Are Autistic People Just Lazy?

This post has been prompted by a Zoom meeting I had today. I was talking to a group of people that most likely included teachers, speech-language pathologists, and parents. Some asked me a question. I don’t remember it verbatim, but I’ll try to paraphrase. “What would I say to a parent to help them to be more comfortable with their child using an AAC device?”

I’ve been asked this same question many times over the years in slightly different ways. This question is based on a false underlying assumption: a lack of speech in an autistic individual is a result of a behavior problem. A lack of speech in an autistic individual is most likely caused by severe apraxia which is a very real neurological impairment. It’s not something that can be overcome by sheer force of will. And it’s not a character flaw that I, and others like me, are not able to overcome it.

To some extent, I can understand the confusion. Apraxic individuals might be able to speak sometimes but not others. A word that can be uttered intelligibly one day cannot be said at all the next. Most people ask, “why can you speak sometimes but not others?” As a result of most people’s binary thinking, they assume that a person must be completely speaking or completely nonspeaking, and there can be no gradations in between.

I think it’s probably easier and less scary for parents to believe that their children are just being difficult or that it’s a behavior problem. It’s much scarier to come to terms with the fact that it’s a real neurological disability.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that autistic people don’t just have to deal with misunderstandings about our speech and language challenges. It touches on a broader misunderstanding of the experience of autistic individuals. To put it very crudely and bluntly, autistic people are shit on for many other reasons. I would argue that of all the different types of disabilities, we receive the least understanding and compassion. For example, I have always struggled to understand the seemingly endless list of unwritten social rules that everyone else knows instinctively. Most people don’t understand why it’s so difficult for me, so the assumption is often that I’m lazy, entitled, attention-seeking, and so on. This is the trouble that many people have when they have an invisible disability. People want or expect some outward sign like a cane or wheelchair, and if they don’t get that, there is confusion and hostility.

Every challenge that we face is viewed as a behavior problem, laziness, or a character flaw. I think I speak for most autistic people when I say that most people don’t have a clue how much mental and physical energy we expend in order to live in, and cope with, a world that is frequently overwhelming and incomprehensible. Imagine that you see a duck out on a lake. It looks like it’s just floating there, but you don’t see beneath the surface of the water where it’s kicking its feet like crazy. To answer the question in the title, autistic people are most certainly not lazy.