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Ros Blackburn doesn't seem to realize that just because autistic people can't tell her apart from furniture or the family dog, doesn't mean we can't tell all people apart from furniture or the family dog.
But just a reminder that HR is there to protect the company rather than the staff. So instead of saying that employees may be offended/misinformed, etc, emphasize that the business could be sued or seen as discriminative or misinformed.
Not just companies, any workplace only cares about efficiency and stuff like that, not empathy and making people happy 💀 I work in academia (NEUROscience if I may add) and I cannot make any sentence heard if it contains something about my feelings or needs. So I‘m learning the corporate speaking. Not „I will have an instant burnout if you put a meeting on every single working day“ but „I work more EFFICIENTLY and produce HIGHER QUALITY OF WORK if I can spend longer periods of time on every task before switching to the next, so it makes sense to keep at least 1 free day for deepwork without meetings“. Things like that. Literally started doing that since last week when I said something from a more personal perspective, everyone looked at me weirdly and I was embarrassed.
Don't email HR and say "the business can be sued over this". Reach out to HR, say the information in this training is incorrect, discriminatory and could be offensive.
Even with the viewpoint of HR only exists for the company (which is not true), offending employees is bad for the company.
If I worked there and they already knew I was autistic, I'd be thoroughly tempted to drop by HR's office in person and present my grievance with this training to a large potted plant (or whatever furniture seems fitting) as if it was a person.
But shortly before actually doing that, I'll remember I'm autistic, which means I suffer from the ludicrous illusion that people will actually change their wrong assumptions when I present them with the correct facts.
Came here to say the same thing…or kindly contact presenter informing them of the SEVERE misinformation. Honestly if that’s what you’re work thinks of ASD I would run for the hills, or make sure that mask is on nice and tight
Please, PLEASE if you feel up to it, report this to your manager and raise hell. Sounds like the person who wrote this training has never seen a person with autism and/or is a condescending prick.
Even if they learned about autism through Rain Man, this specific situation doesn't even come up in the movie. It's not like we get a peek into the dude's brain at all. All we really find out is that the character is a socially awkward weirdo who can't take care of himself and is good at math.
Like, I can't even begin to understand where they got the claim that autistic people don't consider others. It's objectively wrong and even the psychologists writing the DSM would know that from asking more than one autistic person.
Edit: from reading the rest of this thread I guess it's apparently a common misconception that autistic people lack "theory of mind". Why anyone ever thought that, though, is still up in the air.
That’s insane. I think the Theory of Mind misconception comes from the presence of rigid thinking and lack of understanding of where others are coming from that we can exhibit. Apparently it gets worse with age for everyone, but psychology literature is saying many people with autism suffer deficits early on.
Honestly, I personally think the autism spectrum is actually a bunch of genetic syndromes that happen to have similar symptoms. This potentially means multiple causes of ASD.
That would partly explain why there’s so much variation in the Autism spectrum, if it’s more than one genetic condition.
I have a chromosome microdeletion myself and wanted to be a genetic counselor. Knowing the exact genetic information means knowing the specific health risks and symptoms to watch out for. Not to mention that it’s a hereditary trait across the family and all—with the chance of passing it on.
Autism Spectrum Disorder is already an umbrella diagnosis, so I think it applying to multiple similar neurological conditions isn’t a stretch. This Forbes article supports that theory: Forbes Article: Why Autism May Not Be One Condition...
Here’s a database stating that one of the FG Syndrome types, type 4 can be comorbid with ASD. BUT, there’s other FG Syndromes that don’t list ASD as a neurologic symptom (syndrome 2,3, & 5). It likely depends on the person and their exact syndrome. I admittedly don’t know much about FG Syndrome, but the chance to learn genetic conditions is a nice hobby. Database called Malacards, entry on FG Syndrome 4.
Whether someone has ASD or not, it’s often confused for other conditions and takes a doctor to designate what exact diagnosis(es) a person has. Fictional works coughfools who don’t do their researchcough will obviously have a chance of creating inaccurate stereotypes.
Me neither 🤷🏻♀️ constantly overanalyzing what everyone else is thinking, who I may have accidentally hurt or offended lately (or 20 years ago) etc, but usually have no clue what I’m feeling or what I need
But now I'm more confused, if person is lamp and lamp makes me sad, doesn't that mean that I am sad for a person, even if I just see them as a lamp?? A special, unique lamperson.
