AutSide Wiki

Welcome to the AutSide Wiki

This is a living glossary for the worlds I keep returning to.

Inside The AutSide, certain words recur—not because they are buzzwords, but because they are load-bearing. Some come from research. Some come from education, disability studies, psychology, linguistics, or critical theory. Some arrive through autistic life itself, carrying meanings the formal literature still does not fully know how to hold.

This space exists to make those terms easier to enter without flattening them into something smaller than they are.

You’ll find definitions here, but not the false neatness of a neutral dictionary. The language in this wiki is shaped by study, classroom practice, lived autistic / gestalt processor experience, and the long work of noticing how systems name us, sort us, misunderstand us, and sometimes erase us. I write as an autistic gestalt processor, educator, and theorist of pattern, relation, and meaning-making—so these entries do not only explain terms. They also trace the worlds those terms belong to.

Some entries will be practical. Some will be political. Some will name concepts that have been used to constrain us, and others will name the frameworks helping us think and live beyond that constraint.

Whether you’re a student, teacher, parent, clinician, fellow autistic, fellow gestalt processor, or simply a curious traveller, this wiki is here as a companion text: a map of recurring ideas across my writing on language, neurodivergence, education, embodiment, power, and the architectures of understanding.

Not a final authority. Not a closed system.

A field guide in glossary form.

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Alexithymia

Alexithymia is usually defined as difficulty sourcing, identifying, distinguishing, and describing emotional states. That clinical definition is not wrong, but it is often too flat for what the experience actually feels like from the inside.

For many autistic people, alexithymia is not an absence of feeling. It is an interruption in access.

The feeling may be present—sometimes intensely so—whilst the pathway to recognising it, locating it, naming it, or separating it from everything else arrives late, partially, or not at all. The system registers that something is happening, but the meaning does not always resolve in real time. You may know the weather has changed before you know whether the storm is grief, anger, overwhelm, fear, shame, or a body signal that has not yet become language.

This can make emotional life feel delayed, diffuse, or difficult to source. The question is not always What am I feeling? Sometimes it is Is this mine? Is this sensory? Is this relational? Is this cumulative? Is this my body asking for rest? Is this someone else’s distress landing in me before I have time to sort it?

That distinction matters.

In autistic people—especially those who are highly attuned, hyper-empathetic, or gestalt-oriented—alexithymia can be less about “not understanding emotions” and more about signal congestion. Multiple streams may arrive at once: body sensation, environmental stress, social atmosphere, memory, pattern recognition, other people’s affect, and delayed self-recognition. The difficulty is not a lack of emotional depth. It is that the channels do not always separate cleanly.

This is one reason autistic people with alexithymia are so often misunderstood. Others may assume emotional flatness, indifference, or poor empathy when what is actually happening is slower emotional decoding, unclear interoceptive access, or difficulty translating internal experience into socially expected language on demand.

Alexithymia also overlaps with interoceptive differences—difficulty noticing or accurately interpreting internal bodily states. A rising heart rate, muscle tension, nausea, shutdown, agitation, tears, or exhaustion may register first as discomfort, static, or mystery rather than as a clearly labelled emotional state. The body may know before language does.

For gestalt processors, this can become even more complex. Emotional understanding may arrive relationally, contextually, or retrocausally rather than as an immediate internal label. Meaning may emerge later—through pattern, after-effect, writing, conversation, or the slow assembling of the field. What appears from the outside as vagueness may actually be a different timing architecture.

So alexithymia is best understood not as emotional emptiness, but as a difference in access, timing, and translation.

The feelings are often there.

The label just arrives after the weather.

Related concepts: interoception, hyper-empathy, emotional granularity, gestalt processing, shutdown, sensory overload

References: (Poquérusse et al., 2018; Kinnaird et al., 2018; Josyfon et al., 2023; Lin et al., 2024)

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Critical Theory

Critical Theory is not just a school of thought. It is a practice of asking what a system is doing beneath what it says it is doing.

