By many? By this I am going to assume you mean the general populace.
The general populace thinks autistic people are socially disabled to varying degrees (let’s be fair, most people nowadays understand that autism has, to their sensibilities, varying degrees of severity). They kinda get that, but don’t really know what it means for the most part.
Many understand that there is some degree of sensory overload (and general overload). Most think it is just sounds. They tend to think meltdowns are tantrums (and therefore think you’re supposed to grow out of them).
So, in general they understand some very, very basic things, but misunderstand (and therefore overlook) a LOT. They don’t fully grasp that someone with autism is generally in a completely different world from them. They don’t understand that someone with autism cannot change who they are and how they act to a degree they assume they can. They don’t understand the difficulty with multitasking, the difficulty with executive function, the difficulty with distractions, or the difficulty that many with autism face with socializing for multiple reasons (the reasons being what they don’t fully understand). They think that these are things people with autism (well, ‘high-functioning autism’) should grow out of when they become an adult. I know I’ve been told to ‘grow up’ by people before, including ones who SHOULD know better. I’ve been told how I shouldn’t need reminders or to be told to do certain things. Or that I should have understood what they wanted me to do without them explicitly saying so. Some people here are listing some of the bigger things, but it’s the smaller, but largely life-affecting things that people overlook. The things they think are supposed to be normal things that kids grow out of when they grow up.
Basically, where your problems begin to inconvenience them is where they begin to overlook your difficulties and think that you can just ‘stop’. And it causes many with autism even more stress than the difficulties themselves, because we KNOW we’re inconveniencing people, and yet we cannot always alter our behavior. It’s like someone being annoyed at you for having two arms and two legs with five digits on each. I mean sure, we could lop off a couple fingers, toes, or appendages, but is that really fair to expect of someone? So this here? Probably another overlooked difficulty in and of itself: mentalism (Wikipedia says this is the word for discrimination against mental traits and disorders). I’m not normally one to go calling people ‘-isms’, I think people tend to be a little overzealous in it and misjudge people themselves in doing so. But mentalism is different, in that it’s near impossible for someone to actually understand what it’s like to be someone else, and when there are major neurological differences and completely different ways of seeing the world, that is taken even further. Psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, autistic people, and many others I can’t think of suffer from this. The average NT (neurotypical) person can understand the average NT person, but they cannot understand those who are NOT neurotypical. Most cannot even conceive of the differences being possible. I hear so many people asking how, for example, a rich, famous movie star can have depression (“What do they have to be depressed about?”), which highlights this mindset. Mind you, depression is becoming much better understood by the general populace, but the example illustrates my point, I think.
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