Fergus Murray at the Scottish Autism Research Group 2023 Meeting.
Watch the video here. Shorter clips are also included below, illustrated with flowing water.
If you care about the wellbeing of autistic people, you need to try to understand autism. If you want to understand autism, you need to understand monotropism.
That’s true whether or not you believe (like me) that Monotropism is by far the closest thing we have to a comprehensive theory of autism. It is clear that monotropism is an extremely common trait among autistic people, even if it turns out not to be universal, and it will help you to make sense of both the difficulties and the joys of autistic life.
In this talk I want to explain what monotropism is, why understanding it is so important, and how it plays a key role in autistic wellbeing throughout the lifespan. I’m a teacher, so I’ll have a lot to say about the school years, but very little of it will only be relevant to educational contexts!
So, what is monotropism?
As a trait, monotropism is a tendency to focus on relatively few things, relatively intensely, and to tune out or lose track of things outside of this attention tunnel.
You can also think about it in terms of having relatively few interests aroused at any given time, where an interest (in something like its everyday sense) can be thought of as anything that tends to pull in our attention.
The idea of monotropism was formulated in the 1990s by Dinah Murray (my mother), and Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser, in an attempt to provide a unified explanation for many seemingly disparate aspects of autistic experiences and behaviours. Why would one type of neurodevelopmental difference lead to difficulties with communication and executive functioning, and intense interests, and a tendency to stim?
None of the cognitive theories of autism that were dominant at this time (and which are still often taught in introductory courses on autism) seemed to come anywhere close to providing a satisfactory explanation for all of these elements at once! All seemed to break down and make incorrect predictions outside of certain circumstances; what is more, they all simply assumed that all the difficulties autistic people experience are due to problems – deficits – with the autistic person.
Monotropism as a theory of autism filled a gap, then: it provided a more comprehensive and coherent theory of autism than had previously existed. As a bonus, it also explained and drew attention to many less well-known traits of autistic people! …and it did all this in a way that made clear that all of the well-known autistic traits could be explained without assuming any deficit on the part of the autistic person.
Monotropism is just a different strategy for allocating attention, or processing resources, with advantages and disadvantages. There could be good reasons why humankind evolved to feature many people who are quite polytropic – prone to spreading their processing resources widely, better at keeping track of disparate things – while a few people are monotropic, tending to focus intensely and for prolonged periods, at least under the right circumstances.
If these ideas are new to you, you might be wondering how tightly focused attention relates to what you have learned about autism. Does a monotropic processing style really explain the supposed deficits in social imagination and communication, and a tendency to engage in restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests?
I argue that it does, with the caveat that everything I’ve just mentioned is based on non-autistic people looking at us (autistic people) from the outside, and frequently misunderstanding what they see!
Communication is a good place to start with seeing how Monotropism can help us to understand autistic differences and difficulties.
Most human communication is based on several channels going on simultaneously. People use words, prosody, tone of voice, eye contact, facial expressions (large and small) and body language, all at once – and they expect us to do the same. All at the same time! And all while keeping track of what it means that you are interacting with this particular person, in this particular capacity, all while resolving ambiguities in each of these channels, often by reference to the others!
If your processing style lends itself to using a small selection of channels at any given time, communication is naturally going to be different. Autistic people tend to miss some of the subtleties, and those of us who use words tend to rely on them much more heavily than many others – saying exactly what we mean, rather than leaving it to our faces and bodies to do most of the talking, or assuming subtext.
Meanwhile, we tend to make different connections between things from other people, thanks to our different processing style.
All of this means that sometimes, we miss things that seem totally obvious to our conversational partners – and vice versa. What’s obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to me!
Notice here how this way of looking at autistic communication suggests quite different strategies from those implied by a supposed general “social communication” or “Theory of Mind” deficit! Understanding things this way, you might start to get some ideas about where certain behaviours or tendencies come from, why they make sense and what to do about them.
Eye contact, for example, is not something we’re just randomly bad at; it can capture too much of our attention, using up processing resources we could be using to follow your words or notice your facial expressions. Those of us who have ‘flat affect’ might find that modulating our voices and arranging our faces would be too much to handle along with all the other things we’re trying to keep track of. If we are ‘literal-minded’, it’s likely to be thanks to a combination of expecting people to communicate more like us (saying what they mean!) and struggling to find the processing power to resolve ambiguities, while simultaneously keeping on top of all the information channels people expect us to be using.
So that brings us on to social imagination. How easy it for anyone to accurately imagine what’s going on for people who are very different from themselves? In particular, how often do people in more dominant groups ever have real insight into what’s going on with people in less dominant groups? Men notoriously complain of finding women mysterious! White people who aren’t from immigrant backgrounds are often disastrously oblivious to the things that make the lives of those in racialised minorities harder.
So who thought it was a good idea to declare that autistic people lack social imagination, without pausing to question whether they might be just as bad at imagining the inner lives of autistic people?? The failure to recognise what Damian Milton calls the Double Empathy problem, right from the start of autism research, was a shameful scientific mistake, and it goes on harming autistic people to this day.
Assuming that autistic people have an inbuilt deficit in social imagination is as absurd as jumping to the same conclusion about the French when they find British customs puzzling.
If autistic people are typically far more monotropic than most other people, processing the world and communicating differently from others, it is hardly surprising that failures of social imagination occur in both directions… and wow, they occur a lot in our direction! All it takes is different enough experiences of the world, and such failures become inevitable. I do hope that an understanding of monotropism can help bridge that gap, though.
However, it also suggests a complication in the story with social imagination. Understanding other people requires tuning in to them, and sometimes that can be difficult if our attention is deeply absorbed in something else already.
Some autistic children may spend less of their time than most tuning in to other people, and more of it focusing intensely on other things; by the time they are adults, they may have had less practice tuning in to other people as a result. Of course, they still might have had more practice understanding other people than most of them will have had understanding someone like them! Still, a lack of focus on people can compound the natural challenges of tuning in to other people when most of those around you have very different experiences of the world.
This is a very gendered thing: girls are typically expected to pay attention to the feelings of other people all the time, while boys can sometimes get away without. This difference in socialisation likely goes a long way towards explaining the gender discrepancy in autism diagnosis rates, as long as autism is defined mostly in terms of relations to other people.
Girls are essentially forced to practise their social imaginations and refine their communication skills, at the expense of being able to pursue their own interests. As part of this they often develop the ability to ‘mask’ their autism, hiding the things that mark them out as different. As a consequence, they are less likely to be identified as meeting the current diagnostic criteria for autism, but probably more likely to develop mental health problems.
One of the most harmful things that autistic people learn to do when they teach themselves to mask is to suppress stims – to prevent themselves from performing the kinds of repetitive movements that are often the most visible marker of our weirdness, the things that people probably have in mind when they tell us we “don’t look autistic”.
Behaviourists often go out of their way to train autistic children not to stim, which is one example of why even the most “positive” behaviourism can be dangerous: stimming serves a purpose. It can be one way for a person to feel like they have a bit of control over their immediate environment; one thing they can predict and understand when things start to feel overwhelming. When you need to tune out or dampen down sensory experiences that are too much – or anything that’s too much, really – there’s nothing quite like a stimulus that you are completely in control of. Realising this goes a long way towards explaining why these behaviours are seen as “repetitive”. Perhaps another factor is the way that monotropic intensity shapes the geography of our minds, leaving grooves that we keep returning to.
The theory of Monotropism suggests that pursuing our own interests is vital to autistic wellbeing.
Part of that is because of their intensity. They exert a lasting pull on our attention, so that it can be painful not to be able to focus on them, especially when we are being forced to pay attention to something that doesn’t align with our interests at all.
Another reason our intense interests are so important is that they can provide a feeling of stability and connection, in a world that can often be disorienting and leave us feeling isolated – for reasons which Monotropism also helps to make sense of! There is great comfort for me in exploring physics, for example – something that other people might find by losing themselves in various fandoms, or by collecting things, or learning everything they can about any number of things.
In ‘What I Want to Talk About’, Pete Wharmby writes entertainingly and with passion about his special interests and how they have shaped his life – for him, that includes LEGO, the Marvel universe and gaming. As they are for many of us, they have been both refuges, and lenses through which to make sense of the rest of the world.
Again, it helps a lot to have a bit of insight into why autistic people have such “restricted and repetitive” interests in the first place – or “passions” as they’re often known when neurotypicals have them. Recognising their effects and their importance means taking them seriously, where people lacking that insight have often treated them as trivial, or even pathological.
Bizarrely, despite intense interests being present in descriptions of autism going right back to Grunya Sukhareva almost a century ago (and later, Kanner and Asperger) there has still been very little research on them, although that is starting to change, for example with work by Rebecca Wood and (separately) Roseanna Tansley, on the power of working with special interests in education.
If you search research databases for ‘autism’ and ‘special interests’, you will turn up far more about the special interests of the researchers – who mostly think they’re not autistic – than those of autistic people!
People sometimes misunderstand monotropism as being all about “special interests”. It can be understood in terms of intense interests, but only if you understand that doesn’t just mean the things we’re passionate about.
According to the theory, autistic people tend to have our attention and other processing resources intensely pulled towards whatever grabs our interest. Because of that, our long-lasting interests are often intense. We are likely to keep looping back to them, to make links between them and whatever else we’re thinking about, to want to talk about them and know as much as possible about that. All of this is monotropism.
But that’s not all of monotropism. It’s not just our passions, or “special interests” that pull us in like this. It can equally be worries – we can get stuck in ‘loops of concern’ to use my partner Sonny Hallett’s phrase: unresolved questions and anxieties, things we might prefer not to think about. Monotropic people are often given to rumination, especially if the world gives us a lot to be anxious about.
Many of us are also prone to forgetting about most other things as soon as something new grabs our attention -interests can be fleeting, even if they are intense in the moment. This is one place the connection between ADHD, monotropism and autism is most obvious: it can be hard to stay on-task when any distraction can occupy your whole attention; it can be hard to rein in impulsivity if you struggle to maintain multiple competing things in your awareness at any time.
Despite those challenges, hyperfocus is a huge thing for ADHDers, as well as autistic people – if anything, ADHD is actually associated even more strongly than autism with a tendency to hyperfocus. “Attention deficit” obviously doesn’t capture it! We probably need a new name; I quite like “Kinetic Cognitive Style”.
It looks like Monotropism may allow us to make much more sense of the overlap between autism and ADHD than any other theory ever has, but there is much more research needed on this. There is a pervasive problem with the existing medical paradigm for thinking about neurocognitive differences, which is that categories based on external observations do not always map well onto internal experiences, let alone observable brain differences.
So one key way that monotropism relates to autistic wellbeing is that it can help other people make sense of autistic experience. Being misunderstood can be exhausting, limiting, even humiliating. Dominant narratives of autism have been very little help here! I won’t say they’ve been no help; in a way, it is better to be seen as diagnosably deficient, rather than to be seen as lazy, slow and thoughtless.
Oh, they don’t mean to be unempathetic, they can’t help it, it’s The Autism. You know.
Still, the ways that autism is commonly framed remain stigmatising and above all, unhelpful. You really need to understand a bit about autistic experiences in order to formulate strategies to improve autistic lives, and neither the diagnostic criteria, nor the currently-dominant theories of autism, yield that kind of insight.
In my experience, coming to understand monotropism often provides useful scaffolding for helpful ideas about autism to form around. One reason it has been slow to gain widespread adoption is, I think, that it takes a bit of thought to start to apply it! It doesn’t just tell people that autistic people are deficient in this, this and this, as if that was the end of it. You need to actually think it through; it might be a simple idea in one sense, but people are not simple.
