3:03am March 19, 2015

➸ Catatonia in Autism

This is a PDF link to someone’s description of autistic catatonia. I am linking to it because there is very little information out there in human-readable format on autistic catatonia. A warning for any autistic people, especially people with autistic catatonia: It’s very medicalized, it can be very patronizing, it talks about “losing their son twice” – once to autism and once to catatonia. So be prepared, brace yourself. It still has information in it, and links to other information, that I didn’t know about. I don’t agree with all its conclusions, and you don’t have to either. But if you have autistic catatonia, or know someone who does, I’d strongly recommend bracing yourself, putting your mental armor on, and reading as much of it as you can stand. Because it’s rare that you find stuff with new information, that isn’t hidden in PubMed-land somewhere where you can’t access it. (I really need to talk to MIT, get my password back, and start interacting with them again.)

As usual, for those who don’t know, catatonia is not a psychiatric trait. it’s a neurological trait – or really what my neuropsych used to call a ‘constellation of symptoms’ — a syndrome. It’s common in a lot of different types of conditions: Developmental disabilities like autism, psychiatric disabilities like schizophrenia and depression, and physical disabilities like encephalitis. So saying “catatonia” is no more saying “psychiatric” than saying “pain” means specifically “leg pain” or “arthritis pain” or “nerve pain”. It doesn’t say anything about where it originates or what it means.

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