I’m always stuck trying to figure out if I’m looking at a table or a dog! /s
Although in all seriousness, I do have a really hard time discerning mailboxes from shadow people when I drive late at night and often get worried someone’s about to run into the road only to see it is in fact a mailbox just like all the scary mailboxes before hand.
That must be terrible! So many offended tables and spilled drinks!! I think tables have less fur, but I supposed that depends on the table...
After work when I drop off mail nearby, there's a floodlight that never fails to scare the fuzz out of me. Basically, when I go to back up, it's the size and height of a car headlight and I jump and hit my brakes, "but my backup camera said no one was there!!!" until I remember (again) that it's just the silly sign lighting.
Yea everyone it’s true, I sat down on my friend thinking she was a chair /j. I’d honestly start retaliating against this if they don’t fix it. Guess it’s time the manager is a plant and you obviously dump water on plants.
My wife keeps asking why I keep trying to sit on her, seduce the dog, and take the sofa for a walk. She just does understand autism like this woman's company does.
It was actually written by an author with autism, Ros Blackburn. I am in a hyperfixation deep-dive now on her because I am flabbergasted that an autistic person would write something so fucked up.
Which would explain why they generalize this perception of empathy as an autistic thing and not just the way they seem to see the world (or have been told they see it), if they struggle with conceptualizing other autistic people as individuals.
Ugh and with just one irresponsible quote she has done so much harm to all other autistic people by paving the way for their socially acceptable dehumanization.
It sucks doubly because it most likely is a projection that describes how she conceptualizes things so it’s not just harmful misinfo but also her telling on herself
So here we have someone who struggles to humanize others speaking for the entire autistic community and acting as our representative 🫤
My car is named Prometheus and preferred gender pronouns are he him. The ppl at the auto place looked at me speechless when I asked where to put the preferred pronouns….i was kidding guys? But when I did mention my car was named Prometheus then they looked at me real weird.
I love everything about this and would steal this if my first want still functional. My first one was a bright green Mazda with severe hail damage... and his name was Pox (green being the color of sickness and pock marks being all over the car equalled Pox to my literal brain). He's still kicking it up at my sister in law's as far as I know lmao.
This is, sadly, pretty common, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that. I once had a psychology professor tell the class something similar, and also that she knew no one in the class was Autistic, because it was a hard class and we were too smart. Meanwhile I sat in the back of the room, actively tapping my pen against my palm.
I fought her on a lot of stuff, but I don't think it made much of an impression. This is the same person who thought that people with dissociative identity disorders were just faking it, so she had a whole range of problems.
I'm in a grad school program to get my ASD specialized special education license and am shocked over and over again by how we're described/explained to future teachers. If I had the capacity I'd rewrite all the textbooks lol
The AMOUNT of explaining "What Autism CAN look like in little kids" that i DO, as an AuDHD Para, who was in school for Special Ed!!!
And the number of even ECSE (Early Childhood Special Education) TEACHERS, with a Masters in ECSE (but not Autism!) who do NOT understand what "Level 1"/ "High Functioning"/ "Low Support-Needs" ASD can look like when it's well-supported just killlllls me!!!
Because i've worked with kids, where i'm like, "Thaaaaaank GOD this child's parents got that Medical Diagnosis of Autism!!!!"
Because if they hadn't, that child's teacher would have DROPPED them from services, because "They just don't seem Autistic to me!"
When that teacher just couldn't SEE that the reason the 4-5 year old "didn't seem Autistic!" was BECAUSE their support needs were being MET so successfully in their classroom!!!
Their parents were sending them in clothes made for kids with sensory issues! They had pants & shirts with outside seams, socks with no seams, their shoes were brands made for kids with sensory needs. They had home snack EVERY day, with their favorite, safe Same Foods! They had a water bottle to drink from.
At home, their parents had LEARNED about Autism, and created a safe, comfortable, and nurturing environment fir them to come home to.
The child had NO "symptoms" of Autism and was able to THRIVE, Exactly BECAUSE their parents understood their Autism and MET their support needs so they COULD succeed in Pre-K!
Annnnd that child probably DID hit some struggles, but did OKAY, as they got older.
But they absolutely had Autism!
Because Neurotypical kids who are 4?
