The subject of “twiddling” on the part of people with autism is really interesting to me. I believe Jonathan Mitchell has some stories which incorporate it somewhere as part of the action. I’m interested in the connections between compulsive behaviors and neurological responses. I think the place to look for parallels might be in shamanism and spiritism, specifically rituals whose purpose is to put you into a trance and movements exhibited within the context of religious worship. Would be really interesting to draw it together as well with musical performance and dance.

Our Zoe has always held objects and shook them in a rapid motion. We have come to refer to this as ‘twiddling’.

We have not discouraged this behaviour within the confines of the house, but over a long period of time we have managed to enforce the belief that twiddling is not something that Zoe does at school or whilst out shopping or when visiting the dentist etc.

Zoe does draw huge comfort from this hand action, and it would be very cruel to deny her this comfort. The twiddling does manifest itself every single day, from when she wakes to when she goes to bed. However, it should be stated that Zoe knows to drop her twiddles at meal times, when she goes to the toilet and most important of all, when she goes to bed. This is important as she would not go to sleep.

Reading this, people might consider that we are not acting in the child ’s best interest by normalising this compulsive behaviour.

Hm, twiddling, Twitter. Nerds with OCD coding software all day. Stimming. Punding. You have to learn how to channel this natural human desire to repeat positive stimulations to new replacement behaviors. You can’t simply break old patterns, is my experience. Something has to take their place. I worry about neurodiversity as a subject: about how our technologies, chemicals and cultural systems are modulating behaviors and selecting for and against certain types of behavioral sets. I worry that an overzealous political group will one day come into power which de-values certain definitions of what it means to be a human and begins to conflate those who don’t fit that definition as somehow non-human and therefore no longer deserving of rights and decency. Something like what the Soviets (but most certainly not in America! [See also: Dr. Bronner movie]) allegedly pulled:

At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple. The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was sometimes applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy.

Autism is a subject I keep my eye on as another bellwether for that reason.