We humans and most other animals appear to be equipped with a set of predictable responses to situations. We call these the basic emotions: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, joy and sadness. In today’s autism awareness poster, I am presenting two myths associated with autism and emotions.
Emotions are biological states associated with the nervous system brought on by neurophysiological changes variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. It’s true that many people with autism don’t show emotions in ways that people without the condition would recognise.
When we are in sad state, the autistic persons might show either no emotions or complete opposite emotion. This leads to we feeling that they don’t understand our emotions or they don’t respond to our emotions.
“Alexithymia” is a personality construct characterised by altered emotional awareness which has been gaining diagnostic prevalence, with notably high rates of overlap with autism spectrum disorder. Whether the individual is autistic or not, alexithymia decides whether he/ she has ability to understand / express emotions.
Would like to narrate a small incidence, may not be directly related the theme of the day. Once we (me, my wife and Pratibha) went for a function associated with death of a relative. It must be about 10 - 12 years back. The situation there was gloomy. Most people were sad. The wife of the deceased person was in tears in a room. Pratibha was initially staring at everyone as she didn’t understand what’s happening. She was smiling and talking to people. Generally everyone would have assumed that she can’t understand emotions, or respond with the right emotions. The widow of the person deceased was alone in the room, with tears in her eyes. We all briefly met and condoled with her in her loss. After we left the room Pratibha went to her and asked ‘what happened?’, with non-verbal action. She responded saying that “uncle gone to god, so there is tears in my eyes”. Pratibha asked her “why are you crying? Uncle has gone to god. Every day you pray god. God will give whatever uncle wants. Then why sad?”. For Pratibha, death means gone to god, that’s what we have told her. The aunty got stunned for a moment, and hugged Pratibha and said, these are my last drop of tears!
The conversation between Pratibha and the aunty was only between them. No one else was there. The aunty told us later what happened. Pratibha was in joyful mood, when everyone else were sad, might be due to her understanding of ‘death’, or what we told to her ‘what death is’. For her ‘god is good’, so ‘going to god’ has to be a happy thing. Many would have assumed that because of autistic, she doesn’t understand emotions, and she happily moves around in a sad environment. We need to understand how autistic persons look at things based on what we have told them and what we made them understand! Isn’t it she is conveying more deeper meaning of spirituality?
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