Michael Jackson was a fascinating human.  But as much as the autistic community wants to claim him as an icon, he was likely only as autistic or not as most members of the human race.  But whether he had Exposure Anxiety, a condition easily confused with (and which commonly co-occurs with autism) is another question, and perhaps he had more of that than most.

As a performer he was fearless, wildly creative, innovative, in his own world and a league of his own.  As a person, he was somewhere between painfully shy and extremely vigilant.  In his interviews he’d fluctuate between almost autistic in his avoidance of direct touch, eye contact and his voice could retreat to a timid whisper.  Then, in the blink of an eye, he could confront before, just as quick, he’d be gone again. Read the rest of this entry »

  Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is not Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) but its often confused with it.  Read the rest of this entry »

  In an autism fruit salad can be a range of things and two of us in The Aspinauts experience Tourette’s tics Read the rest of this entry »

At one of my UK lectures a warm, solid personality sat not far from the front.  She exuded a feeling of stability, peace, acceptance and on the break she came over to my book table and gave me a book of her own.  Her name was Phoebe Caldwell.  Read the rest of this entry »

    When an 18 year old Sky Walker, a severely autistic man, bashed his mother to death he was facing charges of murder even though he couldn’t understand the charges of what he’d done.  Read the rest of this entry »

  I had a letter from a mother who wanted to share her letter.  Here it is: Read the rest of this entry »

  I have done consultations with those who fit Exposure Anxiety since 1996 and still do online consultations with those wanting to manage this highly problematic condition. This is a snip from an upcoming abridged version of my book, Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage.

If there were a diagnostic criteria for EA it might fit this: Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s art work is titled ‘‘At The Typewriter“.

And it was at the typewriter that I began to find I could express something more than echoed speech.  I was about 9 years old when a typewriter was left in my room for my discovery.  Being a child with extreme Exposure Anxiety, I was reticent about it.  Surely it was an attempt to test me out, to get me to accept it, and clearly it was of ‘their world’, not mine.  Read the rest of this entry »

  Once upon a time Romans forced gladiators to fight wild animals for the audience’s blood lust.  Then we had Nazi Germany where regular Germans turned a blind eye to persecution or considered their own part in it minimal for they were only doing what ‘others had already done’.  And we had football but it became so corporate people lost ownership of it.  Today we have celebrity bashing as the new football and those who get the boots in will often say “I wasn’t the first”, “I’m only doing what others had already done” and that he or she ‘deserved it’ by ‘making themselves a public person’.   When haters call for new recruits, I find this lust for shared hatred sociologically fascinating but also calls to my spirituality as a Taoist.  Why do people crave such imbalance? Read the rest of this entry »

  I recently got a comment on one of my blogs.  It was from a staunch supporter of a psychoanalytic approach to autism, an approach which held that autism was caused by trauma in the womb or due to a difficult birth (and could be treated through ‘rebirthing‘ and the debunked 1970s autism treatment of ‘holding therapy‘.  This ‘primal pain’ theory includes the idea that the autistic child has become autistic from things as vast as chemical assaults by smoking and substance abusing mothers, by mothers experiencing mental illness or abuse or other trauma during pregnancy or who feel negativity or indifference about the child they are carrying or were effected by mother’s suffering post natal depression.  He wanted to raise with me the idea that I was actually a “broken normal”.  This is our conversation: Read the rest of this entry »