I'm pretty sure my friend is Autistic. Should I tell them?

For far too long, external judgement has defined the neurodivergent experience. Let's not continue that problem.

Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist. You can submit questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, linked here.

Today’s question comes from an Autistic person who has many friends who sure seem like they might be Autistic — but who bristle at their suggestion that might be the case:

I very much understand why you are asking this question, Anon. Like you, I have had many friends who have struck me as quite obviously Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.

The neuro-nonconforming have knack for finding one another. We keep each other company as we glumly walk the mile in gym class, and cluster together at the corner of the party, grimacing from the noise with our arms crossed. The people who tend to be the most patient with my info-dumping are my fellow obsessives, be they Autistic, Narcissistic, or OCD; the people who have proven the most patient with my irritability and meltdowns are ADHDers who have carefully practiced how to forgive and forget.

Virtually every person that I’ve ever been close to has been some variety of neurodivergent. A highly neuro-conforming person would be almost definitionally incompatible with my personality and outlook. But that doesn’t mean I should go around telling everybody that I vibe with that I’m pretty sure they must have some kind of disability — and when I have tried doing that, it’s never gone over well.

I once lost a cherished friend by sharing that I suspected she had Borderline Personality Disorder. It was a declaration of intimacy and acceptance; I had BPD too, and I wanted my friend to know that I understood her romantic fixations, suicidal depressions, and unending searches for identity.

But regardless of the Mad Pride and friendship that motivated my statement, BPD remained a highly stigmatized mental illness that routinely gets people institutionalized, arrested, and even fired by their therapists. And so my friend understandably felt insulted by my calling her a BPDer, and she pulled away from me. That was the end of an almost daily penpal relationship that had sustained me emotionally for years. Over a decade since our relationship ended, I still miss her, and still regret that I imposed my narrative onto her life without asking.

Past attempts at diagnosing friends with Autism or ADHD haven’t gone any better. I was pretty certain an ex of mine had ADHD; I saw how stressed he got writing emails and going to the DMV. He worked late into the night, and could only fall asleep with Youtube videos on. But once again, the declaration that he was neurodivergent hit him like an insult.

I thought I was saying I accepted him as he really was; he thought I was saying there was something wrong with him. If anything, my assertion that he was an ADHDer prevented him from seeking out the answers for himself. I didn’t grant him the freedom or the respect to determine his own truth.

The same thing has nearly happened a few times with close acquaintances that I’m pretty damn sure are Autistic. But these days, I don’t force my perspective onto others, because I’ve seen the damage it can do. Some people do not like claiming categorical identities for themselves. They might interpret their experience of living in a painfully neuroconformist society in some alternative way. Or they might know that they’re Autistic just as clearly as I feel that I "know” it about them, but they simply don’t want to discuss it. That does not prevent me from loving them, or from finding commonality in our relationship.

Anon, here is what I have learned: You shouldn't tell someone what you think their identity ought to be, no matter your intentions.

Many people who mask or are undiagnosed hold highly stigmatized views about what Autism is. They will not take your diagnosis as a positive declaration of belonging, but rather an accusation that they have failed to conceal what feels most frightening or vulnerable about themselves. Exposing a side of themselves they’ve worked hard to hide will make them feel very unsafe and judged, even if your goal is the opposite.

Telling someone that you think they might be neurodivergent also suggests that you know them better than they know themselves, which is untrue, and will typically feel invasive and unwelcome to hear. (The same is true of trying to force a queer or trans person out of the closet long before they are ready. It doesn’t matter if you are right. It’s not your life to live, or your truth to author. Any attempt to push someone out before they are ready will more likely send them running to the darkest corners of the closet).

Your friend could be the most obviously Autistic person to ever exist, from your point of view, but the choice of how to self-define still falls solely on them. There are many different ways for a person to make sense of their experience, and they might arrive at some other word or concept that better does their life justice, from their perspective.

People have the right to identify as starchildren, “highly sensitive persons,” “empaths,” introverts, or simply uncategorizable, no matter how much some in our community might hate it. And some neurodivergent folks have such an idiosyncratic point of view that they might choose to see themselves as otherkin, or robots, or multi-personality systems, or something otherwise inhuman instead. That’s also their right. A person does not need to identify as Autistic in order to support the cause of neurodiverse liberation, or to be a damn cool weirdo that’s fun to hang around.

Identities exist to help us make sense of our lives and express who we are to other people, and they should only ever operate on our terms.

There are a lot of identities that I qualify for on a technical level that I don’t like to claim for myself — non-monogamous, nonbinary, queer, and plural being just a few of them. These labels aren’t wrong exactly, but they do not feel right either. They don’t convey enough about my social and interpersonal context: why I might have sex with multiple people and under what circumstances; what my gender is, in an affirmative way, only what it isn’t. I don’t have to proudly fly a polyamorous flag in order to maintain friendships with polyamorous people. I don’t have to stake a claim to a specific nonbinary identity in order to have learned that the binary is bunk.

Most neurodivergent people are absolutely sick of always being defined from an external point of view. We don't need members of our own community doing that to us further.

drdevonprice

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If you have benefitted from coming to understand yourself as Autistic, Anon, you can speak about that openly and positively. That will be enough incentive for anyone in your life who is neurodivergent to explore the possibility for themselves, should they want to.

And if you connect easily with someone because you share traits in common or seem to naturally understand one another, let that be enough. Tell the person that you feel comfortable around them and that spending time with them helps you to accept yourself. That is a much greater compliment than telling someone who they must be.

You can submit future questions to Autistic Advice at drdevonprice.com/ask.