butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

couragetobe:

Fun perspective on autism and culture: Now that I am living in Japan, I generally find eye contact a lot less demanding here than I did in the United States. That “East Asian cultures find American levels of eye contact socially inappropriate” is oft cited. But my definitely not-autistic friend/labmate from Lesotho, Africa finds eye contact exceedingly demanding in Japan because she says in her culture they don’t necessitate eye contact at all. 

She said she had to learn how to make eye contact after moving here and that when she does make eye contact she finds it very hard to listen and process what the person is saying because she is overwhelmed and distracted by all the details of their face. 

She gave this information and perspective freely btw, without any prompting or previous discussion about eye contact or autism between us. This is a classic “autistic impairment” completely culture grown presenting in a non-autistic person just because she was dropped into another cultural environment with different social expectations. 

Cultural differences in eye contact are just one area that really drives home how context bound the “disorders” of autism are & that the underlying cause can’t be some sort of inherent “deficit in social understanding”. If that were the case, then every autistic kid in Lesotho would always be staring into your eyes. 

Mental and developmental health is exceedingly culture locked and I really love talking about it because it’s such a cool way of relitigating our understanding of symptoms and impacts.