: Re: How to write an autistic character having a meltdown? Background I am currently working on a short science fiction story, and need some advice about writing a pivotal scene for the main protagonist.

I must preface this by pointing out that the two autistic people in my life are both non-verbal and so they can't explain in their own words.

As was best described to me, when they have outbursts, it's not because something has upset them per se, but that they can't really compute how to handle the situation and are frustrated by the inability to figure out what needs to happen next. If you code, it's like running a "try" statement, failing, and failing to properly explain the error because the "catch" statement is empty.

The result, from the coder's perspective, is a lot of seemingly non-sense returning at you with errors at line x at line y at line z (and for some time... I've had errors where the initial propblem wasn't logged because there were so many return errors) and unexperinenced readers of the out put will be unable to figure out what went wrong.

In effect, if my input leads to somewhere in the code requesting the value of X/0 and don't anticipate a division by 0 response, the computer is going to barf a heck of alot of words at me that don't tell me that something is wrong... but not "what" is wrong... if I write a simple check that it's a divide by zero, I can have the computer respond "can't divide by zero" though I usually code in a bit more snark than that.

Similarly an autisitic person will be able to tell you something is wrong, but not what is wrong or why it is wrong AND will get frustrated because you don't see the error like they do. The problem is that an autistic person has difficulty processing subtle clues such as a tonal inflection in how one asks "What's your problem?" The "tone" that the question is asked can come off as sincere or sarcastic to regular people... but autistic people don't notice that part and it can be perceived as not caring or not caring that it's upsetting, when in fact you said it in a way that you meant to care.

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: Re: How to write an autistic character having a meltdown? Background I am currently working on a short science fiction story, and need some advice about writing a pivotal scene for the main protagonist.

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