At its simplest, Critical Theory begins with a disruptive question: Who benefits from this arrangement—and who is made to pay for it? It looks at institutions, norms, laws, categories, and “common sense” assumptions not as neutral facts, but as products of history, power, and struggle. What presents itself as natural, objective, or inevitable is often revealed, under closer inspection, to be organised in ways that protect hierarchy.

That is the central move.

Critical Theory asks us to look past official explanations and examine the material and ideological structures underneath. If a school says it is measuring merit, what is it actually rewarding? If a diagnosis claims to describe a person, what norms is it enforcing? If a policy is framed as support, what forms of compliance, exclusion, or economic sorting does it quietly produce?

This tradition is often traced to the Frankfurt School in the early twentieth century, especially thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and later those influenced by or adjacent to that lineage. But in practice, the broader critical tradition now stretches well beyond Frankfurt. It includes work shaped by Marxism, feminism, anti-colonial and decolonial thought, disability studies, critical race theory, queer theory, Mad studies, and other traditions that ask how power reproduces itself through institutions, language, culture, and expertise.

In other words: Critical Theory is less a single doctrine than a disciplined suspicion.

It teaches us to notice that systems rarely announce their real function in plain language.

A school may call itself inclusive whilst structurally excluding disabled learners. A clinical framework may call itself descriptive whilst quietly producing deficit narratives. A labour market may celebrate freedom whilst coercing survival through scarcity. A research literature may claim neutrality whilst treating whiteness, compliance, linearity, productivity, and normative embodiment as the unspoken baseline.

That is why Critical Theory matters so deeply in autistic and neurodivergent work.

Without it, we are often handed institutional language as if it were truth. With it, we can ask harder questions: Why is difference so quickly medicalised? Why are some communication styles treated as disordered while others are treated as intelligent? Why do systems so often confuse conformity with competence? Why are “supports” so often designed to make marginalised people easier for institutions to manage rather than freer to exist?

Critical Theory does not only interpret the world. It interrogates the terms on which the world has been organised.

And ideally, it helps us build other terms.

For me, it is one of the essential tools for understanding how autistic people—and especially autistic gestalt processors—are so often misread by systems built to privilege linearity, norm compliance, standardisation, and extractive definitions of value. It helps expose the gap between what institutions claim to be doing and what they are materially reproducing.

So Critical Theory is not merely academic vocabulary.

It is a method of reading power.

Related concepts: ideology, hegemony, social reproduction, normalisation, medicalisation, deficit model, decolonial theory, disability studies, PTMF

References: (Horkheimer, 1937; Adorno, 1973; Foucault, 1975).

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Gestalt Language Processor (GLP)

A Gestalt Language Processor is someone who acquires and organises language from whole to part rather than from part to whole.

In conventional developmental models, language is often described as emerging analytically: single words first, then short combinations, then increasingly complex sentences assembled piece by piece. Gestalt language processing follows a different route. The learner first takes in larger units—scripts, phrases, intonational contours, relational exchanges, repeated lines, whole communicative moments—and only later begins to segment, recombine, and generate language more flexibly.

That difference matters.

GLP is not simply “memorising phrases.” It is a distinct language pathway with its own sequence, timing, and internal logic. What is stored is often not just vocabulary, but prosody, emotional tone, context, rhythm, sensory memory, relational meaning, and felt experience all at once. A phrase may arrive as a whole event rather than a string of separable parts.

So when a GLP repeats something they have heard before, what is being expressed may be far richer than it appears from the outside. The utterance may carry memory, regulation, affection, pattern recognition, humour, sensory association, or an attempt to recreate a communicative field that once felt coherent. The words are real—but they are often not the whole message.

This is why gestalt language is so often misunderstood in analytic systems.

What gets dismissed as “scripting,” “echolalia,” or “non-functional language” may in fact be highly meaningful language that has not yet been recognised on its own terms. In many cases, the problem is not that the GLP lacks communication. It is that the listener has been trained to only recognise one architecture of language as valid.

The concept of gestalt language processing was first described in work by Barry Prizant, especially through his studies of echolalia in autistic children, and later developed into a more explicit developmental framework by Marge Blanc and others. That work remains important, particularly in naming what analytic models had often misread or pathologised. But the phenomenon is larger than any one clinical framework.

GLP is not only a childhood speech-language pattern often found alongside autism. It is part of a broader gestalt orientation—a way of processing meaning through wholeness, pattern, relation, and field before decomposition into parts. For many gestalt-oriented people, this extends beyond language into memory, emotion, learning, narrative, timing, creativity, and self-understanding. The child who scripts and the adult who becomes eloquent may still be moving through the same underlying architecture.

That is one of the central misunderstandings of the field: fluent adults are often no longer recognised as gestalt, even when their cognition still clearly bears that shape.

As a language pathway, GLP is best understood as different, not lesser. Just as analytic processors may move from single words toward sentences, GLPs often move from stored gestalts toward flexible, self-generated language. Both pathways can lead to rich communication. They simply begin from different starting points and organise meaning differently along the way.

For GLPs, comprehension and expression often emerge first through wholeness—through the music of language, the emotional contour of a phrase, the relational texture of an exchange, the resonance of context—before discrete word meanings or grammatical rules are consciously accessible. Language may be felt before it is parsed.

This has major implications for teaching, therapy, and support.

If we treat GLP as a deficit because it does not resemble analytic development, we will misread competence, interrupt natural progression, and often teach in ways that increase confusion or compliance while reducing authentic communication. If we recognise GLP as a legitimate pathway, the task shifts. The goal is no longer to extinguish scripts or force premature analytic performance. The goal is to support the unfolding of meaning—to help the learner move from stored gestalts toward flexible expression in ways that honour regulation, relationship, sensory experience, and the learner’s own developmental rhythm.

In that sense, GLP is not just a technical term.

It is a reminder that language does not only grow in straight lines.

Sometimes it arrives as weather. As music. As remembered rooms. As the whole before the parts know their names.

Related concepts: echolalia, scripting, self-generated language, natural language acquisition, prosody, gestalt processing, field-first cognition, autistic communication.

References: (Prizant, 1982; Prizant, 1983; Blanc et al., 2023; Hoerricks, 2023, Haydock et al., 2024; Hoerricks, 2024; Hoerricks, 2025a; Hoerricks, 2025b).

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Non-Verbal vs. Non-Vocal

These two terms are often treated as interchangeable. They should not be.

At minimum, non-verbal and non-vocal name different dimensions of communication—and when they are collapsed together, people get misunderstood, mislabelled, and too often denied the supports that actually fit.

Non-verbal

Historically, non-verbal has often been used in autism and developmental disability spaces to describe someone who does not use spoken language in a conventional, generative way—especially someone who does not reliably produce flexible speech made up of single words and novel sentences.

That usage has always been messy.

In practice, many people labelled “non-verbal” are not without language. They may understand language deeply. They may communicate through gesture, AAC, writing, typing, echolalia, scripting, intonation, body movement, facial expression, or highly contextual forms of meaning that analytic observers have not been trained to recognise. Some may have rich internal language but limited access to speech. Some may use spoken scripts without being understood as communicative because the listener is only looking for novel analytic output.

This is one reason many autistic advocates reject non-verbal as a blanket descriptor. It is often used too broadly and too casually, as if absence of conventional speech equals absence of language, thought, intent, or symbolic understanding. That is simply not true.

In older literature, the term sometimes functioned as a rough shorthand for children whose spoken output did not resemble analytic language development. In that context, some of what was being described was not a lack of communication, but a different language architecture—for example, gestalt language processing, where scripts, echolalia, and whole phrases may appear long before decomposed, flexible speech. But even there, “non-verbal” was never a precise term, and it often obscured more than it clarified.