Most of the observed, externally-obvious features of autistic people are second-order effects of monotropism; it might not be obvious how autistic social and sensory differences would arise from a different attentional strategy, for example… until you give it a bit of thought!
So a big part of what I want to do today is to give you a framework on which to build your own ideas and strategies about living and working with autistic people – or as autistic people.
I have talked about how Monotropism can allow us to reframe the supposed deficits that the diagnostic manuals focus on, but now I want to focus on some of the many things about autistic experience that diagnostic manuals miss out entirely – starting with…
The idea of flow, or being in the zone – this is hopefully familiar to most of you. Those times when you get totally absorbed in an activity, usually something that is challenging for you but not too challenging. You can learn quickly in a flow state, but you are likely to completely tune out everything but your main focus. Being yanked out of it feels horrible.
I think it is significant that academic descriptions of flow states – for example, in Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi’s work – overlap so heavily with descriptions of monotropism. Damian Milton has been drawing on the parallels for many years, and I think that flow states and similar times of total absorption can do a lot to help non-autistic people to make sense of autistic experiences.
In the right environment, autistic people might enter this state of intense absorption many times on any given day – but few schools and workplaces are designed to accommodate that! It is also something that many parents and carers fail to understand, so autistic people are often wrenched out of their attention tunnels constantly – an experience that can be intensely unpleasant and disruptive, taking the place of something that could be relaxing and restorative.
Think of a time when you have almost finished a chapter of a riveting book, or a game was nearly over, and suddenly you were pulled away from it and expected to do something else entirely straight away, with no idea if or when you’ll be allowed to get back to what you were lost in. Now, imagine that happening to you several times a day, and everyone around you acts as if this is perfectly normal and no big deal! Nobody seems to understand the time it takes to shift gears, or the feeling of instability that follows from being jerked too quickly off of the track that you were on. Like many of the distressing experiences that autistic people have, this is made far worse by the failure of other people to recognise what’s happening.
Flow states have been touted as the key to wellbeing for everyone – probably rightly, I think. They come with a sense of purpose and a kind of easy intensity that are both hard to match.
Monotropic minds seem to enter flow states far more easily than others, but being dragged out of them really takes a toll after a while. Sonny has speculated that this may be part of the reason why monotropic people end up in ADHD-type patterns of thought and behaviour, constantly jumping from one thing to the next: we are effectively traumatised out of trusting flow states, so we learn to keep shifting our attention in order to be safe. I sometimes think of monotropic attention as being like the flow from a hose – it has to go somewhere, and if it can’t flow smoothly, it’s liable to go everywhere.
Even though they might look like opposite tendencies, I think monotropic people are prone to getting stuck for many of the same reasons we are prone to entering flow states.
A lot of the difficulty autistic people tend to have with task-switching and initiation is best understood in terms of inertia, which I see as a natural result of monotropism. Flow, or monotropic absorption, means giving yourself over to an activity more-or-less completely – really investing your mental resources in it. Because of that, it takes time to get into gear, and it takes time to get back out of it again. We need to shift a greater load of mental resources, because it is so much harder for us to divide them.
Most of the problems autistic people have with ‘executive functioning’ can be understood through this lens, and I think it does much more to explain them and suggest strategies than the label of ‘executive functioning’, which I’ve always seen as a useful but woolly concept.
I don’t believe that this alone provides a full explanation for the task initiation difficulties experienced by autistic people, though. I think a good deal of this has to do with depletion. It’s not just that we need to load up more resources than other people to get going with something – it’s that our resources are likely to be lower to begin with! Many autistic people report a kind of inertness that’s akin to catatonia – an inability to do anything at all, with “No Way Out Except From External Intervention”, to borrow the title of Leneh Buckle’s paper on autistic inertia.
Perhaps you can already think of some reasons why everything I’ve described so far might lead to autistic people being utterly exhausted, but let’s look into this a little more closely.
I have already talked about how discombobulating it can be to be tugged out of an attention tunnel. It can leave us feeling destabilised, needing to stim or tune out for a while to get us back on an even keel.
