For those interested in autism and alcohol, I talked about these in an interview for Club Soda.
Clare Davey interviews me about alcohol and my research around masking and autism, too.
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I was too tired to give a PowerPoint presentation, and so lovely Clare ran this as a Q&A. I was unable to watch it for a while, due to the shame wizard telling me it was dreadful and unboundaried, but I just watched it, after some encouragement from my mum, and it’s pretty good!
There is some definite rambling from me, but there’s also some good stuff here, and I look very cute. I had to lie down for hours after this. Oh my sweet nervous system. How did it survive the 90s and 00s? I’ll never know.
This is great, thank you for sharing! I just watched the first half. I was intrigued by the discussion on the high functioning aspect. My thought about being a "high functioning alcoholic", as someone who has had a successful corporate leadership career, is that when you are in that role/environment drinking is an expected part of the culture. So, I think it would be harder for me to have been successful in the corporate world without drinking, despite the fact that drinking makes it harder to get work done. I drank a lot at work events even when I didn't want to drink, because there is a real pressure to participate in that way. The next morning, everyone is hungover, not just you. The culture accommodates time spent drinking and the effects, though there is definitely an expectation that you "power through" the hangover at the 8:00 AM meeting the morning after a night of drinking with your colleagues. I could not handle that physically, so would try to "sneak out" of the bar/party early after I felt I had put in enough time. I don't think the prevalence of alcohol among high income folks is because they have more access to health care, or more access to services like housekeeping, I think the culture demands it (I'd have to speculate as to why, but I feel that life has a real emptiness to it that leaves people unfulfilled and the gap is filled with alcohol)