For that reason, many people now prefer more specific descriptions, such as:

• minimally speaking

• non-speaking

• unreliably speaking

• AAC user

• script-based speaker

• gestalt language processor

• speech inconsistent

• limited access to speech

Precision matters. “Non-verbal” too often tells us what a person is not doing in a narrow clinical frame, rather than how they are communicating.

Non-vocal

Non-vocal refers more specifically to the absence or interruption of voice-based output.

In other words: the person is not using their voice in that moment, in that environment, or as a general pattern—but the reasons can vary dramatically.

This is where nuance becomes essential.

A person may be non-vocal for motor, neurological, sensory, emotional, physiological, trauma-related, situational, or energy-based reasons. The issue is not always language. Often, the issue is access to speech as an action.

Someone may be fully verbal internally and still unable to produce voice.

That can happen in many ways:

1. Motor-speech or muscular access differences

Speech is not only language. It is also a complex motor act involving breath, muscle coordination, oral-motor planning, sequencing, timing, and regulation. A person may know exactly what they want to say and still be unable to execute speech reliably.

This can happen with:

• apraxia of speech / motor planning differences

• dyspraxia

• neuromuscular conditions

• fatigue-related motor shutdown

• autistic motor initiation difficulties

• episodes where speech is physically effortful, slurred, blocked, or inaccessible

In these cases, the language may be present. The body cannot easily carry it into voice.

2. Panic, freeze, or trauma states

A person may lose access to voice under stress, fear, overwhelm, or threat.

This can look like:

• selective mutism / situational mutism

• freeze response

• trauma shutdown

• dissociation

• acute social threat response

• performance or authority-triggered speech loss

Here, the inability to speak is not defiance, passivity, or lack of comprehension. It is often a nervous system event. The voice has not been “chosen away” so much as closed down by threat.

3. Autistic shutdown / overload

Many autistic people experience periods where speech becomes difficult, painful, effortful, delayed, or impossible during overload, burnout, or shutdown.

This may happen because of:

• sensory overload

• cognitive overload

• social processing overload

• interoceptive overload

• cumulative demand

• burnout

• rapid switching or high-pressure demands for response

In these states, speech may disappear before understanding does. The person may still be thinking, feeling, tracking, and wanting to respond, but spoken output is offline or severely reduced. This is one reason speech ability should never be treated as a reliable proxy for competence.

4. Energy economy / effort triage

Speech can be metabolically expensive.

For some people—especially autistic, multiply disabled, chronically ill, or burnt-out people—using voice may require far more energy than observers realise. Someone may choose not to speak, or speak only minimally, because speech is one of the most costly actions available in that moment.

This is not laziness or disengagement. It is often a form of resource management.

5. Sensory or vocal discomfort

Some people experience vocalising itself as uncomfortable, dysregulating, painful, or aversive.

That may include:

• distress around the sound of one’s own voice

• vocal strain or pain

• sensory aversion to speaking

• gender dysphoria related to voice

• discomfort with volume, resonance, or prosodic demand

• difficulty modulating voice under pressure

In these cases, the voice may be available in principle but not accessible without cost.

6. Relational or environmental mismatch

Sometimes speech is lost not because the person cannot speak in general, but because the environment is hostile to the way their system organises language.

Examples include:

• being rushed for immediate answers

• being forced into eye contact or performance

• being questioned by authority figures

• being asked to speak before language has fully assembled

• being in linguistically unsafe or invalidating environments

• being required to use decontextualised, analytic, or emotionally flattened language

For many gestalt processors, language is relational and field-dependent. If the field collapses, speech may collapse with it.

Why the distinction matters

A person who is non-vocal is not necessarily non-speaking in a stable or global sense. They may speak at other times, type fluently, script under pressure, or lose speech only under certain conditions.

A person described as non-verbal may, in fact, be highly communicative but communicating outside the narrow forms that institutions reward.

And in both cases, the greatest harm often comes from the same mistaken assumption: if speech is absent, thought must be absent too.

That assumption has done enormous damage in schools, clinics, and families.