We are quite often prevented from doing that – usually by people who don’t understand what’s happening for us at these times. That leaves us dysregulated and depleted: it can feel like a small part of us was left behind when we were suddenly forced to change tracks!
The same kind of thing can happen whenever we’re forced to shift or split our attention in ways that feel unnatural to us. When polytropic people expect us to be able to navigate the world the way they do, they insist on us regularly performing feats of mental agility that seem like nothing to them, and it is exhausting.
That includes rapid task-switching, dividing our attention between too many things, having to direct our attention away from our interests and towards things that make no sense to us, being expected to process or filter out too many stimuli, suppressing urges to do things people might see as weird… often, several of these at the same time! ‘Masking’ – trying not to stand out, to pass as ‘neurotypical’ or ‘normal’ – demands that we constantly do these things, and it is clear that this can take a huge toll on our mental health.
Tanya Adkin coined the term ‘monotropic split’ for the kind of mental gymnastics that polytropic people too often expect of us. I think this is a useful way of thinking about what’s going on: there’s a kind of dissonance, or a feeling of being stretched to breaking point, and it can have disastrous effects both in the short and long term.
In the short term, this kind of thing often leads to meltdowns, or their internalised mirror-image, shutdowns. Either one is traumatic, with meltdowns usually harder for other people, while shutdowns potentially take even more of a toll on the person experiencing them. Both result from intolerable situations, usually made worse by the people around being unable to understand how bad they are.
Shutdowns are often the result of someone feeling so frustrated that they could melt down, but knowing that to do so would be even worse, but that they can avoid dealing with other people’s reactions to that if they manage to stay in control enough to do nothing but bottle it up.
Whichever way they go, meltdowns and shutdowns take a huge mental and physical toll, and require substantial recovery time. Some autistic people report feeling their after-effects for days afterwards, and in some cases losing abilities they previously had for even longer.
Autistic burnout is something like a long-term counterpart to a shutdown: the cumulative effects of pushing beyond your capacities for too long, usually because you don’t feel like you have much of a choice. Society demands that we carry on, however hard it is – often while insisting that it’s easy, and we’re surely just not really trying. At some point, we just… can’t, any more. We find ourselves perpetually exhausted, our cognitive abilities chronically impaired – often with heightened sensitivities and a reduced a ability to socialise.
This is a grossly under-researched phenomenon, considering it is something of grave importance, which autistic people have been talking about for many years. Of course, it’s hardly the only thing to fit that description!
Still, research on this should be a high priority, and part of that should be understanding the role that a monotropic attentional style plays in both the overwhelm that seems to lead to burnout, and the strategies that can be used to avoid and recover from it. Connecting with our passions, our special interests, and reducing our cognitive load, are just about the only the only things that we know really help. Both of those require a degree of self-acceptance, and recognition of our needs, that can be hard to come by in a society like this.
So let me move on to some of the specific ways that society is not set up for monotropic thinkers, and what we might be able to do, collectively, to change that.
School is hell for many monotropic kids – even though a lot of us love learning.
There are several interweaved strands making school an overwhelming and often traumatic experience. If you know anything about neurodivergent experiences of school, these may all be quite familiar to you, but let’s see what the lens of monotropism can teach us about all of them…
Sensory
The sensory environment in the average school seems to be set up with the assumption that noise, flashing lights and visually busy classrooms are no problem: that learners should be able to simply filter out these things and ignore them.
School architects and designers rarely seem to take into account that these things occupy learners’ precious mental resources, and can prevent some students from focusing at all.
Too often, the spaces set aside for break times are even noisier and more chaotic than the classrooms and corridors – they may not feel like breaks at all for monotropic kids who already feel overwhelmed by the time they leave the class.
Some learners badly need a quiet space, perhaps with low lighting, to achieve a sense of stability and calm. I have heard of teachers and librarians making special arrangements for kids who are obviously overwhelmed at break times, like “helping out” in libraries or sorting store cupboards, which is great – but meeting these learners’ sensory needs should not require special arrangements.
