Polly's pages (aka 'Donna Williams')

Ever the arty Autie

Autism, Finland style and public speaker, Heta Pukki

May5

Rope Swing by Donna Williams Heta Pukki is a public speaker diagnosed on the autism spectrum who is listed on http://www.auties.org . She she is speaking about the autism world in Finland. She has some interesting things to say about autism history, activism and relationships Autistic style. Here’s our interview.

DONNA:
Heta, I haven’t been to Finland but have been to Norway a few times. So tell us about Finland.

HETA:
Finland is a country in Northern Europe, with Russia to the east and
Sweden to the west from us. There are about 5 million Finns, and we
have our own language that hardly anyone else in the world understands
– apart from a million Estonians. It’s a relatively wealthy, safe
country to live, although the Nordic style social security, public
health care and so forth are somewhat crumbling.

DONNA:
You’re are a child of the 60s and on the autism spectrum. When and how did
you find out you were on the autism spectrum?

HETA:
I knew I was different from a very early age. I remember formulating
clear ideas about this at age four. I was also examined by
psychologists at that age, and my problems were misinterpreted in
psychoanalytical terms typical of the early seventies, but luckily I
was left to manage without any extensive attempts to fix me.

I was academically gifted and withdrawn, so I didn’t cause enough trouble
for anyone to bother. I started looking for answers in my twenties, as
my career in biology failed, and as I found myself unable to start
relationships. Eventually I got very depressed, drifted around
aimlessly, hitch-hiking and doing odd jobs. I did some work on an
organic farm, and there ran into a special ed teacher who taught a
class of autistic children. She recommended that I read Temple
Grandin’s biography. I read everything I could find, and joined the
ANI mailing list – in 1997, I think. It was immediately clear to me
that here were the people who understood me, who described my
difficulties. Getting the clinical diagnosis a few years later was
just a minor formality to me.

DONNA:
Yes, a bit of a different journey to me. I was assessed as psychotic at age 2 in 1965, labeled disturbed through childhood and diagnosed with autism in 1990 when the stereotypes about autism were really narrow, Asperger’s was not yet a diagnosis and there were no other autie biographies published in English except my first one, Nobody Nowhere and Temple’s some years before (and our writings and lives couldn’t be more different). So it was a time where the autism world went through great changes, making things easier for others like you to be diagnosed by the mid 90s.

In the mid 1990s you found the few autism groups that existed, one of which
was ANI which was formed in Kathy Grant’s living room with her, Jim Sinclair
and I around 1994. Tell us about the autism scene and politics in the mid
1990s.

HETA:
I joined the ANI mailing list and soon after that the autuniv list run
by Clare Sainsbury. I was also vaguely aware of the Independent Living
list. There weren’t nearly as many adult diagnoses as there are these
days, of course. Everyone seemed to gather in those few discussions.
It felt kind of cozy, you got the sense of a small group of people
pulling pretty much in the same direction. Ideas moved quickly from
one country to another. I don’t think most people who participated
back then thought of it as politics. I certainly didn’t. I just
thought it was a lot of fun, suddenly having friends and new kinds of
opportunities for action.

DONNA:
So cool that something we started out of isolation as 3 people in a world which believed autistic people were 4 in 10,000 of the population, turned into something ‘cosy’ for many others. It’s kind of like we build a shack and others expanded it into a complex 😉

Being Finnish, how long did it take to find the first Finns on the spectrum
to hang out with and what was that like to finally find people in your own
country.