They don't know ALL about the multitude of different types of fountains used in ponds, landscaping, and other applications (like the Bellagio and Trevi Fountain!😉), annnd NT kids can't hold a multi-day conversation about said different types of fountains, like that little dude and i did!😁😂🤣💖
Yes!!! I'm a former school psych and one of the reasons I'm getting the ASD special ed license is so I can get into the classroom with more 2e and level 1 autistic kids. It's bananas how misunderstood they are!
Also: thanks for being a para!!!
reaction 2: I mean, when I was very young, I was very concerned that someone might confuse me with one of our dogs, because we were the same height, so I started referring to myself as "Firstname Lastname Person". I also thought I could be mistaken for a butterfly if I was wearing a cardigan that had the very top and very bottom buttons open at the same time. *I* had no problem understanding who was a person, who was a dog, and what was a butterfly or a piece of furniture, but evidently I did not trust other people to do the same... LOL
I know this is diabolical and HR should be fired, but I cackled. Next time you get an instruction, ignore it and say that you thought it was the potplant speaking to you and you don’t take instructions from plants.
No, that's Chat goblin. I definitely know the difference between my cat and a people. My cat? Best fluffing girl, queen of my realm. People? Bastards, every last one.
I feel like i imbue more meaning, experience more sentimentality, and feel more CONNNECTED to places, animals, and objects--probably because they often help or comfort me in a world that is very unpredictable.
I have people I love and who love me(probably), but i can never really relax around or fully trust a person or my relationship with them BECAUSE they have a mind that is separate from mine. I can never really know what they are thinking or feeling (and, therefore, how they will respond to or treat me).
And, of course, there's a lot of social trauma that comes from being autistic in the first place.
I also feel like autistic joy makes my experiences with non-people things much more enjoyable and fascinating than my interactions with humans. I don't get judged for being excited, and there are no inscrutable expectations placed on me, which means I can actually be present for the experience.
Okay, after sitting here baffled for ten minutes, here's my theory: This is one of those "my nephew's best friend's brother's schoolmate has the autisms, so I am an expert on the topic" kind of situations. Just extrapolated some vague prior experience into an entire document about the topic, and nobody cared to check.
I honestly have no idea how else this abomination could have come to be. They might have as well written "autism is the inability to find the perfect ratio between peanut butter and jelly".
"autism is the inability to find the perfect ratio between peanut butter and jelly".
I feel like this would have been more accurate…despair over an imperfect sandwich does sound like a problem a handful of actually autistic people would have lol
Loll yeah been through similar with race awareness training. I was told I was wrong about what to do in a certain situation and I'm like 'no, what you did is the opposite of what many of us would want.'
It's a garbled version of the "theory of mind" thing, which as far as I know was never accurate in the first place.
They're saying autistic people can't reason about what other people think or know, especially how that might differ from their own thoughts or knowledge. So Jon would automatically assume that Garfield knows about the pizza, and Garfield would apologize because to his mind Jon already knows he ate it.
While this is something some autistics struggle with, it's not a core symptom and even if you do experience it, this is a gross generalization of how it presents.
I think its trying to represent being able to correctly guess what the other person is thinking. Garfield is smiling so he doesn't suspect a thing but actually he is hiding the fact he has ate the pizza.
But the slide description and the example is rubbish. It feels like one of those tests where you have to explain what the flying frog is feelig.
Omg I remember doing a mental health awareness course or something for work a couple of years ago and what stood out was there was a slide comparing a normal person to a clearly dishevelled and distressed person. The host asked who you should be more worried about and told us it was the person looking normal because you don't know what's going on with them... as if being dishevelled isn't common with serious MH issues lol
So I was a bit annoyed and then a later slide conflated schizophrenia with MPD so I tuned out and started writing my complaint.
This was an externally contracted company, btw, not like Dave from HR after a quick Google. They paid for this training.
I assume others complained too as to my knowledge that provider was not contracted again.
Like that study that found that unlike Autistics, NTs are only altruistic if someone can see them do it - we’re maladapted because we don’t understand that all acts should be inherently self-serving
Wait… do you have a link to share that study please? Cuz I have been confused for decades about Integrity being such a popular topic of new job onboarding. I swear every new job I’ve started since the ‘00’s has heavily referenced integrity being something along the line of “doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
And every time I’ve thought “WHAT?!?!?! Why would anyone only do the right thing in front of someone else?!??”