Peers
Aside from the noise, another reason break times may not feel like much of a break for monotropic learners is other children. Even if someone gets a little bit of space to hyperfocus for a while – observing insects in the playground, maybe, lining up rocks, whatever – other kids often treat them as weird, and might pick on them, because they don’t understand what’s going on for them.
There might also be pressure to take part in confusing games that nobody ever explains properly – my few memories of ball games in the school playground mostly revolve around people being angry at me because I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. Even if I understood the rules in principle, I always found that team sports involved keeping track of far more things at once than my monotropic brain could handle!
Then there are all the social games. In my experience, these are usually explained even more poorly than football, and the consequences of failing to understand them are even worse.
If interacting monotropically with one polytropic person is often disorienting, handling group situations can be downright impossible. All of those communication channels to keep track of, and they’re coming and going between multiple people, all at the same time! How are you supposed to find a space to speak, without talking over anyone? If you do manage to say things, how do you anticipate whether other people will have any interest in them when they usually fail to understand what’s so fascinating about frogs, or physics, or Carthaginian history?
Some will become students of human interaction, puzzling out the rules and mastering the art of communicating in a way that doesn’t make other people too impatient. Others will remain puzzled by people (and puzzling to them), preferring to invest their energies into more tractable problems. Again, there is a strong but not universal gendered dynamic going on there – it is far harder for girls to get away with never getting the hang of people.
Staff
Speaking of not getting the hang of people, monotropic children (and perhaps especially teenagers) often have quite strained relationships with teachers and other school staff – and people in authority more broadly.
One reason for this is that along with all the communication channels I’ve talked about having to juggle, we are also expected to keep in mind the social relations between us and other people, and adjust our communication accordingly. This is another of these things which is hardly ever adequately explained, or maybe we miss the explanations because we were focusing on something else! Instead, we just get authority figures regularly being angry at us for interacting with them the same way we would with anyone else.
These difficulties are often compounded by monotropic communication needs – I vividly remember an angry teacher insisting that I looked at her eyes while she told me off, which meant that I couldn’t take in anything she was saying, so then she got angry about that as well. We also get in trouble for failing to moderate our voices in the right way, or for body language that’s seen as rude or insubordinate.
Many of the clashes come about in the first place because teachers failed to account for the student’s monotropism: they expect kids to be able to listen even when they’re in the middle of something; to resolve ambiguities in what they say; to focus on things that have nothing to do with our interests. They also expect kids to follow rules without questioning them or asking for clarification, or to accept rules being broken without explanation – both of which conflict deeply with autistic intolerance of wrongness. We are forever struggling to make sense of the world, and when things don’t fit with our understanding of how they’re supposed to be, it can be impossible to let them go.
One of the worst things at school is when teachers assume that all of this is deliberate, which still happens a lot. As Ross Greene puts it, kids do well if they can! Far too often, teachers fail to see it that way, and put things down to malice or “laziness”; they think kids are choosing to be difficult, when they’re just desperately trying to make things make sense.
This is one of the reasons why diagnosis can be valuable, despite the dangers of labelling; and why it is so crucial that school staff learn about neurodivergence from neurodivergent people. Without that kind of insight, they won’t be equipped to deal with the barriers faced by kids who process the world differently, and it’s usually the kids who’ll get the blame.
Interest
Some of the hardest things about school have to do with interests: in particular, being required to spend lots of time on things that are of little interest, and being prevented from digging deeply into the things that interest us the most.
Steering monotropic attention is like steering a big shopping trolley, on a slope. It takes a great deal of effort to steer it away from what’s pulling it in, and even when we manage to build up some momentum in a different direction, it usually takes us a lot longer than it would for most people. Then we have to deal with slowing to a stop before we crash…
On the other hand, if we have a chance to pursue the things that grab us, we are likely to learn quickly compared with most people, and in unusual depth. Really loading up the trolley with facts, to stretch the metaphor further.