HETA:
The first ones I met were actually Swedish. I went to a conference in
Sweden and met a whole group of people, some of whom I already knew
from the Internet. I was terrified of approaching anyone, I could see
that a group of autistic people collected in one part of the lecture
hall, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone. I just kept
freezing in total panic. Then at lunch I saw that there was an empty
place at the table where some of these people sat… and I just went
over and asked if I could join them, said that I thought I already
knew some of them from the Internet. And I did; Martijn Dekker was the
first one I talked to, face to face, and there were also Gunilla
Gerland and Dave Spicer. They welcomed me warmly, and I was instantly
part of the group, participating in the discussion. This was a unique
experience to me back then, a transformation. I had read Gunilla’s
book, and here I was talking to her. I thought, can life really change
like this? Can I walk into stories, become a totally different person,
someone who can sit down at a table with a group of people and belong,
instantly? I was also impressed by Dave Spicer’s talk, the fact that
someone could act visibly autistic and still deliver such a convincing
message, radiating confidence and charisma.

Meeting autistic Finnish people happened in a very different way. I
set up a peer group, with the help of Aila Halme, the executive
director of our national autism association back then – she was a key
person to me, a crucial supporter in those times. I advertised, made
tea at the association office, lit candles and waited. There were
three of us at the first meeting, and together we set out to find some
more. I remember being determined and confident, no longer scared of
meeting new autistic people. I just knew there would soon be more of
us, also in Finland. Since then, a lot has happened of course, and the
whole scene is totally different.

DONNA:
That’s so exciting. I remember hearing from the first Japanese autistic adults, each asking me, are there any more of us in Japan? So I linked them up and they formed the first Japanese group and that’s grown now. I don’t think people these days can imagine how isolated we all were from each other in the early 90s. Many of us born before the 70s had never been told of our diagnoses because of the social taboo and many of those who weren’t institutionalised (which was standard in the 60s and before) were often bashed into ‘acting normal’, hidden away or told they were mad or retarded to save saying the word ‘autistic’ with the connotations it had for mothers in those days.

How does Finnish culture fit in with autism? Do you feel it’s an autism
friendly culture?

HETA:
A lot of people seem to assume that it is, because Finns are known as
rather stiff and minimal in terms of emotional expression. Maybe it is
true, for the more introverted autistic person; Finns are not as much
in your face as people in most countries, we allow each other space.
It’s socially acceptable to be a bit reserved, you’re not expected to
jump up and down with enthusiasm or spout as much insincere politeness
as in many other countries.

You can walk around in the woods or spend
time alone at a cottage on your free time, and no one will think it’s
strange. But there’s another side to it too: the more extroverted,
loud, colourful autistic personality really sticks out and does not
get the acceptance that the British, for example, show towards
eccentrics.

Bureaucracy is pretty bad here too, the public health care
and social benefits systems are very slow to learn about autism, and
the job market is not very accepting of any kind of difference. I see
too many autistic people with no diagnosis, no recognition of their
service needs, endlessly frustrated with having to negotiate about
their most basic needs with stiff bureaucrats who know absolutely
nothing about proper autism services.

DONNA:
Yes, there are still MANY born in the 50s, 60s, 70s who were never told.

I was fascinated by how you made the same marriage mistake I did, which I wrote about
in Like Colour To The Blind and in Everyday Heaven (although I went on to
marry ‘the right one’ in Everyday Heaven after the divorce from hell with
the first one). We both married someone on the spectrum quickly just
because of sharing ‘spectrum stuff’ then finding that as PEOPLE you were
simply too different. Tell me about that because there are many people on
the spectrum who really think this is what they are looking for.

HETA:
I think it’s easy to be impressed by how similar two people on the spectrum are… for a
while. Then you start finding out how many of your personal likes and
dislikes are similar, and how many just personal. With my ex, David, we certainly had some good times and often managed to work
together well, if we had some shared goal, but in the long run we both
became miserable. I felt that I was going insane, and I felt that
David wasn’t well either, that the situation was just bringing out the
worst in both of us. We went through some conflict and disagreement,
but soon after we had separated I feel we both started to get better,
and found ways to co-operate. We are friends now and this is the way I
feel things can work. The similarities are still there, and some
shared goals and values. We help each other when we can, we work
together professionally and in bringing up our daughter. Having some
distance, I can see obvious reasons to why we could not share a
household. We may have some similar challenges in daily life, but in
many ways completely opposite sensory needs and everyday solutions.
Trying to adjust to the other’s rules and accommodations would just
raise the stress levels for each of us.