So the more useful question is rarely “Is this person verbal or non-verbal?”

It is:

• How does this person communicate?

• When is speech accessible, and when is it not?

• What supports increase access?

• What conditions shut speech down?

• What forms of communication are being overlooked because the listener expects only one kind of language?

A better practice

When possible, describe communication access, not just perceived absence.

Instead of broad, flattening labels, ask:

• Do they use speech consistently, inconsistently, or rarely?

• Do they use AAC, typing, gesture, scripts, or echolalia?

• Is speech lost under stress, overload, or demand?

• Is the barrier linguistic, motoric, sensory, relational, or trauma-related—or some combination?

• What does the person themselves call their experience?

That last question matters most.

Because language about communication should not erase the communicator.

Related concepts: non-speaking, minimally speaking, unreliable speech, situational mutism, selective mutism, apraxia, AAC, echolalia, autistic shutdown, communication access.

References: (Prizant, 1982; Peters, 1983, Blanc, 2012, Kapp et al., 2019)

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What is an Instructional Accommodation?

An instructional accommodation is a change in how a student accesses instruction, participates in learning, or demonstrates understanding without changing the core learning expectation itself.

In simpler terms: the destination stays the same, but the path is made more accessible.

An accommodation does not lower the standard, replace the curriculum, or excuse the student from learning. It changes the conditions of access so the student can engage with the material in a way that is more neurologically, physically, linguistically, or sensorily possible. The goal is not to give an unfair advantage. The goal is to remove barriers that were never neutral in the first place.

That distinction matters because schools often talk as if the “normal” classroom is already fair, and accommodations are special exceptions added on later. In reality, most classrooms are built around a fairly narrow model of attention, language, regulation, motor output, pacing, and social performance. Instructional accommodations exist because many students are being asked to learn inside systems that were not designed with their bodies, minds, or communication styles in view.

So an accommodation is not a bonus.

It is an access support.

What accommodations do—and do not do

An instructional accommodation may change:

• how information is presented

• how directions are delivered

• how much processing time is available

• how a student responds

• what tools or supports are used

• what environmental conditions are needed for access

But it does not usually change:

• the essential skill or standard being taught

• the underlying learning target

• the expectation that the student is meaningfully participating in instruction

If the learning target is altered substantially—if the student is working on different content, reduced complexity, or alternate standards—that usually moves into the territory of a modification, not an accommodation.

That is an important legal and educational distinction.

Examples of instructional accommodations

Instructional accommodations can include things like:

• extended time for classwork or tests

• text read aloud or access to audiobooks / text-to-speech

• visual supports, graphic organisers, sentence frames, or guided notes

• chunked directions instead of long multi-step verbal instructions

• reduced distractions or a quieter work space

• alternative response formats (oral response, typing, pointing, AAC, drawing, dictation)

• preferential seating

• frequent check-ins for understanding

• breaks for regulation, movement, or sensory recovery

• copies of notes or partially completed notes

• use of calculator, multiplication chart, formula sheet, or manipulatives when appropriate

• access to assistive technology

• flexible timing for verbal responses, especially for students with slower processing or inconsistent speech access

The key question is always: What barrier is this support removing?

If we cannot answer that, we may be handing out generic “supports” rather than designing real access.

Why this matters in disability and neurodivergent work

For disabled and neurodivergent students, accommodations are often the difference between:

• being seen as capable or “noncompliant”

• demonstrating knowledge or appearing to “know nothing”

• participating meaningfully or shutting down under inaccessible conditions

• being supported or being pathologised for reacting to the barrier

This is especially important for autistic students, gestalt language processors, students with ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, motor planning differences, anxiety, trauma histories, chronic illness, or fluctuating access needs. A student may fully understand the content and still be unable to show that understanding under conventional classroom conditions.

For example:

• A GLP may need more processing time, relationally meaningful language, or visual / contextual supports rather than rapid-fire decontextualised questioning.

• A dyslexic student may need text-to-speech or read-aloud access so decoding difficulty does not mask comprehension.

