TPGA senior editor and co-founder Shannon Des Roches Rosa finally cracked under the pressure and wrote over at TPGA about the Telepathy Tapes podcast. Perhaps you’ve heard about or even listened to this podcast, which relies on the premise that non-speaking autistic people read minds and, like benign extraterrestrials, seek to share messages of love and peace and just might be “guarded by angels.” As Shannon notes about the podcast, “You’ve probably been asked about it, too, if you have even a tangential autism connection.” (Why yes, yes I have.)

She continues: “The Telepathy Tapes is a hot, complicated mess — but not for the reasons you may think.

“Treating the autistic people in the Telepathy Tapes as special spiritual messengers is absurd. If you have ever encountered later-emerged AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) users, they tend to be traumatized about how they were treated before they had useful communication, and most felt (and still feel) incredibly isolated. Autistic AAC users may overflow with empathy and understanding, but they do not exist to bring other people healing radiance, no more than any human does.

“The Telepathy Tapes’s patronizing woo is not about understanding or accepting autistic people. But it is why the podcast is a success, because its narrative gives non-autistic people a fairy tale about magically connecting with autistic people, instead of doing the hard work of truly exploring autistic people’s often very challenging realities, enabling communication access, and understanding the ways non-autistic people and society could improve their lives. We must also reject its message that if AAC users can read minds and communicate telepathically, maybe they don’t need access to the robust language-based communication that is a human right.

Read the full essay on the TPGA blog.

News you can use

• In collaboration with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, the website Big [If True] “examines the misinformation spreading online about fake autism ‘cures.’” Reporter Bethany Lindsay and a mother who actually infiltrated an autism curebie group reveal the dangers within these misinformation echo chambers where people are told, for example, that a child’s vomiting just means a product is working. The video, which has captions and a transcript (always my preference!), also features journalist Anne Borden King, co-founder of Autistics for Autistics, talking about working as an advocate for increased supports in her region.
• Evidence indicates that autistic people have a three-fold greater risk of dying by suicide compared to non-autistic people, along with higher proportions attempting suicide relative to their nonautistic counterparts. A study published in Autism in Adulthood indicates that “preventing suicide in autistic people depends, in part, on ensuring that undiagnosed autistic people are diagnosed quickly, accurately, and sensitively, and given suitable post-diagnostic support. [Autistic people’s] priorities indicate that thinking about suicide prevention needs to move beyond focusing exclusively on people who are already in crisis.”
• Relatedly, researchers at La Trobe University in Australia have developed a suicide prevention toolkit specifically for autistic people. The Suicide Prevention for Autism Neuro-affirming (SPAN) toolkit “addresses current gaps in practice by providing health care professionals with validated neuro-affirming tools to improve understanding, communication, screening and support for Autistic adults at risk of suicide,” according to Dr Claire Brown, a post-doctoral research fellow at La Trobe who led the project.
• The Arc Minnesota has released a statement regarding federal immigration enforcement actions in the state, noting that “Community reports and public statements show a clear and troubling pattern: disabled people being assaulted, denied essential medications, and exposed to unsafe and unsanitary conditions while in federal custody. Families and advocates have also raised concerns about DHS accessing Medicaid‑linked health information to identify and target individuals—putting all disabled people who rely on Medicaid at risk.” The complete statement is in the following link and includes calls to Congress for immediate cessation of the immigration enforcement “surge” in Minnesota and redirecting DHS/ICE funding toward “healthcare, disability services, and community supports.”
• Looks like yet another study confirms that the reason there are more autistic people today is because the world got better at recognizing autistic people. Of interest, the study, published in Autism Research, also found that the frequency of autism associated with the “highest level of adaptive challenges” declined slightly during 2000 to 2016, even as frequency increased. The authors write, “all of the increase in autism frequency between 2000 and 2016 was for autism with mild or no significant adaptive challenges.”

NB: The newsletter is short today in part thanks to a tanking barometric pressure that has left this newsletter writer with an intensification of a disabling middle ear condition. As TPGA’s editors posted to Bluesky on Sunday, “Your periodic reminder that many autistic people are sensitive to barometric pressure changes, and can be in real pain from sinus pressure when it starts to rain or snow. So if you are seeing or feeling dysregulation, look out the window! And treat accordingly.” It’s real, y’all.

Thanks for reading!

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