5:01pm May 31, 2014

Some thoughts on autism spectrum disorders and violence.

On the one side are news stories that keep claiming that the latest mass shooter “was autistic,” even when there is little or no evidence that they had such a diagnosis or any traits matching it.

On the other side, there are people rightly protesting this portrayal of autism, pointing out that “autistics are gentle, peaceful people” and “there is no correlation at all between autism and violence.”

I feel I have something to add to this.

I was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome as a young child. As a kid, I was violent to other kids, very, very often. This was sometimes because of my trouble with impulse control… sometimes because of my very deep frustration with the way I was treated by others… and sometimes because I honestly could not figure out the difference between playful roughhousing and actually hurting someone. (Lately I’m realizing I learned a lot of my social skills from reading “Calvin and Hobbes.” This may have been a problem.)

These causes most likely WERE related to being on the autism spectrum, especially the last one. Some autistics DO have violent behavior problems associated with autism, either directly, or as a response to society’s treatment of autistics. Others have violent behavior problems caused by something else entirely. And many, many others have such a strong aversion to conflict that violence is unthinkable for them.

Throughout the whole autistic population, it probably averages out to less violence than the neurotypical population. So no study would ever show any correlation between violence and autism.

And, among the autistic people who are violent in ways directly related to the autism, I really doubt there are many who would commit violence on the scale of a mass shooting.

My violence, as a child, was limited to sudden and brief bursts: hitting a kid who did something I hated; shoving a friend when our innocent play got out of hand; sneaking up on other kids and biting them because I thought it would be funny and I was desperate beyond reason for people to do anything other than ignore me.

It happened over and over and over again, getting me suspended, getting me moved to different schools, getting me sent home from summer camp. From my perspective, and my family’s perspective, it was a huge problem. But to my knowledge I never caused anyone serious injury. I fantasized about worse violence, certainly. (Remember, I learned my life skills from Calvin and Hobbes!) But I never acted on the fantasies.

And, as I grew up, even the small acts of violence vanished completely. I’ve become so Minnesota Nice that it’s hard even to stand up for myself when someone does something that really bothers me. My childhood experiences with conflict were so traumatic that they pushed me very, very far in the other direction.

I’m not saying every autistic person’s experience is the same as mine. Not all autistics have figured out social rules as well as I have, and some are a hell of a lot more angry. Often with good reason. The world is not nice to us. (Especially when the news keeps baselessly linking us to deadly catastrophes.) I was lucky to have as many supportive people in my life as I did.

And I’m not saying that my current niceness is caused completely by my supportive upbringing, either. Some people have parents and teachers just as nice as mine, and grow up to be terrible people. We may never fully understand the causes of all the things people do. People are too complicated.

But I do want to say that

1. even if there is SOMETIMES a connection between violence and autism, that does NOT mean that ANY significant number of autistics are at risk for mass-shooting-type violence.

and

2. the environment you grow up in can have a LOT of effect on your feelings and behavior as an adult, even though a good upbringing isn’t an absolute guarantee of good behavior. If you’re raised in a setting where some of the people around you are demonized, degraded and treated unfairly, that’s probably more of a risk for violent behavior than any mental condition you could be born with.

I’m someone else autistic who was impulsively violent, well into my twenties. I hesitate to blame it on autism, I really don’t know where it came from but I have some ideas. But that’s not the point, anyway.

Impulsive, spur-of-the-moment violence is not the same as the kind of calculated violence it takes to pick up a gun and run around shooting people.

Most autistic people who have violence problems are impulsively violent during meltdowns or PTSD triggers or other things like that. And people like that do need to work on being less violent. BUT.

We aren’t going to pick up a gun and shoot someone.

We aren’t going to plan out violence and carry it out.

That’s something completely different.

To plan out violence and carry it out, on that kind of scale. You have to deliberately work your way up to it. You have to build walls between yourself and others, so that compassion does not kick in and stop you from killing people. You have to develop hatred, develop anger, and nurture them.

These are things I was told by someone who almost became a mass shooter but didn’t because of a spiritual experience. Long story short, they’re now a wonderful person you’d never in a million years suspect that they could’ve been a mass shooter.

But they have emphasized to me over and over again, that in order to do what that shooter did, you have to work at it. You have to force your mind into a mindset where murder is going to be okay. You have to exercise your hatred every single day, you have to block out love and compassion and all the normal things people experience that prevent us from running around shooting people.

That is not the same as the impulsive violence autistic people sometimes experience.

And it should not be compared. At all. They have nothing in common.

I’ve noticed that the people who benefit the most from these comparisons are the people who do the shootings and other things like that. Even people who don’t do shootings, but do other forms of cold-blooded, planned, premeditated hate, benefit from people thinking that what they do is the same as impulsive violence. My stalker does a lot of threats of violence and cold-blooded premeditated hateful manipulation stuff (and has tried to solicit murderers for me and a friend of mine), and then tries to make people feel sorry for her by claiming that this is all because she’s autistic and was abused as a child. I have known hundreds of autistic people who were abused as children, myself included, some abused worse than she was and for longer. Some of us have violence problems or did in our past. Pretty much none of us behaved how she behaves.

There’s a difference. People need to understand the difference.

Notes: