‘When You Expect Bears To Breathe Underwater’ and ‘Disabled Personality’

When You Expect Bears To Breathe Underwater

If you must know something about Collin, it’s that Collin is a bear. 

If you have ever met a bear you will also know this about Collin; He can swim, but he cannot breathe underwater. 

It is a Saturday and Collin has plans to spend time with the fish. 

Collin loves to swim. He is quite good at swimming. 

What Collin is not good at is breathing underwater. He is really quite terrible at it. 

Today, Collin pulls on his favourite red trunks and gets into the water. 

He can’t help his large size and makes a big splash when getting in. All the fish stare at him. 

He knows he is different from the fish, but this doesn’t bother Collin. 

‘It does not matter that I have fur and Brian has blue scales and Jenny has purple fins, we all enjoy swimming. That’s what matters’ he thought to himself. 

Everytime they go swimming they spend about 1-2 hours in the water. 

Today is different. 

1 hour passes

‘I feel quite good today’  

2 hours pass

‘Hmmm we would normally be back by now’

3 hours 

‘Could you imagine if they found out I can’t breathe underwater!?’

4 hours

‘Why can’t they see I’m struggling? Won’t someone help me?’

If you can’t breathe underwater, you can’t speak underwater. Collin has no way of telling the fish how desperate he is for help.

5 hours

‘WTF is wrong with me’

6 hours 

‘I wish I had never swum in the first place’

7 hours 

‘Maybe if I get caught in the current and dragged far out to sea I will feel better, at least I will be away from them’

8 hours 

‘How could I have been so stupid’

9 hours 

‘help’

The 10th hour has passed and Collin is finally out of the water. The water still sticks to his skin and fur, like glue. He rolls angrily in the grass, against trees and rocks, anything, to get the feeling off of his body. 

‘Why am I like this!?’ he asks himself. ‘Why am I so different?’ 

He not only wondered why he was different from the fish but also why he was different at home than out there with the fish. 

Unable to sleep, Collin gets a pen and paper and begins to write a list. 

On one half of the list he writes the kind of person he is at home. 

• Kind
• Passionate 
• Creative 
• Empathetic

To name a few. 

Then, on the other side he wrote what kind of person he was when he was out with the fish. 

Kind, passionate, creative and empathetic all made it onto the list. 

In fact, everything was the same. The only thing that was different was how he felt when he looked at the lists. 

When he looked at the ‘home’ list he felt happy, content. But when he looked at the other list he felt ashamed, embarrassed and really quite lonely. 

This struck Collin as rather odd. He contemplated deeply on the topic that night 

‘Even when I was so obviously drowning, I was still me.’ 

‘Why is it that the same traits can be treated differently in different contexts?’…

---

Disabled Personality

This past year I was diagnosed ADHD and Autistic (affectionately known as auDHD).  

This caused me to begin a new hyperfixation on the diagnostic process and the history of both ADHD and Autism. 

There were many things in the diagnostic criteria, the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders 5th edition), that bothered me.

The DSM-5 is not written for or even from the perspective of the subject but rather the perspective of the assessor. The narrow language model provided focuses greatly on observed behaviours which is rather ironic considering the root of the word Autism is derived from the Greek word autos, meaning self. Not only that but these are mental disorders we are talking about NOT behavioural issues which is what the DSM-5 currently written for.

External opinions and context are relevant of course but in the way the diagnostic criteria is written there is little consideration for internal experiences and processing that are next to impossible to simply observe in a person. This means that when it comes to being diagnosed it can be an extremely different experience depending on who you are seeing, when you are seeing, and why you are seeing them. It means us late diagnosed neurodivergent folk are more reliant on seeing the right person in the hopes that they take more initiative in the diagnostic process like giving more agency to the subject rather than just filling out forms and observing the subject. 

But what are we even testing for? 

Because when the DSM itself says culture must be taken into account it becomes less about the subject’s brain, but rather the culture the subject resides in. And in my unprofessional opinion, if the diagnostic process comes down to you in relation to your surrounding culture or rather how disabled you are in your surrounding culture, the diagnostic criteria doesn’t appear to be all that reliable, does it?

