Autistic Advice #6: Choosing the job that’s right for you — and keeping it. — Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a recurring series where I respond to questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist. You can send me questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, linked here. Today, I’ll be responding…

If all attachment wounds are interpersonal, how can healing them come from within? — One of the books that kept me company during my week of no posting was Jessica Fern’s Polysecure, a book ostensibly all about building attachment security within polyamorous and non-monogamous relationships. …

A social media power-user chooses to touch some grass. — Since I created my Tumblr account over eleven years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than three days without posting. On a typical day, I will post at least half a dozen times, across a variety of social media platforms. Often far more than that. In the last…

Your therapist is positioned to take your side — that’s both a good and bad thing. — Yesterday, I stumbled upon a tweet that sadly reminds me of numerous avid therapy-goers I’ve met in real life:

I’ve made thousands of dollars by filling out class action settlement forms online. Here’s how you can, too. — In the mid-2010s, I’d check blogs like Consumerist regularly. I’d sit down with my coffee and cereal in the morning, pop open the site, and read about the latest product the grocery store shrink ray had secretly reduced in size overnight (a phenomenon we all refer to as shrinkflation now)…

Case in point: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in kids with ADHD or Autism. — When children struggle socially or emotionally, many parents are strongly motivated to believe the struggle must have some biological cause. This makes discussing the interpersonal and cultural roots of many mental illnesses very difficult and fraught. For example, if a kid has a very powerful emotional reaction to rejection, and…

Know the costs — and the legal risks. — I literally wrote the book on the large and diverse population of Autistic adults who, for a variety of reasons usually related to marginalization, make it well into adulthood before discovering they have a disability. I call this group of Black, brown, trans, gay, female, elderly, and impoverished Autistics “masked…

A “deleted scene” from my book Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity — Eric, a Black queer parent in his forties had to spend years looking for a psychiatrist who would even entertain assessing him as Autistic. He knew he wanted the potential legal protections that a diagnosis could afford him, particularly the option to take qualifying exams for graduate school in a…

Throughout 2020, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot emphasized the role irresponsible individuals played in the spread of COVID-19, leveraging shame to downplay the role city policy played in rising case numbers. In Lightfoot’s response, we can see a microcosm of how COVID-19 was bungled by public institutions at just about every…