Recent writing on Monotropism

A quick round-up of recent work:

Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond have both been doing a lot of thinking and writing about monotropism, mental health and burnout on David’s site, Emergent Divergence. The idea of meerkat mode is particulary evocative. David also discusses monotropism in his compelling book of collected essays, The New Normal.

Meanwhile Helen Edgar has been expanding on many of the same ideas and particularly applying them to education and parenting, on Autistic Realms and now MoreRealms.

Two more books that talk about monotropism are Pete Wharmby’s What I Want to Talk About, a love letter to autistic ‘special interests’; and his second book, Untypical, about what it means to be autistic in a world that wasn’t built for us, and what to do about it. These books probably deserve their own entry on this site, but that will have to come later.

Spectrum Gaming, led by Andy Smith, has just launched Autism Understood, a site aimed at explaining autism to young people. There has been a real dearth of quality, autistic-made autism resources for children, so this is an important development. I (Fergus Murray) wrote their entry on monotropism; several other pieces mention it.

Stimpunks has a substantial glossary entry on monotropism, and it shows up in a good few other posts on the site.

Finally, there is a pre-print up of the first paper to come out of the Monotropism Questionnaire, previously reported here. The authors of this are Valeria Garau, Aja Louise Murray, Richard Woods, Nick Chown, Sonny Hallett, Fergus Murray, Rebecca Wood and Sue Fletcher-Watson.

If you are interested in discussing any of this, and keeping up with further developments, you might like to join the Monotropism Discord – please email fergus@monotropism.org if you’d like an invitation!