Mepathy

A mistype on a Facebook post got me thinking. There is a lot of discussion on empathy in Autistic people. Initially, autistic individuals were often misunderstood as lacking empathy, a misconception rooted in a narrow, neurotypical-centric viewpoint (Baron-Cohen, 2002). This limited perspective hindered genuine understanding and perpetuated stereotypes.

A pivotal shift came with Damian Milton's concept of "double empathy" (Milton, 2012). Rather than framing empathy deficits as inherent to autism, Milton's model emphasises mutual understanding challenges between autistic and neurotypical individuals. It highlights that communication barriers often arise from differing cognitive and sensory processing, not a lack of empathy. This has been supported by further work such as Crompton et al's 'Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective' (2020).

Anecdotally, autistic individuals often express empathy by sharing personal stories. Rather than asserting ownership of empathy, they offer anecdotes from their own experiences, allowing others to gauge their understanding of the situation through the narrative shared. Something I know to my cost is often misunderstood as 'making it all about me' and considered to be a demonstration of my lack of empathy. This caused me considerable distress as a child until I learned to show empathy not by demonstrating it honestly and with integrity, but by simply making statements that led people to assume I felt empathetic towards them (whether I did or not). Today I understand the confusion; they get the anecdote AND the explanation about empathy. Sometimes, it isn't accepted well, but at other times, often when it most matters, people really understand that I am trying to give them something, not take something away.

Perhaps mepathy is, by accident, a better word for this approach to displaying empathy?

References:

• Baron-Cohen, S. (2002). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in cognitive sciences, 6(6), 248-254.

• Crompton, C.J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C.V., Flynn, E.G. and Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), pp.1704–1712.

• Milton, D. E. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887.