I’m Pathologically Demand Avoidant. It Rules.

A need for freedom & healthy suspicion of authority has protected me, not hurt me.

A meme of Bugs Bunny saying “no.”

This piece was originally published on July 5, 2023 on Medium. Why I’m migrating all my Medium pieces here.

It’s the summer of my first year in graduate school and I’m standing in a small office on Northwestern’s campus. I’m there for a job interview, for some short-term research assistant position, and my sweaty body’s at ease in a stretchy cotton skirt and loose blouse. My hair is hanging freely at my shoulders, unmolested by a brush, and my face, as always, is bare.

A printed-out copy of my resume sits in a manila folder in front of me — both office supplies having been stolen from my main job. There’s a lilt in my step as I roam idly around the room. I’m pleased by the gentle weather and the peace that a semester off from my studies will bring. I even begin humming to myself.

The hiring manager walks in, in a full suit and full face of makeup. My goofy, unfiltered appearance makes her open her mouth with surprise. I just smile back, obliviously. She brings me back to her office and quizzes me about my work experience and statistical knowledge. I rattle the answers off, feeling zero stress. Everything seems to be going well from my perspective, when suddenly, about ten minutes into the exchange, everything comes to a halt.

“Do you even want this job?” The woman asks me, gesturing to my appearance, and my leg casually crossed over my knee.

“Sure,” I tell her, with a shrug. It’s thirteen dollars an hour in 2010 money, in a field relevant to my career. I’ve got to make rent. I could do worse. This interview isn’t that big a deal, but it is worth my time.

This is not the correct answer for her. Or really, it’s not the correct performance. I’m supposed to be desperate, well-dressed, and ready to please. But I’ve never been able to pretend that something of little consequence is all that important to me.

I do not get the position. In fact, I’m thrown out before the interview can really get started. Somehow this doesn’t bother me either. I can do a job for money, but I can’t become a new person. I walk home, still humming. I know I’ll figure it out.

In 1980, British child psychologist Elizabeth Newson introduced a novel profile of Autism that hadn’t been described in the literature before, which she named the “pathologically demand avoidant” profile.

Compared to more (stereo)typically Autistic children, PDA Autistics were described as more comfortable with imaginative play, more emotionally expressive, and more socially skilled. In fact, they are observant enough of other people’s emotions and expectations as to be ‘manipulative’ at times, Newson claimed.

Newson and other scholars reported that PDAers often had high verbal abilities and an interest in other people — but stated their identities seemed unstable, or noncommittal. They were supposedly more likely to be female than “traditional” Autistics were, and were sensitive and creative to boot.

In these and many other ways, the PDA profile of Autism closely mirrors how numerous masked Autistics tend to describe themselves. Masked Autistics tend to be more adept at socializing than their less masked peers, and more outwardly expressive, as well as sensitive to rejection. As a group, they’re also more likely to include populations of Autistics that have long been overlooked in the scientific literature, including people of color, trans people, and women.

The core difference between masked Autistics and PDA Autistics tends to be their approaches to external expectations. Masked Autistics strive to game out unspoken social rules, and to perform the roles expected of them, in order to avoid detection as disabled. PDA Autistics, in contrast, are often viscerally incapable of doing so.

But the line between a masker and a PDAer is shaky, and may really just be a matter of one’s point of view. An Autistic person who strives with all their might to be easygoing and agreeable might still be viewed by ableist outsiders as too emotionally flat and hard to be around. Even when we parrot social scripts perfectly, research shows that neurotypicals still dislike us. So in many ways, masking and PDA are just two sides of the same isolating coin.

According to the limited clinical literature that exists on the subject, PDA Autistics hate being told what to do, and early in life can appear passive to a fault. This, too, echoes the tendency of many masked Autistics to become incredibly inhibited in the face of vague, impossible-to-meet social expectations.

PDAers often learn to speak or walk at later ages than their more neuro-conforming peers, which can strike caregivers and doctors as a sign of laziness or low motivation. But from the outside, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between apathy and a stress-induced freeze response. And in fact PDAers have been frequently observed to experience overwhelming anxiety.

Excessive demands and uncertainty often provoke PDAers to explode into panic attacks or meltdowns. Many report finding it difficult to brush their teeth, manage their calendars, or complete new items added to their to-do lists. They are resistant to authority figures who try to force or pressure them into completing a task. Caregivers frequently view their PDA Autistic children as disobedient, or feel disturbed that their kids don’t share their own goals and values. This is an experience common to young masked Autistics as well.

When not in control of their environment, PDA Autistics show signs of extreme distress. They’re also very uncomfortable with uncertainty, and obligations for which there aren’t clear, objective instructions. These forms of distress tend to recede a bit as the PDAer grows older, develops more effective self-advocacy tools, and gains enough freedom to simply walk away from environments that are damaging to them.

PDAers are often misdiagnosed with related disorders such as ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder as children, or with conditions like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder as adults. Though the PDA profile of Autism has been championed by a number of parents’ groups and clinicians, it currently is not listed in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, or the International Classifications of Diseases.

Some psychologists, such as Allison Moore, Tomlin Wilding, and myself have argued that the PDA profile cannot be understood as an individual pathology at all. Wilding suggests we ought to think of the acronym PDA as standing for “persistent drive for autonomy” instead. I’m inclined to agree.

I’d also argue that instead of writing off a child’s clarity-seeking and desire for freedom as faults, we ought to ask ourselves whether it’s society that’s sick with pathological demand assignment. We so consistently fail to show the limitations and needs of disabled people any respect.

I think we should conceptualize institutions, employers, teachers, and the parents of minors as pathologically demand assigning, not their victims as pathologically demand avoiding.

In tenth grade, when a Christian, abstinence-only performing arts troupe tried to divide my health classroom down the middle into groups of girls and boys, I found myself sitting rigidly in the center, with a shit-eating grin on my face and no will to move.

As that same group began lining up my classmates and forcing them to sign a virginity pledge, my friend Emma and I began spouting off in disagreement. You don’t have to sign that stupid piece of paper, we whispered from the sidelines. Having sex is not a big deal, you can do it if you want to.

Weeks later, when a boy from my karate class drove me home and tried putting an arm around my body, the words “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING” sailed out of my mouth. I was embarrassed by my instinctive combativeness, yet it protected me. When a girl in my grade cornered me in the showers screaming abuse and calling me a dyke, my back went rigid and I hurled a stony, confident voice back. When strange men pulled up in their cars to compliment me on my teenaged body and ask for a date, I shut them down angrily and immediately, stunned at where my strength came from.

My confidence bordered on arrogance at times, and it curved reality around me. When I was sixteen, I tricked two separate workplaces into believing I was an adult, and hiring me. When one of those jobs required me to sign customers up for a predatory credit card, I didn’t ever try to do so, and in fact discouraged shoppers from taking the bad deal. When I couldn’t stand the stress of dragging my uncoordinated body into gym class, I found an institutional loophole that allowed me to replace the course with a local college class in philosophy.

I’ve always had a knack for exploiting systems and bending rules in order to preserve my comfort. And I’ve steadfastly refused to follow social norms that strike me as unjust: gender roles, social niceties, guidelines of “professionalism” that are so often homophobic and racist, mandatory events that serve a solely symbolic function. I don’t dress up, I don’t lie, I don’t hold my tongue.

I love that I have a will to be so difficult to deal with — it’s forced me to build a life in alignment with my values. I only wish that more Autistic people had the confidence and privilege that would permit them to do the same.

…

Autistics are far more likely to be out as transgender than our more neuro-conforming peers. A highly vocal coalition of transphobes that includes JK Rowling and Jesse Singal have wrung their hands about this fact quite a lot.

Interestingly, the fact that 42% of Autistics identify as bisexual, gay, lesbian, or asexual seems to concern nearly no one. Nor does the finding that we’re more likely to be polyamorous and to build families that deviate from the nuclear norm. And neither set of trends usually gets considered alongside the broader observation that Autistics are also more morally and intellectually consistent than non-Autistic people. Research also shows that Autistics are more likely to be whistleblowers at companies that are behaving unethically, and that generally, we are more willing to sacrifice social acceptance in order to stand up for our beliefs.

It’s clear that Autistics are more likely to be honest about difficult truths than our non-Autistic peers are. The real question, then, is not “why are so many Autistic people trans?” but rather, “Why are so many non-Autistic people in the closet all their lives?”

And the answer to that one is obvious. Non-Autistics lack a persistent drive for autonomy. No wonder so many of them resent us for dodging the very demands they succumb to.

The Biological Causes of Mental Illness Cannot Be Separated From the Social Ones

Case in point: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in kids with ADHD or Autism.

devonprice.medium.com

People sometimes get very attached to an understanding of disability that is rooted in biology, because they believe that is the only explanation that grants them permission to not function up to society’s punishing, impossible standards. But the reality is that neurotypicality’s punishing standards are not attainable to anyone, and so nobody should feel defective or broken for failing to meet up to them.

While it may bring relief for a parent to believe their PDA Autistic child is failing to meet standards because of something neurologically wrong with them, questioning the standards themselves will prove way more fruitful.

If your child can’t sleep at night because of test anxiety, the problem might actually be the compulsory nature and high stakes of the test. If a kid screams and thrashes when forced to brush their teeth, comb their hair, and stuff their body into a restrictive, gender normative uniform, the problem might just be the whole forcing part, not the principled resistance of the kid.

In the reactions of PDAers we see a body rebelling — against overloaded schedules, uncomfortable sensory stimuli, conformity pressures, and the impossible-to-meet expectations of hyper-individualistic capitalist life. That such rebellion is inconvenient to deal with is the whole point. Lovingly stewarding the life of a child will always be inconvenient. Introducing respect for another person’s needs into your existence will always cost you something, make you ease expectations, break some old rules, abandon some old goals.

Adapting your expectations to the way a person actually functions is the sensible, humane approach. And unwaveringly sticking to the same expectations no matter how often those expectations fail is a sign of being unprepared to deal with reality. Who’s the ‘insane’ one in that equation, from a societal perspective? The disabled person who has clarity about who they are and what they cannot do, or the abled person who cannot accept it?

Image by Gaining Visuals, courtesy of Unsplash.

Whenever I am invited to complete a new work task or attend a new meeting, I am immediately overcome with an affliction I like to call “calendar madness:” I cancel upcoming interviews, reject consulting job offers, and delete emails from my inbox without pity. I begin saying no to all new requests, and refuse to answer questions about my availability. I stress and I fume, and I begin imagining that even the most basic responsibilities must take three times longer than they actually do. I can’t even bear to open up my calendar and look at it during this time.

Calendar madness is pretty much textbook PDA. It’s a sign of resistance, of task avoidance and stubbornness. And yet it’s adaptive for me. Calendar madness means that I nearly always under-promise and over deliver. It airs out a schedule that would otherwise become overwhelming pretty quickly. It prevents me from burning out. Calendar madness is the reason I’ve never turned in a manuscript late in my life, why my taxes are done and my bedroom is clean and there’s still room in my week for long walks and visits to the movies.

In a world where Autistics are conditioned to become passive and compliant, I’m thankful that my reflex is to reject and disappoint instead. It’s a good thing that sometimes I can be a little difficult to deal with.

As a public-facing Autistic person, I receive many worried emails from the parents of PDA Autistic kids. They want my advice for how to “make” their kids feel better, “make” their kids do better, “encourage” their kids to do more. Instead, I wish most people could be more like PDAers. Perhaps if we all collectively refused to be pressured into painful compliance, the world would already be a lot more friendly to difference of all sorts.

…

I originally wrote this article for the mental health blog Hello Alma. But when I received my contract for the work from Hello Alma’s CEO, I was stunned to find a clause surrendering all ownership and copyrights to the work, and to any profits from it, as well as to any future work I make derived from this piece. Such a practice from a publisher is highly unusual, and exploitative. No writer should ever sign a contract giving the copyright to their work like this.

One of the concerning passages from my (unsigned) contract with Hello Alma.

When I requested that the concerning clause of my contract be removed, the CEO of Hello Alma never replied back to me, and the editor I worked with, while incredibly sympathetic to my concerns, was unable to help. For this reason, I pulled the piece and chose to run it here.

I’m sharing this information to warn other writers: do not work with Hello Alma! Read your contracts! You should never give up the copyright to your work to have it run in a publication or printed in a book! And you should definitely never sign a contract giving someone else ownership of anything derived from your work! This is the kind of parasitic shit the Writer’s Guild of America is striking about!

The fact I noticed this troubling passage in my contract and was willing to kill an $800 deal in order to fight it is yet another tribute to my pathological demand avoidance. I’m glad I have the impulse to be shit-stirring, whistle-blowing, and argumentative when I recognize I am being had. I’m willing to sacrifice just about anything, including professional prospects and my career for the sake of calling out an outrageous demand.

I desperately hope that other psychology/self-help/neurodiversity writers see this, and take this as a call to be more discerning in the contracts they sign, I once again want to affirm the power of unions in preventing exploitation of creatives in ways like these, and I strongly discourage anyone from working with Hello Alma.