#AutChat is a Twitter hashtag and weekly scheduled chat for autistic and similarly neurodivergent people. Here are all our past chat topics. Most pages include links to archived chats.
You can learn more about #AutChat here.
Self-acceptance:
Daily life:
- Driving and transit
- Finances
- Clothing
- Cooking and also cooking and meal prep
- Food sensitivities (taste and texture)
- Executive function: Planning, starting, and stopping tasks
- Executive function: Self-monitoring and organization
- Executive function: impulse regulation and emotional regulation
- Eating difficulties
- Routines
- Sleep dysregulation and dreams and our more general sleep chat
- Systemizing and rules
- Time management
- Travel
- Clutter and cleaning
- Energy management
- Inertia
- Pattern recognition
Employment, education, supports, and accommodations:
- Conflicting accessibility needs
- Forms of communication
- Communication
- Presuming competence
- Uneven skills and abilities
- Employment; also see coping in non-autism-friendly employment
- Volunteer work
- Managing emotions about unemployment and underemployment
- Higher education
- Accommodations
- Support and accommodations for higher education
- Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)
- Quality services (including special ed and community-based)
- Small barriers to everyday accessibility
- Service/support animals
- Education while growing up
Fun stuff:
- Stimming
- The Internet
- Special interests
- Relationship with language and the related but different relationship to language
- Role models
- Useful apps
- Animals and pets
- Learning new languages
- Media and entertainment
Coping and not coping:
- Self-care
- Coping with grief
- Coping strategies
- Coping with the holidays
- Coping with holidays during the pandemic
- Meltdowns and shutdowns
- Functioning well
- Self-harm
- Coping with quarantine
- Managing conflicting goals and needs
- Coping during the pandemic
Co-conditions:
- Interoception (body awareness)
- Auditory processing
- Motor differences
- Co-conditions
- Heat intolerance
- Echolalia
- Synesthesia
- Connective tissue disorders
- Digestive issues
- ADHD
- Alexithymia/emotional awareness
- Memory
- Prosopagnosia and face recognition
- Sensory over- and under-sensitivities
- Sensory sensitivities
- Mood disorders (see also Mood dysregulation and Depression)
- Suicidal ideation
- Visual processing
- Hyperlexia/hypernumeracy
- Reading and math difficulties
- Addiction
- Dysautonomia
Activism and advocacy:
- Autism Acceptance Month
- Lack of recognition for underrepresented groups
- Accessible political activism
- Activism and advocacy
- Effective strategies for educating people about autism and similar neurodivergences
- Awareness and acceptance
- Privacy and privacy violations
Diagnosis (including self-diagnosis):
- How we learned we were autistic or similarly neurodivergent
- Age at realization/diagnosis and our older age at diagnosis chat
- Invalidation and doubting diagnosis
- Process of getting a formal diagnosis
- Pros and cons of formal diagnosis
- Self-diagnosis/self-identification
Passing:
Health and healthcare (mental and physical):
- Self-concept and learning you’re autistic or similarly neurodivergent
- Burnout
- Depression
- Healthcare access
- Communicating with healthcare professionals
- Medications and supplements
- Mental healthcare
- Dental and orthodontic care
- Pain
- Therapies for adults
- Eating disorders
- Co-existing sight and hearing disabilities
Identities and culture:
- Autistic and neurodivergent communities and the future (our 5th anniversary chat)
- Language preferences (for what we like to be called)
- Gender identity
- Intersectionality (in general)
- Other disabilities and neurodivergences
- Plurality
- Sexual orientation
- Attraction and orientation (sexual, romantic, and other)
- Trans/nonbinary; see also nonbinary gender identities
- Women/people perceived as women
- Autistic culture
- Representation of neurodivergent symptoms/traits/co-conditions in autistic communities
- Autistic representation in fiction and Autistic and similarly neurodivergent characters in fiction (a follow-up chat to the first chat)
- Autistic similarities
- Generational differences
- Autistic and similarly neurodivergent youth
Relationships and social skills:
- Relationship to family of origin
- Flirting
- Joining and participating in groups
- Setting boundaries
- Boundaries, safety, and boundary violations
- Teamwork
- Building in-person support circles
- Family and relationships
- Friendship and expectations
- Friendships
- Inclusion in the community
- Learning social skills
- Love relationships and finding partners
- Relationships
- Scripts
- Sexuality (and asexuality)
- Parenting as an autistic or similarly neurodivergent parent
- Empathy (see also our experience of empathy chat)
- Unlearning social skills
- Asking for help
- Chosen family
- Rejection sensitivity dysphoria
Chats about #autchat:
- The very first #autchat
- Meta-autchat (autchat’s six-month anniversary chat)
- #autchat and you (autchat’s one-year anniversary chat)
Miscellaneous
- Interacting with research
- Religion
- Resolutions and commitments
- Social media accessibility
- Aging and lifespan changes
- Understanding idioms
- Writing autistic characters
- Writing about your experiences with neurodivergence
Some topics don’t have pages: Autism and different cultures (transcript here, autistic characters in fiction (a two-parter), executive function (a two-parter), research (transcripts here and here), and retroactive diagnosis of historical figures. We also had one open (no specified topic) chat.
If the topics on this page interested you, you might also like the #AutismMeans hashtag series, held from Apr 2015 to May 2016. Many people who participated in #autchat also participated in #AutismMeans.
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