DONNA:
You found both your husbands on the internet. Do you think that’s an autism
friendly way to find a partner? What are the traps and have you had any
close calls? Is there any way to truly tell people are who they say they
are?

HETA:
Yes, I met David on the autuniv list and my second husband Paul
Bourgeois on an internet discussion forum unrelated to autism. I think
it’s definitely an autism friendly way to meet people. It seems that
most of my contacts with people start this way, not just romantic
involvements but friendships, professional contacts, co-operation in
activism. It helps me to form a clear image of a person if I can read
some of their text first – the longer the better.

Being rather face-blind, I think the text gives me some kind of center that I can
associate things with, instead of the mental image of their face being
that center. I feel more confident on the Internet than I feel face to
face, and I don’t see that creating connections this way could be any
more risky for me than meeting people in “real life” (I consider
internet discussions quite real, so I find that expression misleading
actually).

Some people may pretend to be something they are not, on
the net, but that sort don’t want to get involved in the kind of
discussions I enjoy. I haven’t met anyone yet who would want to trick
or exploit me and who would also have the patience to talk to me. I
guess that sort of person doesn’t generally have the patience for
lengthy analytical conversation. If anything, the Internet probably
makes me more safe, as the nasty types would find out there’s nothing
to exploit here.

Meeting men in bars or on the basis of newspaper ads, when I was
younger, that I think was risky. When I was depressed I often didn’t
care about my safety much. But I have a manner and emotional
expression that tended to discourage the nastier ones, even back then.
I wasn’t very concerned about myself or them, not able to show much
reaction to anything, which I guess wasn’t very interesting to them.

DONNA:
It’s true that if one doesn’t trust, others often won’t trust you. If one doesn’t respect oneself, others often won’t respect you. If one doesn’t like one’s own company, others often won’t either. So its pretty important to make a really healthy relationship with oneself before expecting to have healthy relationships.

You have become well read on autism related info. Tell us how that learning
challenged assumptions and stereotypes for you?

HETA:
I started studying at the University of Birmingham when I had already
been participating on the net and organising activities for some time.
I guess I hadn’t formed any firm stereotypes or assumptions, mostly
learning from discussions with autistic people and from rather random
bits of literature.

Back then, we didn’t have any professionals or
public information in Finland who could have given me a clear,
coherent picture of what they thought autism is; all training in the
field was rather fragmentary.

So basically I had a background in
autistic activism, and while studying the Birmingham materials I
always tended to pitch that knowledge against the professional views
they offered. I tried to fit the two together, finding bits of
research and practice that might serve the people I knew, and
questioning the official wisdom when autistic people’s experiences
didn’t seem to agree with it.

They allow a lot of freedom in choosing
the topics of study assignments, and I ended up taking new angles to
the things closest to me, trying to apply some academic rigour to
looking at things like autistic people’s creative writing, and
experiences and personal solutions related to sexuality.

DONNA:
The field has come such a long way.

You have begun to try and set up autreats. Tell us about the concept, what
they are and why you believe in them? Also are they inclusive or
separatist? Are they diversity friendly or do they discriminate against
those non-autistic people some call ‘NTs’?

HETA:
I have not tried to set up autreats as such. I learned about ANI:s
Autreat conferences through the Internet, and I liked the idea of
events set up to serve autistic audiences, primarily. Everything that
was offered, in terms of information and networking opportunities,
seemed to be aimed at professionals and priced well out of our reach.
I figured we needed something that would suit our culture and funding
opportunities, and I also felt we should have a forum for public
debate, not so much the separate ‘autistic space’ of Autreat. I
believe there is a need for that too, sometimes, but I felt we needed
effective dissemination of information more than anything else.

