On building resilience as an autistic/ADHD Fine Art practice based researcher

PhD Candidate Elinor Rowlands writes about building resilience as an AuADHD Fine Art practice based researcher

Resilience for an autistic researcher is to know what kind of environment provides them with the tools to be most resilient. In other words, people have often said I am an effective teacher or lecturer but whenever I have pursued that role in full time employment or even part time employment, I have ended up in severe autistic burnout.

Teaching is not sustainable for all. Difficulties in teaching can be fatiguing and can make autistic academics feel that they are not resilient. However, identifying barriers can help them to thrive. Being a resilient researcher is not only about becoming a lecturer, but it is about identifying where in academia you excel. You as a researcher can shape environments to suit your strengths in delivering academic excellence.

Autistic academics can often feel that education is inaccessible despite thoroughly enjoying the research element within their academic role. It is for this reason that resilience is found in discovering what ways you can experience autonomy and how you are able to shape environments, so they work for you.

If we look at successful and resilient academics, they are often those who have shaped the environments from which to thrive.  

Being resilient is about identifying how your skills shape your team or the environment you want to create for your team.

Researchers will feel they are failing in their job when they continue to put themselves back into the same roles or environments and continue to experience the same results or what they perceive as failure - for example, burn out.  

For example, I can’t do office small talk so to be resilient, I don’t go to offices to do small talk. Nor do I work in them.

I use the “Access to work” grant scheme so I can have a support worker who I can bring with me to meetings if I need that support. They write my notes for me and help me with email or verbal communication. Sadly, the Conservative Party have cut notetakers from Disabled Student Allowance, which means many disabled and neurodivergent students are at a significant disadvantage. However, lockdown was able to provide accessible pathways by introducing the recording of lectures and for disabled researchers in particular, this aids them to be more resilient as they have their access needs met. 

Whilst I’m a researcher in full time education, I have Disabled Student Allowance and have a mental health mentor who I meet weekly to keep me on track with my mental health and who also helps me to navigate conversations that I might need to have with other professionals, colleagues or tutors. Due to being autistic and having ADHD, I am more at risk and susceptible of burnout from social interaction and communication, so need to adhere to strict strategies in order to pace myself. 

Similarly, resilience is about scaffolding and support. All people need support, even those who might not be autistic or have ADHD like me. It’s important to not live on the spectrum of good and bad, or failure or success. Instead, to be resilient we need to ensure we keep our thinking, emotional and working environments in check. We need to identify what support we might need to reduce barriers.

In this way, I think it’s important to highlight the kind of value that an autistic sensibility can provide. Non-autistic researchers can learn a lot from the autistic lived experience too.

We as autistic people, often feel things more deeply, and therefore can use this in many ways:

• We are excellent researchers - and can find information really easily and quickly.

• We adore patterns and can engage with many ideas and make them work when other people have given up on them. And often we make them work in novel ways.

• Because we are so sensitive, we can learn to avoid certain situations that are making it more difficult for us to do the work.

More importantly, I verbally stim and apologise a lot when I’m taking a risk and in a new environment. From a mainstream perspective I do not look confident or resilient but inside I am often feeling fine. Resilience can look different to an autistic academic and more so when you throw in intersectionality.

Imposter syndrome is something that is huge in autism - but similarly, so is the fear of missing out. I talk about this from an autistic perspective around taking things literally.

I struggle with the feeling of missing out so often I used to go to everything, but now I’m more focused as a researcher on what I need for my own research but also my health and wellbeing. This sort of reclaiming of my needs or my space, is in fact making me a more resilient researcher.

Going to everything feels non-negotiable when you’re autistic, the reading between the lines is not read, and often this can result in autistic burnout. When you’re not autistic, you don’t take the literal thing literally, so you miss out on taking the literal thing literally. That can deliver all sorts of content and all sorts of ways of thinking which otherwise ironically might be missed. Because of course, if missed then the self-evident or literal can be glossed over.