And when you dig into anything deeply enough, you start to see how it connects with all sorts of other things. This is, I think, why kids who are allowed to direct their own education don’t necessarily do any worse in the long run (whether they are unschooled, or at schools that are geared towards self-direction). Sooner or later, it all links together! You get to a point with learning and communicating about any topic in enough depth, and you eventually find that you need maths, English, science and history if you want to keep going.
Most schools, though, provide limited opportunities for deep, self-directed learning, and teachers worry a great deal about skills gaps being filled before students leave school. This is understandable, given public demands of schools, and the relative inaccessibility of adult education in our society.
However, many neurodivergent kids, who have often found mainstream schools hellish, start thriving once they enter an environment where they have the time and space to pursue their own interests, without the overwhelming social and sensory demands of a typical school. For many families, that means home education – there is something heartbreaking about how many children experienced lockdown as a blessed relief from their compulsory schooling. Of course, many families have discovered home education for different reasons; often because it was painfully clear that school did not suit their monotropic children. Alternatively, they have found child-centred, relatively child-led environments that have made a big difference – things like Forest Schools, Montessori schools and schools with a strong focus on self-directed learning.
At home, as at school, reducing demands and increasing children’s autonomy can reduce anxiety and help them to learn, while also giving them more space to find joy. Planning gentle transitions gives them a chance to climb in and out of attention tunnels, rather than risking whiplash. Working with, rather than against monotropic processing can make things smoother for everyone.
Many of the same problems we face at school turn up in the workplace as well. Office politics can feel way too much like the baffling and sometimes vicious social dynamics of the playground. Authority figures still expect us to somehow modify our social style to show them deference. We go on being expected to somehow intuit rules and exceptions to rules that are never spelt out. And we go on being expected to be able to turn our attention to things that are difficult and uninteresting, now with even higher stakes than we faced at school.
Meanwhile, the fragile coping strategies we develop in our youth often prove disastrously maladaptive in adult life, leaving many of us isolated and facing chronic mental health problems. Unfortunately, mental healthcare is in very short supply, and often even less accessible for autistic people than it is for everyone else.
Even so, some autistic people thrive, and most of us have things that we take great joy in. In some cases, we are able to turn our ‘special interests’ into careers, and if that works out, it can be a beautiful thing.
It is fairly clear that academia, for example, has often benefited greatly from monotropic thinkers being allowed to pursue their interests in a very focused way. Unfortunately, modern universities tend to demand a very wide range of different skills from their academics, and dangerously gruelling time commitments, often making it impossible for autistic people to succeed, however good they are at the core aspects of the job. In the past, many monotropic academics might have had wives and servants to take care their basic needs while they get on with the business of researching: a problematic arrangement, relying on a huge degree of privilege and inequality. There is no going back to that, so what might it take for more monotropes to thrive?
There are two closely related problems here, which both follow directly from monotropic thinking: fluctuating, spiky skills profiles, and a strong drive towards focusing on intense interests at the expense of other things.
In the context of a political economy like the one we currently exist in, spiky skills profiles are a huge problem. There are limited opportunities to focus exclusively on things we are good at, and little support available to help with the things we’re not. Most workplaces discriminate heavily against people who can’t demonstrate a very wide of different skills, and even more so against people who they don’t see as fitting in socially.
That, combined with the promise of pursuing passions, makes self-employment an appealing option for many autistic people; but here, again, spiky skillsets can be a massive barrier. Self-employed people need to do a lot of paperwork, and that’s something I, like many autistic people, seriously struggle with! I joke about it, but it’s actually a genuinely massive barrier; I’ve known autistic people to lose hundreds of pounds because they absolutely could not steer their attention to fill in a boring, scary form. Even worse if we are expected to make a phone call!
Self-employed people usually also need to do a lot of marketing and networking: both major challenges for many autistic people, especially those who have been taught to doubt their own value and abilities.
There are many things that could help to make life easier for people with spiky skill sets who tend to throw themselves wholeheartedly into what interests them. Unfortunately, none of them are easy to achieve in a neoliberal society.