What we have had, since 1998, is yearly seminars focused on AS/HFA
adult life issues. We have had both autistic and non-autistic
speakers, the latter usually representing service providers and
projects supposed to serve us. I had this vision, from the beginning,
of having professionals answering tough questions from a mainly
autistic audience, and sometimes it has worked; we’ve had some really
good discussions over the years.

Some years we’ve had one day, some years two days; sometimes we’ve
invited foreign speakers, sometimes not.

The seminars have been
administrated and funded by our national autism association, and the
position of the autistic people involved in planning and organising
has been, unfortunately, rather unclear.

There have been occasional
disagreements about how the seminars should be handled, even whether
they should be arranged at all. I have worked to keep them going, to
convince the association that autistic speakers must have equal status
with professionals (not be assigned only workshops, for example, while
professionals do the lectures); that there must be support measures in
place to help as many to participate as possible; that autistic
volunteers must be actively sought to participate in the arrangements,
and that their contribution must be respected and rewarded
appropriately, for example by allowing them free participation and by
covering their travel expenses.

I have also ended up finding speakers,
writing programs… now we have a project that will develop these
events further over the next two years. By the end of that I hope we
will finally have a clear concept, a division of work that both the
association and autistic volunteers can feel comfortable with. It’s a
lot of work but also rewarding. The people who are involved end up
learning a lot about autistic people’s needs and preferences, and
sometimes limitations in terms of organising capacity. I don’t think
we would learn as much if we limited it to autistic people only.

Our seminars have been open to everyone, and it seems that’s the way
they are going to stay. Some people have occasionally expressed ideas
about developing autistic-only events. I have argued that often a
non-autistic person needs the information just as badly, and may in
fact be the only one in a family who can participate and then deliver
the information to their autistic child, sibling or spouse.

I believe poor families are just as excluded from training events as single
autistic people. In Finland, and other relatively small countries I
believe, the autism scene does not get as nasty and divided as in
North America for example, so there is less need to isolate ourselves.
When we need our safe autistic space, we can create all-autistic peer
groups, picnics and local summer camps, and that I think is enough. At
the seminars, we have adopted one thing directly from Autreat: the
coloured interaction badges. That works really well.

DONNA:
Yes, when I first became a public speaker, it was all voluntary. We were lucky if anyone offered to even pay for our travel expenses and accomodation. The organisers were paying non-autistic speakers at professional rates with all expenses paid and even those of us on the spectrum with qualifications were usually paid nothing. It was amazing the way we were expected to behave like ‘pets’. I was often not expected to talk on any professional level, just to come along and give a little entertaining personal banter. And that bugged me so I developed my own lectures on really challenging subjects. In time, I was presenting alongside the non-autistic speakers as a paid speaker but never at their rates. Even today, I often headline as the key note but my fee has been moderate and standard for years and there are non-autistic speakers charging up to 16 times my fee. I was asked why I charge the rate I do and I enjoy telling people I do it as an embarassment to those who charge excessively 😉 (I also charge what I feel keeps participant fees down).

You’ve begun to do public speaking. Every public speaker on the spectrum
has their own specialities, as do I, and none of us can speak on behalf of
all people with a shared label as those with autism are often no more like
each other than those without autism are all alike (which they aren’t
either). So what’s your speciality as a public speaker in the autism world?
How affordable are you and how might people book you if they are interested
to do so?

HETA:
I have done public speaking since our first seminar in 1998, gradually
increasing the frequency and the range of my topics. I now earn my
living from planning study materials and courses, teaching and
lecturing.

Public speaking to large audiences is actually just a minor
part of it, but I’m happy to do that too. I guess my specialism would
be combining autism theory – everything I learned at Birmingham – and
the experience of working together with many other autistic adults in
building our own events and activities.

In everything I write, I end up setting up comparisons between the official knowledge and the
everyday knowledge of the people I know, or clever writers on the net.
This combination seems to give something both to autistic adults and
to professionals in the field.

