6:04am August 14, 2013

Catatonic excitement; unnecessary death

Ever since I was a teenager, and until my body would no longer function that way (mid twenties), something used to happen to me. It was like my body grew a mind of its own, and I started running around the room. Body slamming walls. Arms flipping around hitting things. Jumping on and off furniture. Voice making strange yelping sounds.

I was merely along for the ride. If someone was in the room I might try to call for help every time I ran by them, but often they couldn’t tell that from the involuntary sounds I was making.

If I was lucky, someone could help me stop. They could do some things I can explain, that would guide my running towards the couch, get me lying down, and get a heavy blanket over me.

If I was not lucky?

I couldn’t stop. I would run out of breath and couldn’t stop. My lungs burned and I couldn’t stop. I started wheezing and I couldn’t stop. I only stopped when I collapsed on the floor.
A lot of people think this sort of thing is voluntary misbehavior. It’s not. A person would have a hard time keeping this up on purpose.

Autistic people usually have at least some attributes of catatonia, even when we don’t have the progressive kind I have. Catatonia is not just about becoming unable to move, and it’s a neurological movement disorder, not a form of psychosis or loss of contact with reality. It has all kinds of traits associated with it, many of them known to overlap with autistic traits. Most autistic people have at least some catatonic traits. Here’s a list:

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/13327445763/the-possible-connection-between-symptoms-of

Anyway catatonic excitement is a state where you basically experience uncontrollable extreme levels of activity. So extreme that some people run themselves into a state of severe medical exhaustion. You have little to no control of what you are doing.

But when it happens to autistic people, it’s seen as willful misbehavior:

“Leary and Hill (1996) analyzed the literature on symptoms associated with established movement disorders and those associated with autism. The greatest difference among these disabilities was the interpretation of the symptoms. In Tourette syndrome, Parkinson’s disorder and catatonia, there was a neurological interpretation of symptoms. A social rather than a neurological interpretation was applied if the person had a label of autism.”

— Donnellan, Hill, and Leary, Rethinking Autism: Implications of sensory and movement differences

Instead of helping us in any way, people are likely to punish is or restrain us. Restraint can be especially deadly in such an agitated state.

Recently, an autistic man named Dainell Simmons was killed by police just after being described as running around, banging on walls. They had come to transport him to a psychiatric emergency room. They tried to handcuff him for no apparent reason, and when he struggled they used stun guns and pepper spray, which killed him.

Struggling against being handcuffed is not usually voluntary for autistic people. We often have an intense response to being restrained in any way, shape, or form. And the description of him running around banging on walls could as well have been me in a state of catatonic excitement. I’ve also been picked up by police and transported to psych emergency rooms. And I’ve struggled involuntarily when handcuffed, but being small and female and white most times that happened, I never got pepper spray or stun guns, although I have been physically mistreated. They had a habit of grabbing me from behind and punishing me for struggling.

It has always disturbed me when autistic people are described purely in terms of our height and weight. As uncontrollable people who get bigger and scarier as time goes on. That’s exactly the reason cops gave for what they did. He was big and tall and therefore dangerous. He hadn’t even done anything to them until they tried to grab him and handcuff him for no reason. (When they arrived he was sitting and talking calmly.)

Some people are able to control their responses when other people grab them and handcuff them. Autistic people often are not. And especially not just after an event that clearly involved a loss of control over our bodies. It’s not good enough to teach us to remain calm when someone grabs us. That doesn’t work. And it doesn’t even guarantee our safety. Often police will use force regardless of what we are doing.

Nondisabled people rarely seem to put themselves in the shoes of disabled people who get killed, by police or otherwise. They imagine it happening to their friend, their sister, their son, but not them. I am not sure why. All I know is that whenever I hear something like this, the first thing that happens is total identification with the person who died. I know what it’s like to lose control over your body’s movements. I know what it’s like to be restrained. These are not things that happen to someone else. They’re things that happen to me.

Sometimes I think the world would be better if people did immediately identify with people in these situations, instead of imagining this happens only to some other kind of person, never to someone like them.

Meanwhile I often can’t get it out of my head. Especially when it involves details that closely resemble situations I am familiar with. And from the description, catatonic excitement is not a bad guess as to what might have been going on.

I can’t make you understand what it’s like for your body to run around out of your control, to only be along for the ride. But maybe you can understand being killed for things you have no control over?

Notes: