Stimming

If you think about it, most of us, from time to time, do typical or what we might call “normal” stimming-type behaviors like drumming our fingers on a desk; wiggling or tapping a pencil; pacing back and forth; bouncing a knee up and down; twirling a lock of hair; or even humming. The difference between “normal” stimming and autistic stimming, is how often it occurs and what kind of stim activity is chosen.

Medical culture constrains stimming through strict clinical designations and pathologizing definitions, referring to it as stereotypies or "self-stimulatory behaviours." Autistic people, however, often define stimming more broadly as repetitive sensory practices used to regulate emotional states, to cope with external sensory stimuli, or for purposes of self-expression.

Forty-six percent of Autistic adults who underwent ABA therapy as kids report having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the experience. Many experience deep shame even naming the subjects they feel passionate about, because they’ve been punished for having special interests. Some are unable to appreciate the emotional and psychological benefits of fidgeting or stimming because the importance of having “quiet hands” was so deeply drilled into them.

In psychiatry, stereotypy is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism of “stereotyped or repetitive motor movements’’, theorized as a form of self-stimulation, or stimming. Movement that is considered excessive or ill fitting to the setting, whether repetitive or not, is considered hyperactivity, part of diagnostic criteria for attention hyperactivity deficit disorder (ADHD). In response to this pathologization, critical scholars and neurodiversity advocacy groups (e.g., Loud Hands Project Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), 2012) have reclaimed the medical term “stimming,” celebrating stimming as an expression of autistic embodied experience and identity, not only self-regulatory but also political, aesthetic, and communicative.