For a long time, the story about intense interests in autism has been a negative one.  We viewed autism as pathology, and so naturally, anything about autism had to be bad.  Intense interests were associated with autism; therefore, intense interests were bad.  Of course, we tried to find explanations, to find justifications.  Autistic kids need to get out and learn social skills, and they can’t do that if they’re pursuing an intense interest, we reasoned.  Autistic kids need to get social acceptance from others, and pursuing an intense interest is kind of weird and won’t help with peer acceptance, we argued.

Fortunately, I think we’re moving past these ideas.  Sure, intense interests are a problem when pursued to extreme excess, but so is anything!  Now I think we can see some of the value to be found in intense interests.

To add my own voice to the emerging pro-intense interest chorus, here are some positive things about intense interests:

1. They’re fun. Autistic people’s lives don’t have to be a perpetual, neverending psychological intervention.  We’re allowed to take breaks and do fun stuff.  You know that wonderful feeling of non-social reward that researchers think is so horrible?  We’re allowed to pursue it.
2. Also, doing fun things is good for mental health and well-being, and mental-health and well-being will help people function in the world. Obviously we don’t want to take this to an extreme, sit in the basement forever, and just pursue fun things on the computer – that feels like failure, and that feeling is bad for mental health.  But in moderation, pursuing fun things is good.  We even have research that says that intense interests are associated with subjective well-being.  It is known.
3. They can be good for social connections. Yeah, okay, there is a way in which intense interests can be bad for social connections.  If an autistic person’s peers are totally uninterested in a subject, then the autistic person would need to stop pursuing the intense interest in order to make friends with those specific peers.  But that just means we need to find a new peer group: a club of people interested in the same topic, for example.  I think friendships based on common interests are much more meaningful than friendships grounded on the conditional acceptance of a person, provided that they suppress their own interests and conform to others’ expectations.
4. They can be good for jobs and careers. Autistic people aren’t going to get jobs because of our amazing job interview skills or our social-networking abilities.  Instead, because there’s something subtly off about us that makes people judge us negatively, we’re going to be at a disadvantage in the job market.  To succeed, we can’t just work on improving social skills to make us less bad than the other people: we have to have something positive that makes us better than the other candidates.  We’re at a disadvantage, so we can only succeed if we are better than the competition.  Intense interests, properly harnessed and turned towards the pursuit of a career, can give us that edge.
5. We can be proud of our intense interests, because we know that they make us better than others in some given area. That is good for mental health – we all need something that we can be proud of (and it’s hard to be proud when everyone is telling you that you’re disordered and deficient).
6. Pursuing an intense interest can help us take a break from the real world, where we get this message of being disordered and deficient, and where we face daily struggles that other people don’t. Yes, escapism is bad in excess, but in moderation it’s an effective coping mechanism.
7. Also, can I just repeat one more time that they’re fun? Julia Bascom writes that “the experience is so rich.  It’s textured, vibrant, and layered. It exudes joy. It is a hug machine for my brain. It makes my heart pump faster and my mouth twitch back into a smile every few minutes. I feel like I’m sparkling. Every inch of me is totally engaged in and powered up by the obsession.”  Does that sound like a problem that needs solving?

Any other ideas we can add here?  Comment below!

P.S. This blog post is brought to you courtesy of Patrick Dwyer’s intense interest in autism.  Without intense interests, this blog post would not have been possible.