Topics that I have studied in depth include autistic people’s organisations worldwide, creative writing (especially poetry), sexuality. Currently I’m reading all the current
research I can find on emotional reactions, and comparing that to the
work of autistic writers – your ideas about ‘exposure anxiety’, among
others.

People seem to have a great need to find ways to deal with
autism as something affecting the tone of their emotional life, not
just as a source of practical problems. They wonder if they are able
to give their child or spouse the kind of support that is needed, or
they want to know if it’s ok to allow someone the solitude they seem
to need, instead of pushing them to constant interaction. I try to
react to that kind of need, finding out what the current thinking is
from a variety of sources and translating it to something
comprehensible.

Often I feel that my greatest ability is in
summarising literature, helping people find the topics and sources
that they want to study in depth.

I think my services are affordable. For lectures and courses, I’ve
been charging 100 euros per hour plus expenses; outside Finland, the
travel expenses would become considerable of course, but basically
I’ll go anywhere in Europe, if I’m invited.

For associations or groups
arranging their own training events I’ll work for even less, provided
they do the organising as voluntary work. If an event is primarily for
professionals or meant to train professionals to be better at their
jobs, then I charge my full rate and encourage other autistic people
not give their work away for free either; the professionals don’t need
charity from us, and they should learn to value our time, effort and
knowledge just as they value their own.

DONNA:
You have ideas about supported employment for people on the autism spectrum
and changes needed in special education. What are some of your ideas?

HETA:
I haven’t really seen any realiable figures on unemployment among
autistic people. All the outcome studies and surveys pick their
participants in ways that would tend to overrepresent the less
successful. One thing that really needs to be done is some basic
research covering the whole spectrum, taking into account that those
who have no difficulty with employment are not so likely to seek
diagnosis or join associations; they may still be just as autistic. I
think we need to look at the positive solutions, the successful
strategies, and learn from them as well as the problem situations.

In Finland we have been talking about a co-operative for years. I’m
hoping it might finally become a reality, since we now have a project
meant to improve autistic people’s work situation, and they have
promised to help with the initial stages.

In our system, it’s not easy
to set up private enterprise, you tend to end up losing your social
security, which many people rely on for their most basic needs. A
co-operative could give us some of the benefits or entrepreneurship
while leaving a reasonable safety net. It could allow some to work
part-time or occasionally, trying out different strategies. It could
help us to organise exchange of services among ourselves, improving
our lives even when we wouldn’t necessarily make big profits all the
time. I don’t think it would necessarily have to be exclusively
autistic. A mixture of skills and abilities would be needed.

Regarding special education, I’ve been writing and talking about one
phenomenon that I keep running into in all kinds of contexts: there
seems to be this underlying assumption that autistic children need to
be taught good manners, or how to act appropriately, and if that
happens then everything will be solved. I feel this is a very naive
assumption.

Autism is not limited to manners or appropriateness, it’s
difference that people sense no matter how well you behave. This means
that people act differently, and often inappropriately, as a reaction
to our difference. I feel children should be taught about how to
survive in their real social environment, not the normal person’s
assumed normal environment; they should be taught, for example, what
kinds of reactions and attitudes people with various physical or
sensory handicaps experience, so they could compare their own
experience to this and form effective strategies to deal with
prejudice.

And of course, older autistic people’s experiences should
be a key part of young people’s education. There is already a
considerable body of literature written by autistic people, but I
don’t think it’s being utilised systematically anywhere.

DONNA:
You talk about autistic ‘culture’. How do you define autistic culture given
even the new stereotypes don’t fit all of us, given that the most verbal
tend to be the most dominant heard and given that we were once merely people
often on the fringes of society rather than a culture in our own right?