• A student with anxiety or panic-based speech loss may need non-vocal response options.

• A student in autistic shutdown may need reduced verbal demand, sensory relief, or written response access.

• A student with executive functioning challenges may need chunked tasks, clear sequencing, and external structure rather than repeated correction for “not trying.”

Without accommodations, schools often end up measuring barrier impact and calling it “ability.”

IEPs, 504 Plans, and the politics of access (USA-centric)

In U.S. schools, instructional accommodations are often formalised through an IEP (under IDEA) or a 504 Plan (under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act). But the legal document is not the real heart of the matter.

The deeper question is whether the school understands access as a right—or as a favour.

Too often, accommodations are treated as if the student must “earn” them by failing enough, suffering visibly enough, or proving that the barrier is severe enough to deserve relief. That is backwards. The purpose of accommodation is preventative and participatory: to ensure access before predictable harm becomes academic collapse, behavioural escalation, or internalised shame.

A better way to think about it

An instructional accommodation is not a shortcut.

It is not grade inflation.
It is not coddling.
It is not “special treatment.”

It is a recognition that the standard classroom path is already built around assumptions—about speed, body, language, stamina, sensory tolerance, and regulation—that do not fit everyone.

An accommodation says:

The student is not the barrier.
The barrier is the barrier.

And once we can see the barrier clearly, we can design around it.

Related concepts: modification, IEP, 504 Plan, assistive technology, universal design for learning (UDL), accessibility, least restrictive environment (LRE), executive functioning, sensory regulation

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What is the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF)?

The Power Threat Meaning Framework is an alternative to the medical model of mental distress.

Where conventional psychiatry often begins by asking “What is wrong with you?”, the PTMF begins elsewhere. It asks:

• What has happened to you?

• How did power operate in those experiences?

• What sense did you make of what happened?

• What did you have to do to survive?

• What strengths are still present, even if they were forged under pressure?

That shift is not cosmetic. It changes the entire terrain.

Instead of treating distress as evidence of internal defect, disorder, or dysfunction, the PTMF understands many forms of suffering as meaningful responses to lived conditions—especially conditions shaped by trauma, coercion, exclusion, violence, deprivation, chronic invalidation, and unequal power. It does not deny that people suffer. It refuses the assumption that suffering is best explained by pathologising the person who is suffering.

What PTMF is trying to replace

The PTMF was developed by a group of British psychologists and service-user-informed thinkers as a direct challenge to the dominance of diagnostic psychiatry, particularly the idea that emotional distress is best understood through categories such as “mental illness,” “disorder,” or “symptom clusters.”

Its central argument is that diagnoses often do three things badly:

• they individualise what may be social, relational, political, or traumatic

• they decontextualise suffering from the conditions that produced it

• they reframe survival strategies as pathology

In other words, the system often takes a person shaped by power and then describes them as if they simply malfunctioned in isolation.

The PTMF refuses that move.

The four core questions

At its heart, the PTMF reorganises understanding around four interlocking domains:

1. Power

What forms of power have operated in this person’s life?

This includes not only overt abuse or trauma, but also the quieter, structural forms of power that shape people every day:

• family power

• institutional power

• economic power

• racialised power

• gendered power

• colonial power

• professional / clinical power

• school discipline and surveillance

• ableism and compulsory normativity

Power is not just what someone did to you. It is also the system you had to survive inside.

2. Threat

Given those conditions, what threats did the person face?

Threats may include:

• abandonment

• humiliation

• coercion

• punishment

• instability

• poverty

• sensory overwhelm

• loss of belonging

• exposure to violence

• chronic misunderstanding

• erasure of identity

• being forced to perform a version of self that secures safety

A threat does not have to be dramatic to be formative. Repeated small threats can shape a life as deeply as major ones.

3. Meaning

What meaning did the person make of those experiences?

This is crucial.

The PTMF recognises that human beings are meaning-making creatures. We do not simply endure events; we interpret them. We build narratives, beliefs, expectations, and protective assumptions around what has happened.

