Over the summer, I was part of a Stanford Rebuilt Project - NDGifts (Neuro diversity, Giving Individuals full team success.). It was a collaborative effort by around 72 people from across the world. It is the idea of helping employers better understand ND so that ND folks also become part of the employment landscape. I wrote the section on Anxiety as Comorbidity of the 81 page report.
Launch Event on 9/3/20 (From 0:52 mins) - on Youtube
Link to the Report: My section starts on Page 50
I actually heard about this project from another recent Berkeley graduate, Cole, who is also part of this project. It’s been an unusual summer sitting at home, with rampant cabin fever.
There were many areas that Tiffany laid out that we could get involved in and frankly I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the beginning. I already deal with a lot of anxiety and this summer of pandemic has not been kind to many of us autistics in some ways and it has felt very oppressive and suffocating.
So I thought, why not take on the topic of anxiety as a co-morbidity and write on it. Writing can be cathartic and therapeutic as well as informational for others, and I have written on mental health in autism before.
Other topics I was interested in writing about was how neurodiversity is defined, how it is represented in the media and the whole special education system which is a mess with gatekeeping at every level. Had lots of thoughts on many of these things. Of course it's absolutely unrealistic to take on writing so many. So I focused on the anxiety part. But was able to add inputs to other different areas in the meetings.
Tiffany was also super helpful in funneling a lot of research articles my way as I was trying to set up the remote login to the Berkeley library system to access research materials. So that was super helpful.
Sometimes the hardest part is to get started and Nicole was really great on that and she outlined a nice framework to work within. It was great working with Nicole.
So the section is a combination of literature review of existing research and incorporating personal experiences to give it a human angle, that there are real people at the end of it reflecting liv’d experiences.
I think mental health is something that people have not quite understood, a kind of fuzzy logic. Sometimes it seems like the newest buzzword, to be used almost like a fashion accessory, which saddens me as it dilutes the needs of those who really have to liv with it.
Everyone also seems to assume that Mental health is a stand alone condition. So if you have autism, it must preclude anxiety. I think what we are trying to say is that anxiety is a very real thing, a very real co-existing condition, a very real comorbidity of neurodivergence.
If you think about it, Mental health is inevitable after years of feeling different, that you don’t belong, and being excluded. The nature of the neurodiversity itself, whether it's autism or ADHD or dyslexia or dysgraphia, can itself be a source of anxiety as can environmental factors and societal attitudes. We go into explaining these in the report. It does not matter if the disability is very visible like in my case or invisible as in the case of many others, each has different anxieties around it.
I have both learned from and enjoyed writing this section as well as reviewing and providing feedback to other sections.
I think one of the surprising ironies of this pandemic, or rather its bright lights, is that zoom has been able to connect us to people from around the world. It was amazing to hear different perspectives across times zones and across continents. So we were zooming and working off the same google drive and it did not matter that we were literally crossing physical oceans.
As an autistic I have a huge personal stake in seeing improvements across the board for our community. I tentatively attended the first meeting and found an important area was being targeted, getting employers to understand what neurodiversity was about.
You see, you can implement all kinds of laws to mandate equitable access to employment, but laws will not translate to anything as long as employers feel uncertain and uncomfortable about what they are dealing with.
It's no use just telling employers that they need to be doing this for the greater good because everyone needs to be included. They will always find a workaround to not go into unknown employee territory if they don’t understand what accommodations can look like or that there can actually be advantages to them. Neurodiversity is a huge spectrum which can make it seem overwhelming but it can also be a spectrum of un thought of skill sets that can be harnessed.
I had another stake in this project in that some faces in the neurodiversity populations such as autistics with higher support needs, are less visible even to general society, and therefore less visible to employers as well. For instance, I’m not the image of what you imagine a college going autistic would look like. But why should individuals like me be a rarity in the college world and hence the employment world. I wanted to give a voice to this population as well, that we exist and have skills to contribute too. And we can create win-win situations.
It stands to reason therefore that as potential employers learn about neurodiversity, they will become more amenable to including all of neurodiversity in the employment arena. We can help employers get over this fear of the unknown and find out that perhaps we are all not so different after all. I believe this project is a step in expanding understanding and kind of demystifying neurodiversity.
Simple really, from my point of view as an autistic. All of us, whether abled or disabled want to be contributing members of society. We all need to wake up to something meaningful every day.
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