HETA:
It’s a problematic term, I know, but I haven’t been able to come up
with anything better. Some talk about a ‘movement’, but there are so
many autistic people who participate in some internet discussion group
or local peer group, and never identify with any social movement at
all…

I think that autistic people’s activities, when we decide to
act together because of our similarities and shared experiences, can
be called culture in the same sense that there is Deaf culture. You
could say that any stereotype doesn’t fit all Deaf people, that the
smartest and most educated among the Deaf tend to be the most
dominant, that the Deaf used to be on the fringes of society… still,
when they come together and begin to shape ideas, practices and action
based on their similarities, it is a form of culture.

There is a body of knowledge, there are meanings and interpretations that tend to get
passed on within the group, forming a basis for new participants to
build on. One article about Deaf culture talked about “a history of
solutions”, by people who identify with each other’s experiences. I
think we have that.

We have things like the coloured communication
tags, which have been created by autistic people, and adopted and
adapted to local needs in various places. Autistic people all over the
world have picked up linguistic conventions, expressions like aspie
(or equivalent in local language), NT (not really meant to be
derogatory, I feel), concepts like overload, inertia, curebie and so
on.

I don’t think there is an autistic culture in the sense that we could
dismiss our local culture and become members of something exclusive;
rather, there is a loosely connected subculture, something we can
participate in while remaining, primarily, part of our local culture.

I see very obvious local differences in the ways autistic people
choose to organise their activities in the US, in Great Britain, in
Sweden and in Finland, for example. I’ve mixed with people from all
these countries, and I find that autistic people’s assumptions on what
should be done and how are deeply rooted in their background, just as
anyone else’s, even if they feel excluded by their societies. Still, I
have no problem with thinking that an autistic culture exists as a
pattern that’s partly overlapping and intertwined with local
mainstream cultures, partly a thing of its own connecting large
numbers of autistic people in many countries. And as with Deaf
culture, I feel that participation in this is not so much defined by
biological qualities or diagnoses, but rather by personal decision and
identifying with the goals and values of the group – meaning that no
autistic person should be automatically assumed to be a part of
autistic culture, nor any piece of art or writing by an autistic
person, unless the person clearly expresses the affiliation.

DONNA:
Sounds very level headed.

There is also autistic the adjective and autistic the condition. How do
you see the interplay of these with the concept of autistic culture? Do you
accept that the three can co-exists without erasing the realities of each
other?

HETA:
I guess autism as condition is defined by
current diagnostic criteria and medical research, while autistic as
adjective also refers to a wide range of experiences, interpretations
and solutions that never come within the range of medical science or
special education. I see a parallel situation with Deaf culture again;
there’s Deaf as in being part of a community, having certain
experiences and values, and then there’s deaf as a condition, having
clinically significant hearing loss that the doctors can measure.

The measurement has some relevance to the culture, but it cannot even
begin to address the complexities of growing, living, learning,
loving, growing old as a person with this particular characteristic,
dealing with the ways other people interpret the difference. Also,
when we’re dealing with autism, we can’t expect the measurement to be
very precise, neither clinicians nor clinical criteria being perfect;
this leaves a lot of room and need for cultural means of dealing with
things, particularly for those who identify as autistic but don’t meet
the current criteria (at least as interpreted by their current
clinician).

There may be some disagreement, occasionally, on which is more
important, the clinical or the cultural approach, but mostly they just
exist side by side, serving their different functions. In a way, the
more we have autistic culture, the more we take initiative, learn from
each other and claim the right to define ourselves, the more we put
emphasis on the adjective.

That is my personal preference. Some choose
not to participate in that way, or may be unable to do so; some may
prefer to deal with their autism only as the condition, comfortable in
a patient / client role, and personally I don’t judge that either. I
guess I’m kind of flexible that way, I don’t feel that one person’s
reality has to erase another’s.

There’s room for many interpretations,
if we choose to make room. I read medical research on autism with
great interest, and I think parts of it may prove very useful to us,
although I know that many people involved in the autistic culture or
social movement don’t expect anything good from that direction.

DONNA:
Over 80-90%% of autistic adults are unemployed, many are in sheltered employment
sometimes lucky to earn $1.50 an hour. Others try self employment with
greater or lesser success. Poverty is pretty rife. Tell me about your
financial realities of being on the autism spectrum?

HETA:
I’ve seen a range of employment figures from different countries, and
I don’t really trust any of them that much, but I do believe the
employment issue is a crucial one. I see so many people’s talents go
to waste, every day.

I have been depressed and unemployed in the past, and pretty much as
poor as a person can be in Finland, relying on last-resort social
assistance sometimes for months at a time. This does not mean living
in the street or going hungry, but in just about every other way it’s
a very limited existence.

Our system also makes it very hard to do
periods of short-term work, so it’s difficult to climb out of that
situation. Running my own small business, I can avoid the ridiculous
bureaucracy and the humiliation of having to report my life to social
workers who know nothing about autism and don’t want to know. I get to
maintain some kind of dignity, and I get to do work that I find
meaningful; I get to travel occasionally, and people give me positive
feedback. I know I can contribute something that no one else can at
this moment, in this country.

Naturally, this is good for my
self-esteem and mental health. The downside is, I cannot work very
fast and I tend to get very stressed with too much interaction
sometimes, so I can barely earn enough to make a living and pay my
study loan instalments. If I became ill, for example, it would take no
more than two months for me to lose my business and be back to begging
the social workers for help. They make it hard to stop running a
business too, it might take a long time to get even basic unemployment
benefits.

I’m not always sure if it’s right to live the way I do; I
feel I have a responsibility towards my children, so when I’m tired I
start thinking that maybe I should give up the business and focus on
getting the maximum benefits out of this society, like many people
seem to do, just so I could have at least time and energy to give to
my children. But then again, maybe it’s good for them to see mummy
working, teaching, getting the respect of a few colleagues at least.

Everything seems to be set up to discourage someone like me from
working, although the official line claims the opposite. I often feel
I’m the exception, or somehow being difficult just because I choose to
work as much as I can.

DONNA:
If people would like to send work your way, what specific services do you
have to offer and what do you feel you bring to your work?

HETA:
I plan and teach courses, in Finnish mainly but also in English if
required. I offer consultation, for example to schools or workplaces
where people want ideas on solving problems related to an autistic
person. I read and summarise literature on specific topics, to produce
compact information packages for projects – this is useful in Finland
since many autism professionals don’t read English fluently, and have
difficulty following recent developments in the professional
literature.

I’ve also written a small information booklet of my own,
on sexuality, and I hope to collaborate in the future with other
autistic people to produce similar materials, both in English and in
Finnish, and possibly translate existing materials for distribution in
Finland.

I’m steady, dependable, thorough and hard-working, and I have solid
training in biology and autism theory. I’m experienced in doing public
presentations, and I’ve also supported other autistic people to speak
in public. I don’t have problems with different world views or
interpretations of autism; I tend to view them as interesting and
worth studying, rather than something requiring emotional reaction or
resistance on my part, even if they don’t agree with my own views.
I
feel this makes a good combination for co-operation with many
different kinds of people.

DONNA:
If people want to contact you with more work, how can they do that?

HETA:
It’s best to contact me through my website, http://autspect.fi, or by
sending me email at h.pukki@gmail.com

DONNA:
Anything else you’d like to add?

HETA:
I’m really glad to see you doing this kind of work. I wish more people
would see how useful networking can be. I try to get people involved
in voluntary work, thinking it would benefit them too in the long run,
through the contacts they form – that’s the way it has worked for me.
And I’ve tried to make activists in different European countries talk
to each other, to compare notes on their local issues, without much
success. I think what hinders many of us is distrust and lack of
experience in creating the connections we need.

DONNA:
Heta, thanks for the interview.
I wish you all the best.

http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.auties.org

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