This Is “Profound Autism”?: Reframing the Discussion Around Complex Care Needs

Posted on by Astrid

A few days ago, there was a discussion on the Autism Science Foundation’s Facebook page in which parents of autistic adults with complex care needs were describing their children with the hasthag #ThisIsProfoundAutism. I asked to reframe the discussion to include people with multiple disabilities including autism in general, because it is rarely (but not never!) autism, no matter how severe, alone that causes a person to be completely dependent on caretakers. I then explained that due to the combination of my disabilities, I need 24-hour care, including one-on-one for most of the day.

Not surprisingly, I was quickly met with the question whether I was saying I needed 24-hour help with basic tasks such as eating, bathing, dressing myself, etc. Well, the Autism Science Foundation page is a public Facebook page and I didn’t want the people on my friends list (including immediate family) who don’t know this, to judge me for it, but the short answer is yes. While I, like presumably most “profoundly autistic” people who don’t have physical disabilities, am physically capable of eating and dressing myself for the most part with some difficulty, my executive dysfunction means I still need help with them. As for bathing, well, I basically need someone to wash me, because, while I can physically hold a washcloth in my hand, I don’t have the organizational skills to actually work out the ritual without a ton of supervision and even then it’d lead to a lot of meltdowns.

I did, incidentally, point out that I recognize intellectual disability as a valid additional disability that needs to be taken into account when I asked to reframe the discussion. After all, that’s most likely what’s causing these autistic adults to be unable to understand instruction and to be completely dependent. For me, it’s a combination of executive dysfunction, which is a direct autism symptom, blindness, mild cerebral palsy, and other things.

I also do recognize that the need for support with severe challenging behavior is not the same as the need for help with basic personal care. One does not exclude or necessarily include the other and one is not more valid than the other. I, for one, am somewhat more independent in terms of eating, dressing and bathing than my severely intellectually disabled fellow clients. I am a lot more dependent where it comes to the effects of my challenging behavior.

I also do not mean to say that autism on its own cannot possibly cause a person to need a lot of care. It can. I am reminded of a girl I read about on Dutch social media many years ago, who indeed had hardly any functional communication skills but did have an IQ above 85. She, unlike me, didn’t have any additional disabilities. She was completely left behind in the care system: she was too severely disabled for traditional child and adolescent mental health services, but her IQ was too high for intellectual disability services. Really, I should not have called for reframing the discussion to include those with multiple disabilities, but those with complex care needs in general.

That being said, I strongly disagree with those people who say that just because I can write, means I should have ignored the conversation, since it clearly wasn’t meant for me. The fact that I can write, does not make me not dependent on care providers and does not mean policy or lack thereof won’t affect me. I am autistic and that, along with my blindness and other disabilities, causes me to need the extensive care I get now.

Working On Us Prompt: ADHD

Posted on by Astrid

It is Wednesday and that means Beckie has launched another topic in the Working On Us Series. I badly wanted to participate last week, when the topic was (complex) PTSD. However, I felt too low on energy then. This week, the topic is ADHD.

I was never diagnosed with ADHD, so in this sense I have little to add here. I, however, do experience many symptoms that could be signs of particularly inattentive-type ADHD. They overlap a lot with autistic symptoms though, which I do have a diagnosis of. At this point, I don’t think it’s necessary for me to get an official ADHD assessment. Most groups for adult ADHD/ADD welcome self-diagnosed individuals and those who are questioning, like me.

Symptoms I relate to include restlessness, both physically and mentally. I’m not necessarily hyperactive in that I blurt out random things, but I do fidget like all the time and my mind is usually racing. That is, it is either racing or completely shut off, like when I’m low on energy.

The same really goes for impulsiveness: I’m not impulsive in the typical way, but I am in less typical ways. For example, every need feels urgent to me. This applies to basic human needs like eating – when I feel hungry, it feels as though I’m literally starving -, but also to other wants and needs. This could be related to autistic sensory processing issues, but I believe it’s more than this, especially since it doesn’t just apply to sensory or bodily needs.