Because, if by removing the subject from the culture and placing them in a different culture has the capacity to change their diagnostic state. We begin to realise that the diagnostic criteria is rather fragile and unreliable. 

Not only does the culture affect the diagnosis, so too does the context of the assessor. Due to the agency that a lot of assessor’s often take on means that I could go to different assessor’s in the same city and get a different result even though the diagnostic criteria is the same. 

This also puts us in the area of debating traits that are just “personality” or rather not enough to diagnose you, therefore being considered “subclinical”. Tony Atwood’s 2007 book The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome makes reference to this;

Recent research has indicated that 46 per cent of the first-degree relatives of a child with Asperger’s Syndrome have a similar profile of abilities and behaviour (Volkmar, Klin and Pauls 1998), although usually to a degree that is sub-clinical, i.e. more a description of personality than a syndrome or disorder. 

I believe it is highly unlikely someone could have, in his words, ‘a similar profile of abilities and behaviours’ and be truely subclinical. 

In the context Atwood discusses being subclinical he refers to first degree relatives. A relative who exhibits traits but is considered to be “subclinical” reflects on the unreliability of the deficit model used by the DSM. My guess is that these “subclinical” relatives are actually autistic’s who appear/are mentally healthy and happy. 

I will go more in depth another time about the history of Autism, but in short, it was believed that if an autistic child became happy and mentally healthy, they were cured of autism. In other words, if you are autistic, you cannot be happy or healthy. Even in 2023 this is still the grounds on which the diagnostic criteria stand. 

I think a lot of late diagnosed autistic adults have a fear around being subclinical because likely for most of your life you and those around you have only viewed these traits as purely personality (positive or negative) rather than something to do with cognitive disorder, difference, or processing. In reality they aren’t one or the other, they are both. If I wasn’t auDHD I would have a different personality because I would have a different brain and therefore be a different person. 

The debate of trait vs disorder is more relevant than you may think. 

When we look at the Myers-Briggs INFJ personality type we can see a lot of the traits lineup with those of the characteristics of being autistic. 

Does this mean that all people with infj personality type are autistic? Obviously not.

INFJ	Autism
Deep fascination with psychology and how society functions.  Sensitive to criticism. Highly empathetic. Introverted. Perfectionist. Insightful.  Sensitive. Strong sense of justice. Values driven. Deep thinker. Passionate. Very creative.  Rich inner world. Struggles with change. Stuck in Inertia. People-pleaser.  Prone to burnout.	Deep fascination with psychology and how society functions.  Sensitive to criticism.  Highly empathetic. Introverted. Perfectionist.  Insightful.  Sensitive.  Strong sense of justice. Values driven. Deep thinker. Passionate. Very creative. Rich inner world. Struggles with change. Stuck in Inertia. People-pleaser.   Prone to burnout.

Does this mean INFJ and Autism are the same thing? Definitely not. But many Neurodivergent people have noticed a strong pattern with Autistics’s having INFJ personality and ADHDers having INFP personality type. This is definitely true for me as I have switched between INFJ and INFP personality types throughout my life.

The point of this comparison is to highlight how socially we treat these labels very, very differently, even if they exhibit a lot of the same qualities.

For example, If you went to a job interview and you listed these traits which are summarised as being INFJ. I can almost guarantee that you would be treated very differently if you did the exact same thing with the same person but summarised the traits as being autistic. 

Just like when Collin compared Home and with fish it was not he, the subject who is the issue. 

This debate of disability or personality runs alongside the models of social disability and medical disability, which I will discuss at length another time. 

On a more personal note, my diagnostic process went very well. I managed to find a woman who understands the complexities of an adult, female autism diagnosis (not to mention the concurrent diagnoses of ADHD). She took her time getting to know me and my particular ‘brain style’, as she calls it. My only hope is to see this level of tailored approach become more commonplace in the diagnostic process, because it is currently quite uncommon to find someone like her first try.