By Jesse Meadows: For Complete Post, Click Here…
I could tell you stories, but the truth is, I don’t remember much. I don’t think I was a very good person at the height of it all — alcohol tends to distort your morality. Bad ideas glisten in a drunken sheen. They shatter all around you, glitter and cut.
It took me fifteen years to try sobriety, and I only did it because I thought it would ease my depression. Because one night in bed I was wasted and crying, texting my friend about how much I wanted to die, and he texted back, you’re scaring me.
It is scary, especially considering that autistic people are 7 times more likely to commit suicide, and there are no autistic-specific suicide hotlines (and if there were, truly, it would be text-based. Phone calls are a nightmare).
There’s barely any support for autistic adults at all. Typing “autism therapy” into Google will get you endless pages of services aimed at teaching children how to perform neurotypical behaviors, a practice which directly contributes to trauma, self-harm, and suicidality in adulthood.
In one of the only books I could find on this topic, Asperger’s Syndrome and Alcohol, co-author Sarah Hendrickx writes:
“We have a suspicion that many people do not know they have AS because their drinking hides it and ‘normalizes’ them.”