As for inattentiveness, I can’t usually pay attention to something unless it really interests me, in which case I hyperfocus and become totally absorbed to the exclusion of other activities. I know this is an ADHD trait, but it is also common in autistics and I’ve always wondered whether everyone doesn’t have this issue to an extent.

Lastly, my executive functions seem to suck. My memory for random words or digits is about average and used to be above-average, but for everyday life experiences (particularly others’ experiences) and daily tasks, it’s pretty bad. I was told when I did a behavioral memory test (where you have to retell a short newspaper story) as part of my autism assessment, that my memory is detail-oriented.

With respect to planning and organizing tasks, I suck at those and always have. I used to do pretty well when faced with a deadline, but even then I struggled to organize tasks. I recently read that ADHD children often learn to do tasks on high adrenaline. The reason is often that neurotypical adults assume that, if a child is capable of something relatively difficult once, they must be able to do it all the time and must be able to do all assumed-to-be-easier tasks in that category. For this reason, neurotypical adults often force ADHD children into doing tasks they cannot yet do, assuming they can, and as such cause the child high anxiety. This causes an adrenaline rush, which temporarily increases the child’s ability to perform.

When I read this conversation on Facebook (it was originally posted to Tumblr but I don’t know where), so many bells rang in my head. Like many people referred to in this conversation, I can sometimes do seemingly more complex tasks while not being able to do simpler tasks in that same category. I am also very inconsistent in my abilities, usually being able to perform a task under pressure better, but with less pleasure. For clarity’s sake, this conversation was meant to explain the harmful effects of forcing children to do tasks they feel they are not capable of.

Since I do not have an ADHD diagnosis, I’ve not had any treatment specific to it. I’m also not on ADHD medication. I, however, find that some coping strategies that work for ADHD individuals, do work for me.

Why I Am in Long-Term Care

Posted on by Astrid

The day 1 prompt for this year’s 31-day writing challenge is “Why”. I immediately thought of the question that keeps popping up in my mind whenever I meet someone new at the care facility: Why am I in long-term care? Today, for example, I met a student doctor who was touring our home. I informed her midway through our conversation that I don’t have an intellectual disability, to which she replied that she could tell. Well, duh! Even when I’m overloaded, like I was at the time, and experiencing pretty bad language problems, I still sound like someone with at least an average IQ.

So why am I in long-term care? To a casual stranger, I could just point to my lack of sight and they’d be satisfied. Not a doctor or even a medical student, I guess. The medical advisor for the funding agency understandably concluded that blindness alone doesn’t warrant 24-hour care. Neither does mild cerebral palsy. And, as regular readers of this blog know, autism, being seen as a psychiatric condition, doesn’t count.

They finally found a way around this situation by saying that my disabilities are intertwined. They are, of course. In multiple disabilities, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, the short answer to why I’m in long-term care is because I’m blind and autistic and have mild CP, not because I have any of these alone.

This is the legal answer. The way the funding agency found around the stupidly close-minded look at disabilities the law requires medical advisors to have. The long answer is, of course, that my individual care needs mean I need 24-hour proximity of care.

I have significant executive functioning issues. These cannot be objectified by tests because I’m blind and the tests of executive functioning that are available, are all visual. For this reason, the medical advisor wrongly concluded that I don’t have cognitive impairments. I don’t have an intellectual disability, but that’s not the same.

These executive functioning difficulties make it hard for me to take care of myself. I can do basic self-care activities with reminders and prompting, but then still I often mess up.

People, including my support staff, have used my blindness as an excuse for my difficulty with basic self-care. Of course I can’t see when my clothes are dirty, but if I were just blind, I would be able to prevent the most common causes of my clothes getting dirty. Like, I would be able to prevent myself from drooling over them, or I would be able to find other ways around it.

People also use my blindness as an excuse for my needing proximity of care. If I were just blind though, I would still struggle to know when staff had left the room, but I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by it.

But I’m not just blind. Had I been just blind, I wouldn’t have needed to apply for long-term care. And yet, paradoxically, my care ground is blindness.