it's not like we're talking about say oppositional defiant disorder it's another kind of similar thing here but if there's so much social difficulty why would you be good at acting like another person now this phenomenon happens so much that there is a specific name for it the autistic tend to go with masking in research it tends to be called camouflaging but in either case they're talking about the same thing i'm not going to delve too much into the specific research on camouflaging because i can just explain what it is but i have a bunch of links down in the video description if you want to read specific details uh there will be something about camouflaging that we're going to talk about i am going to reference the research but masking camouflaging whatever it's the idea of putting on essentially an act acting like you aren't autistic suppressing any of those autistic traits for the purposes of getting in or whatever and in principle most people would think that yeah that's a good thing you're you're fixed oh no oh no if this were some magic fix to autism then we'd say oh you basically have a cure but that's not what's going on that's not the problem and in fact this carries many problems we will get that but this is actually an incredibly problematic thing considering you've seen this in other people a person acts like something they're not in order to fit into a specific group they're dead set on fitting into this social clique in high school and so they act like something that they're not they give up on their own principles their values they lose themselves in order to fit in you see this in the workplace quite often where because of the power systems that are in place people are essentially forced to fit into very particular um behavioral political categories that they are not a part of just so that they can have a job working on things that they like instead of how do we get people with different views to get along with each other there's entire fields devoted to that negotiation and social psychology organizational psychology all deal with those kinds of things in different capacities the reality is you have seen this and has it ever really been a good thing no usually you see the person developing emotional problems takes a toll on last video i talked about eba and kind of how it works and some of the problems that you wind up seeing most of that was oriented towards the more severely affected now what is done with the less severely effect myself included is hyper focus on you just need to behave differently you just need to learn to behave exactly like everybody else and you'll be fine of course the thing is that is an impossible goal there are all sorts of different subcultures throughout even your local area that could not possibly happen as a really easy to understand example you need to behave and think exactly like everybody else now say you're from the united states and you've got both the democrats and the republicans who are constantly fighting among each other because they have different views and different values different belief systems and everything else that goes along with that how do you possibly fit into both groups we don't you can't you don't only see those differences in politics you see those differences everywhere that's why the cliques form in school all of those are different subcultures different groups of people different tribes if you're going with mention or with moral tribes this is an impossible goal and is why changing yourself to fit in is never healthy now the focus on researching this camouflaging phenomenon in autism started a lot with the big push to rethink whether autism was a primarily male disorder there were some theories that maybe there is some kind of female protective effect that is responsible for why more males have autism some research into that and it doesn't really seem like it's the case we know that there is a genetic basis we don't know why because its genetic basis is very unusual normally when you thinking of genetic disorders say huntington's career or down syndrome you're talking about essentially a kind of mutation it's a little bit different and down there's a chromosome kind of important but we typically associate these with a mutation the gene that is supposed to produce a specific protein gets changed to where it produces a similar but malfunctioning protein tried we've looked for that we've never found it doesn't seem to be there so what other possibilities are well from epigenetics we know that there's things like gene method look we found a few examples doesn't really explain most of the condition okay there are a few examples there's another one called de novo copy number variations where the perfectly fine gene gets copied genes producing the right thing but in different amounts behaving differently isn't it maybe maybe more of those are on the y chromosome because then surely that would explain why it's male dominated nope nope in fact of the 159 instances of copy number variations that i am aware of there may be others but these are the like the majority of the cnvs associated with autism none of them seem to happen on the y chromosome that doesn't seem to be male bites so then people started thinking well maybe maybe one of the androgens one of the male hormones uh induces cnv after all uh males tend to be more varied in a lot of ways if you look at like iq distributions and tons of other things males have a broader distribution it's less biased uh so you see higher rates of retardation and incredible intelligence in males um but less of like average whereas uh females tend to be more consolidated condensed however you want to describe that they looked found no link again so it doesn't seem like this should be a male dominated disorder so we have to be missing female diagnoses right that's certainly what it looks like so this was around the time where simon baron cohen's idea of the extreme male brain hypothesis was still around that's [ __ ] we'll cover that in another video simon's theory is complete [ __ ] i will tear some of that research apart but that's not what's going on at all one of the easiest examples of how that's not going on is that you see higher rates of autism in the lgbtq all that other stuff community and based on that and descriptions from people who are autistic about their own sexuality it seems like there's a less adherence to gender stereotypes among the autistic whether that would be a higher degree of gender fluidity or idol no sex theories or gender theories are not my thing i don't care about that um i don't care about the theory behind that do your thing i'm all for that i i just how that is described is not something that interests me i just i like what i like i am what i am you do your thing but considering that it certainly doesn't look like it's extreme male brain you would expect to see like a s ridiculous macho kind of thing and that's not what you see but they that these coinciding and so what people end up starting to to think is what if we can't sex-link autism to males maybe it's got to present differently in females and so they got on that kick for a while and it did it did wind up getting a lot more females diagnosed and we were able to find that these uh these women presented with the same genetic and endocrinological and organ things that i've been describing the difficulties with or differences with the throat muscles the difference with facial affects the increased rates of constipation and all those other things it's like okay you having that consistent thing going on this is clearly is affecting a lot more women than we originally thought how do we miss this the different idea in how the idea that it presents differently in women seems to make a lot of sense research is starting to get away from that um because it doesn't it seems like the sexual stereotypes that the researchers hold about how women men and women are supposed to be are what completely mess this up i'm mentioning all of this with the stuff on masking or camouflaging