Neuro Gnostic

Inter alia, this has happened a lot. I often don't answer my phone. But I have also had times where I go completely non-speaking, and can only go, "Gah," not say actual words at all. It feels odd.https://twitter.com/ShonaDav/status/1000650599216672768 …

I can carry on writing or typing for quite some time after I lose speech, but there were times when even that became difficult, and it would take me 20 minutes to send a 1-word text message.

During a very difficult time of my life (lots of meltdowns), a bipolar friend became suicidally depressed. Since I was often non-verbal during that time, we communicated daily using only a single character of punctuation, to show, "I'm still here." Too hard to do anything more.

He said afterwards that I saved his life with this minimalistic communication, because nobody else visited him or spoke to him in that time. When he knew he was starting to go down, he'd asked people from his church to please come to him to sit with him, but they wouldn't do it.

I also visited him in person once during that time, but he could hardly speak, and I couldn't speak for the first hour or so. He motioned to where coffee was. I made some. We just lay on a bed (not touching - his feet at my head) for a long time, till someone came to the door.

Then he went to the door and he was able to talk and I gradually got up and speech returned in small bits.

After I learned that sensory overload is caused by intracellular hypokalaemia, I started treating that, and overload went away, and meltdowns were fewer, and I also didn't have a complete loss of speech again.

Also, some parents who started treating their children's sensory overload after with electrolytes after what we shared with them, found that communication became easier. One non-speaking pre-school kid spontaneously taught himself to write once his sensory problem was relieved.

So, now I ammmmmmmm more curious. So many articulate autistics on twitter. Is this the difference between writing and speaking? If you use an augmentative communication device where you type and it speaks, does that get around it, or is it still hard?

I can be super articulate when speaking too. Or I can be a jumble. It depends on my stress level. I’ve never tried to type when I was in a non-verbal mode, but I know it is hard to read. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy read!” “Uh, I can’t.”

I sometimes take to typing, chatting or texting when I can't talk / too exhausted / overstimulated to talk.

I often email colleagues who are on the next desk to me to ask a question because it’s easier on so many levels.

I often email colleagues who sit next to me too Told them - when I ‘came out’ as autistic - that if I’m on a day where speech is difficult that I will email and asked that they email back instead of coming up to me to talk

is there a third version.. ? where you can speak but only to repeat a word or phrase, eg ‘no’ or ‘don’t’ or just a repeated sound? is non-verbal necessarily silent?

do you think it is caused by your brain going ack, emergency, right, what processes dont we need that we can jettison, oh wait, vocabulary? yeah, we dont need that, out it goes?

I do a lot of repeating words/phrases when I’m in meltdown. Sometimes I have more words (i.e. full explanation of what’s happening & what I need) in my head but I cannot physically process them into sounds.

Other times when I’m stressed but not in meltdown, I can think of a sentence, start to say it but, by the time I get a few words in, I have forgotten the words required to finish the sentence.

It’s like walking through mud. I can manage one word sentences if forced too. It takes longer to respond. My body uses this time to collect myself & manage my anxiety. I’m learning it’s not all bad to shutdown if I need to. It can be confusing for those with me at times.

I am generally a quiet person outwardly so it is not all that unusual for those I am around less frequently to see me sit in silence. I’ve also learned to “busy” myself with my music or a manageable task to mask it.

Those close to me see the shutdowns & usually give me the time I need. Outside those times I lose words a lot. Particularly the names of things. I don’t have a pattern figured out for that so I don’t have any control when that happens

I do not know if it's the same, but sometimes I have word-finding problems, especially when I'm stressed, or I forget how to start the sentence in order to make sense of it, logically

Don't know how idiosyncratic it is but eventually I learned to (mostly) get around the lost-word thing by seeing the words in my mind and reading them?

Interesting. Is it more of a difficulty for aphantasic people? We can’t see the word. Anyone have an effective strategy?

I'm guessing all I'm doing is swapping one word perception for another; can you "hear" the missing word verbalized in your heard if you train yourself?

sorry, I capitulate for me it is extremely difficult not to communicate such a complicated issue in my native language.