This aspect of literalness can mean autistic researchers are often doing 3 PhDs in one, and even I have been told by my supervisors this year during year 1 of my PhD to take a break because I have done too much work or that I am working too much. But the autistic lived experience is that we feel we are never doing enough and can’t switch off the internal motor. It is why so many brilliant autistic researchers I know have dropped out of their PhDs after being made to feel they were doing too many projects in one.

This is another example, my supervisors recommended I save my data on a practice based arts research exposition site. I saved all my data there whilst also adding all my processes in drawings, videos and texts. My supervisors stepped in and told me that this was now my methodology. What one could call the autistic trait of research style has become the methodology.

The autistic researchers I mentioned, who had to drop out of their PhDs because they were told they were doing far too many projects in one or doing far too much work. They lacked something that I have received generously at this university. And they didn’t lack resilience, in fact I believe they were incredibly resilient. But what they lacked was care and support, which I have received in abundance from my two supervisors.

You see, resilience is also about care, and I have two very caring supervisors who step in when they see I might be on the brink of burnout. They see my burnout when to me it’s about discovery but to them, they want me to pace myself.

So I also ensure I am resilient by having support - support through the Disabled Student Allowance, for mental health mentoring, but also outside of my studies I have weekly autistic practical support, and then I also meet with an employment coach who is a Thinking Environment specialist, and has offered me pro bono support once a month, offering me space to think about my artistic practice. This is alongside my supervision sessions.

Without any of this scaffolding support, I would not be able to be a resilient researcher.

There are two sides of resilience and putting to use the autistic trait that doesn’t fit such as taking everything literally, and by hypothetically changing it to use it as advantage - for instance, using the weight of the problem against it, we become resilient.

Resilience therefore requires two things, since autistic academics can find it difficult to read other people or experience a difficulty in being misread by others, there is a need on both sides for trust and good faith.

This trust and good faith, together with care and support goes a long way and I believe it could be argued that Nietzsche was a neurodivergent researcher and writer, well beyond his time even though he writes in ways that would be thoroughly opposed today. He might have even been silenced, shut down or told to overcome his eccentricities/ intensities classed today as ‘difficulties’ and would never have thrived in the way that he did but for the support of his colleagues which is why he was able to publish his writing.

Further, in horror films disabled and autistic protagonists feature the most as psycho killers or weirdos or in many Oscar nominated films as people needing to overcome their disability. The Social Model of Disability states that disabled people are disabled by barriers (including assumptions, attitudes and systemic failures) not their impairments. Even Stephen Hawking argued that the film the Theory of Everything was not about his work but instead about toxic ableism. The film was based on a book his ex wife had written about him. Hawking had no say on the narrative of the film, and he even asked, “Where is the science?”.

Instead, the film showed how his ex wife had sacrificed everything to be with him... something he told her at the very beginning of the film that he could do without and wanted to let her go to lead a life without him. These narratives of attempting to fix or care out of charity for the disabled person instead of focusing on giving them welfare support and benefits so they can access employment or be a brilliant and innovative thinker to make significant contributions to the world as Hawkins was able to do as a scientist, mainly in his words, “due to the Disability Living Allowance scheme” (now scrapped by the Conservative Party) “and the NHS.” 

What Nietzsche and many other Nobel Prize winners could do during the Weimar years etc. shows that accessibility and acceptance of the ‘weird/eccentric/neurodivergent thinker’ is key when we want to include resilient researchers who might look different, because that’s where genius lies.

We shall continue to lose genius and innovative writers/thinkers if we diminish creative pathways and accessibility for neurodivergent and disabled populations especially if we continue to oppress and exclude these people from not only academia where eccentricity used to thrive but also from running organisations, and positions in government if we do not care, support, trust and have good faith in them.

Fine Art is still looked down upon in academia and yet, the arts make £2.6 billion for the British economy in comparison to £320 million for agriculture. The arts could do so much more politically if it was allowed to thrive and not contend with as many cuts as it has endured. JF Kennedy, one month before his death argued at Amherst College in memory and honour of the poet Robert Frost who had been invited to speak at his inauguration, that “the arts belongs in politics because it challenges power.”