because what we thought was that camouflaging or masking is used more often in autistic women because they have better social skills and are therefore able to pick up on this stuff more often and utilize it more often therefore [Music] i don't want to say hiding that's what a lot of the researcher says it's not a good way to describe it but like it didn't get picked up by diagnosticians kind of makes sense you know of course then a lot in the autistic community we're like hold up i'm a guy i exhibit a lot of that or people who had not been diagnosed and go you know what i have all these other things i got told i wasn't autistic because i was doing this camouflaging thing that the diagnostician said excluded me but you're saying the autistic females do this and plenty of autistic females saying i don't camouflage at all i seem to identify more with the male presentation of autism these sex stereotyping of the condition has caused problems uh past two years research has been getting away from that which is fantastic but i'll um there are two autistic creators that cover this in particular and i'll leave the discussion on the pitfalls in sex stereotyping autism uh to them but it's yo sandy sam and purple ella links to those videos in the description i would strongly recommend checking them out at least one of them and it's been a problem man as people in the comments have brought up when you look at other things that were originally thought to be highly uh gender specific and has shown to largely not be the case um like adhd or add i'm going to say add specifically i do think we diagnose a lot of the time with a lot of add cases as adhd specifically adhd would be a subset of that um but within add you see two major types inattentive and hyperactive inattentive was believed to be more than male hyperactive was blood to be more than female but i think i might have the backwards i'm not an add specialist by any means i don't i don't seem to have it so i don't know much about it um never worked with anybody with it either i know more about cerebral palsy than i do about edd huh those aren't described as gender-specific you don't see male form of add or female form of adv it's inattentive and hyperactive that's it what many in the community thinks is probably the better way to go about addressing this is that you have verbal and nonverbal autism and then with or without camouflage right you covered it all it has nothing to do with sex because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with it maybe maybe they are biased one way or the other but but this doesn't exclude a typical presentation a typical presentation for that and i would encourage looking at it through that lens rather than through a heavily gender cleanse but recall one of those things i said about why these researchers were thinking that it was a gendered sex thing women have better social skills and are able to use this camouflaging to seem less autistic there's an article here by oh it doesn't have the first name but uh h amy aim i don't know what that last name is so camouflaging predicts internalizing problems in young adults without autism but it includes with autism that's a weird title i wonder if that's a typo but oh no this actually was about oh okay um i'm going to include i'm going to mention this part anyways but i do need to talk about this article again i forgot why i included this this was a finding after but it was to back up something i said much earlier in this video so i'll just read this part additionally camouflaging predicted internalizing problems over and above social competence autistic traits age iq and gender these results are consistent with previous reports that camouflaging is associated with oral mental health outcomes in autistic individuals but also where was the oh results indicate that among non-autistic young adults those with greater social skills reported less camouflaging suggesting that increases in camouflaging behavior is associated with poorer social competence now i'm not saying that women or autistic women or anything like that have poorer social skills i just want to i've been bringing this up because it really hits the nail on the head with how these sexual stereotypes have completely polluted the discourse and diagnostics in these conditions and even the research around them so it's time to get into how this has to do with harm okay this is the second part of the unintended but hinted that camouflaging asking whatever you want to call it is really bad for people's mental health hopefully the example i gave kind of extending it to non-autistic people makes it obvious like how along my lines i'm kind of going on here the oh it doesn't have the first name again so mk pelton and others are autistic traits associated with suicidality there's a rest of that title um they were able to find that yes it was in fact highly correlated but what exactly is suicidality why didn't they say suicide and what are the suicidality rates suicidality includes the actual suicide attempts which would include both successful and failed suicide attempts but also what would be considered a serious um idealization of suicide so not oh if you break up with me i'm going to kill myself that's not suicidality that is a form of manipulation um disgusting when people do that that is incredibly very dirty manipulative tactic but we're talking about somebody who actually thinks they would be better off dead yeah so this is idealization or um idealization or an actual attempt to die this is not i'm gonna threaten to kill myself for some kind of game the suicidality rate in the autistic 35 percent it is ridiculously high as i mentioned it was found to largely be the result of pushing this masking or camouflaging behavior epa largely teaches it but it's not the only way in which this is learned a lot of the times societal pressures sometimes even parental pressures encourage this kind of behavior it's problematic obviously enough i shouldn't need to explain that you're talking about a thing that directly leads to people wanting to die because they think they would be better off another study um i don't remember which one of these it is but it's down there somewhere in the video description found that even when it doesn't lead to an actual suicide attempt it still leads to an increased amount of internalization of problems so this is where instead of seeing a problem for what it is like oh hey i was trying to talk with this other person and we just didn't see eye to eye on those things and whatever you know because you can have completely innocent social breakdown in which two people are neither one of them is particularly at fault just have totally different perspectives that are irreconcilable um you're very unlikely to have somebody who grew up um upper middle class from the city to be able to sit down at a bar and have a good uh relatable conversation with somebody who grew up in the backwoods lower middle class it's like a logger or something they are almost certainly not going to get along with each other and it's not that either one of them is socializing wrong it's that they just have essentially nothing they could possibly relate to each other when internalization becomes a factor instead of seeing that for what it is you would go oh i'm a fuck-up i'm a failure i completely messed this up this is all my fault you've seen that in other people they were quite possibly severely depressed it's really anxious something but that is obviously a bad um a very bad state to be in that that is a severe mental health problem so i don't want to drag this video on too much longer we're looking at about half an hour so kind of uh clockwise right now i will be doing another video on the unintended harm at some point i try to put something else in there to break this up for a little bit i'm not even going to try to promise the next video is going to be tomorrow i haven't been doing that all that well so there'll be a new video at some point this month until then have a good one guys