Employers could come to understand that neurodivergent people can be extremly good at their actual jobs, and that they are losing out by discriminating against people who don’t also have a wide range of barely-relevant skills, or who don’t fit with their idea of a “team player”. I don’t know what it would take for this to come about though, and I think we’re probably moving in the opposite direction.
Governments could provide more support for day-to-day living, with less bureaucratic gatekeeping – but, again… in this economy?
They could also work to expand existing schemes like ‘Access to Work’, and make them more… well, accessible.
I have often wondered if some kind of skill-sharing and mutual aid network might help fill in some of the gaps in people’s skillsets by pairing them up with people whose gaps are complementary, but as far as I can tell nothing of that sort exists yet, and I’ve been a bit too busy to try and set it up myself – although it is the kind of thing that my organisation, AMASE (Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh) manages a bit of, on an ad hoc basis…
The idea of Monotropism has been around for more than thirty years, and over the last five years or so it has become, ‘within the autistic adult community, probably the dominant theoretical approach towards understanding what autism is’ as the Canadian autistic psychologist Patrick Dwyer puts it in his piece ‘Revisiting Monotropism’.
Countless people over the years have found it a powerful lens through which to understand themselves and the autistic people in their lives. Many talk about ‘lightbulb moments’ as previously puzzling things fall into place. The phenomenal response to the Monotropism Questionnaire (a first attempt at measuring monotropism) shows that there is a huge appetite for ideas of this sort, but also many questions still to answer.
How does monotropism interact with anxiety and trauma? What about age, profession, parenthood? Can this perspective give any insight into OCD, as Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms has recently argued? Might it help us to understand the relations between autism and addiction, or psychosis, as David Gray-Hammond has been exploring?
It is clear that there are many things about it that remain badly under-researched – as there are with so many topics relating to autistic wellbeing! I feel lucky to be in Scotland, where several universities are at the forefront of the shift I see in psychology and allied fields towards taking seriously the lived experiences and insights of autistic people, about our own lives.
As an autistic teacher with many neurodivergent students, I know that I have found these ideas to be invaluable in making sense of both my own experiences and barriers, and those of the teenagers I teach. They have been no less useful in supporting autistic adults.
I would like to be able to talk about all of this with a lot more peer-reviewed, empirical research to back me up, though, rather than relying on personal experiences and community discussions. Science is not the only way of learning about the world – particularly when it comes to human experiences – but there are many, many questions about autistic experiences that only scientific enquiry can definitively answer, and autistic people deserve to have them addressed.
I like to think we’re finally getting there.
Resources
- The Passionate Mind by Wenn Lawson (book)
- What I Want to Talk About: How Autistic Special Interests Shape a Life by Pete Wharmby (book)
- Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser
- Loops of Concern by Sonny Hallett
- ADHD and Monotropism by Fergus Murray with Sonny Hallett
- Kinetic Cognitive Style by Stimpunks
- Staying Put, Monotropism & Me by Jamie Knight
- “No Way Out Except From External Intervention”: First-Hand Accounts of Autistic Inertia by Karen Leneh Buckle et al
- What is monotropic split? by Tanya Adkin
- Autism tips for teachers by Fergus Murray
- Autism, intense interests and support in school: from wasted efforts to shared understandings by Rebecca Wood
- How are intense interests used within schools to support inclusion and learning for secondary-aged autistic pupils? by Roseanna Tansley et al
- Kids Do Well if they Can (video) by Ross Greene
- A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education (book) by Naomi Fisher
- Spiky Profiles by Autism Understood
- Revisiting Monotropism by Patrick Dwyer
- Monotropism Questionnaire Online by Fergus Murray
- Monotropism, Autism & OCD by Helen Edgar
- Creating Autistic Suffering: The AuDHD Burnout to Psychosis Cycle by Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond
- Unusual Medicine: Essays on Autistic identity and addiction and other books by David Gray-Hammond
All photos are by the author with the exception of the wood in the first slide, which is by Dinah Murray.