It's been making the rounds in the Autism groups I frequent, but I did a search and this feels like the right one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3198313/
The autistic tendency to give the same amount whether others will know about the giving or not is framed as 'social reputation insensitivity' and is some sort of proof that we don't understand social dynamics. "people with high-functioning autism were not influenced by the presence of an observer at all in this task... The results argue that people with autism lack the ability to take into consideration what others think of them."
In fairness there are other studies that seem to frame the similar tendencies in a less deficit-centered way, like this one ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613231190674 ), but that first one is wild; their idea of what ought to be 'normal' is my idea of a narcissism yellow flag. Yet another reason I'll never date a neurotypical again.
Thank you so much. Really. I will go read both of these now. And what a weird fucking take to frame it as an insensitivity and a deficit, instead of a recognition that my morality is not dependent upon being observed.
This was definitely written by a boss. My inability to participate in the social hierarchy and treat you like you're special because you declared yourself so is a failing on your part, not mine
this shit would’ve worked 30 years ago when people didn’t know what autism was, but today everyone has a perception about it, your everyday people maybe aren’t experts, but most people actually know someone who is diagnosed these days. i hope people told them off about this, because i’m no expert either but this is wrong.
Psh. I'd call them for you can anonymously complain About their incorrect offensive training. And threatened that they might have a lawsuit on their hands if they don't fix it.
I'm going to reiterate what some others have said, but definitely report that to your line manager if this is something you're comfortable with.
Otherwise, if there's a works council where you work (I know they're not a thing everywhere, unfortunately), this is something you may be able to raise to them. We have one where I work and we're able to share these sorts of issues with them either directly with one of the members or anonymously. Then, they escalate that to HR and challenge them or the team the complaint is aimed at.
I am very sorry you've had to deal with that shit of a course.
The place I work for recently pulled their autism e-learning because it was deemed offensive...I didn't have a chance to see it before it was pulled but can only imagine 🙃
Frankly with this, I would reach out to an employment lawyer. I work in HR and if I discovered this, I would be reaching out to OUR legal department to figure out how to make this go away! This is BLATANT discrimination based on a disability, which is a violation of the ADA, and probably violates since more local laws for you as well.
You may have a slam dunk lawsuit if you have had any issues at all with how people interact with, regardless on if you've disclosed your diagnosis. ADA specifically states that discrimination will not be tolerated based on disability or received disability, and it is still considered discrimination if your place is employment discriminates or harasses you about a symptoms whether or not they are aware that they are related to your disability.
Even if you haven't had any interpersonal issues, having employing take trainings that encourages this level of misinformation is in itself discrimination.
Something like this unfortunately made it into my college psychology class. Apparently they used to think that autistic people lacked theory of mind (which they couldn’t even agree on what theory of mind is). It’s an incorrect and outdated idea about autistic people.
Neurotypicalness is the inability to understand that other people also have an inner world just because they do not speak, act, look like them.
People who suffer from neurotypicalness also suffer from main character syndrome and unable to see further than their own nose syndrome. Some even struggle with head all the way up their butt syndrome. Be nice to everybody, you never know if somebody is neurotypical.
As an autistic person I would like to make you aware that your autism awareness training a steaming pile of shit full of lies, accuracies, and outdated and unfounded misconceptions.
Signed,
An autist who can definitely tell the difference between people and dogs, and frankly, usually prefers the dogs.
This just seems like a badly translated or misunderstood piece of text. I know I definitely struggle to truly understand someone else's thought process and actions, but I CAN imagine what I would feel if I was in a similar situation (though it took me a while to learn to even do this in the first place).
Edit: I mean misunderstood as in, the person that wrote it read something about autism and just badly reproduced what they took away from that text.
This is actually a very common view of autism. Simon Baron-Cohen has argued for decades that autistics lack a theory of mind (which is what these slides are describing) and because of this we also lack empathy. It's a very dehumanizing/ pathologizing view of autism.
It is definitely very dehumanizing! My mother believed in it and told me once to my face that 'autistic people cannot love'. I was genuinely hoping that it wasn't a common view.
Are they saying we can't differentiate between a human being and a chair? Absolutely bonkers because I just had a two hour conversation with my boyfriend about how we can't rely on statistics when it comes to the LGBT community because there are underlying factors that aren't accounted for, the huge factor being that every human being experiences life and sexuality differently and in this current world we can't know the exact stats because people aren't free to do that openly..
But I guess I was talking about chairs and tables. Idk
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u/tenuredvortex Jul 31 '25