For example:

• “I must stay quiet to stay safe.”

• “If I need too much, I will be abandoned.”

• “My body is dangerous to inhabit.”

• “Difference will be punished.”

• “Love must be earned through performance.”

These meanings are not random cognitive errors. They are often coherent adaptations to the world as it was encountered.

4. Threat Responses

What did the person have to do to survive?

This is where the PTMF makes one of its most important interventions.

What psychiatry often calls symptoms—withdrawal, hypervigilance, dissociation, masking, panic, rage, perfectionism, compulsive control, self-protection, shutdown, people-pleasing, emotional numbing, obsessive patterning, relational avoidance—may be better understood as threat responses.

Not signs of defect.

Signs of adaptation.

The question is not Why are you behaving irrationally?
It is What did this strategy protect, and what did it cost?

Why PTMF matters so much in autistic and neurodivergent work

For autistic people, the PTMF can be transformative because so much of autistic distress is routinely misread through a medicalised or behaviourist lens.

Autistic people are often described as disordered when what is happening is something closer to this:

• chronic sensory assault

• relational misattunement

• coercive demands for compliance

• communication invalidation

• pathologising of natural self-regulation

• social punishment for difference

• repeated exposure to misunderstanding, exclusion, and forced performance

• lifelong pressure to mask in order to secure safety, education, employment, or belonging

Under the medical model, the autistic person becomes the problem.

Under PTMF, we can ask better questions:

• What forms of power have acted on this autistic life?

• What threats were created by school, family, therapy, medicine, or culture?

• What meanings formed in response?

• Which so-called “symptoms” are actually intelligent adaptations to an unsafe or non-fitting environment?

This is one reason the PTMF aligns so strongly with neurodiversity-affirming, anti-pathologising, and disability justice approaches. It helps us see that what is often labelled dysfunction may be a patterned, embodied, historically intelligible response to environments organised against us.

PTMF is not “everything is social”

The PTMF does not claim that biology is irrelevant, nor that every experience of distress can be reduced to external oppression alone.

Rather, it insists that biology is never interpreted outside context, and that distress cannot be understood properly if context is stripped away.

Bodies matter.
Brains matter.
Nervous systems matter.

But so do poverty, colonisation, schooling, policing, racism, transmisogyny, ableism, family systems, labour precarity, and all the other arrangements that decide whose suffering gets medicalised, whose gets criminalised, and whose gets ignored.

Why I return to PTMF so often

For me, the PTMF is one of the most useful frameworks we have because it restores history, power, and narrative to places where diagnosis often removes them.

It makes room for a different kind of question—not How do we classify this person? but How do we understand the conditions under which this person became who they needed to become?

That is especially important in autistic work, trauma work, gender work, and any serious attempt to understand distress without collapsing into reductionism.

PTMF does not offer a neat label.

It offers something harder, and often more honest:

A way of reading suffering without erasing the world that made it.

Related concepts: medical model, neurodiversity paradigm, trauma-informed care, social model of disability, masking, threat response, formulation, diagnosis, decolonial psychiatry

Reference: (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018).

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A Living Work in Progress

This wiki is not fixed, and it is not meant to be.

I return to these entries often—as my thinking sharpens, as the field shifts, as new research emerges, and as lived experience continues to teach what formal language still struggles to hold. Some definitions will stay relatively stable. Others will deepen, widen, split, or be rewritten entirely as the work evolves.

That is part of the point.

The AutSide has never been a static archive. It is a living body of thought—recursive, cumulative, sometimes corrective, and always in conversation with the changing realities of autistic life, language, education, power, and survival. This wiki follows that same logic. It is not a sealed glossary of final answers, but a record of concepts in motion.

So if you return later and find that something has changed, that is not drift. That is the work continuing.

And if there is a term you’d like to see included, clarified, or revisited, feel free to let me know. Many of the most important questions begin that way.

Last update: 3-25-2026