AUTISM, DID, etc.

Friday, May 19, 2023 

This is the first in a series of essays introducing certain mental health topics, with the overarching aim of putting into context how they interact with someone's mathematics and career in academia. Throughout this essay, I will occasionally link to various external resources that either provide a description for a term I use without definition, or provide more perspectives in general. More perspectives are always important to gain a holistic understanding, as I can only reliably explain my own lived experiences, and no two people with the same mental health diagnoses are the same. 

I am writing this from Berlin. I originally came here about a couple of weeks ago for a conference titled "3 Facets of Gravity", which ended last week. Do not be fooled by the title of that conference --- I do not work in mathematical physics by any worldly sense of the phrase "work in", though there is a part of me that was once passionate about it, and it still has a lingering interest and desire to understand a bit of mathematical physics throughout its life. 

Mathematical conferences are often supposed to be about "making connections" as much as about learning mathematics. What are connections? They are supposed to be people in academia who can hopefully appreciate, if not understand, your work; and with whom you can have meaningful conversations. 

How does one go about making these connections? That is a question that I would have given anything I had in order to find an answer to when I was in pre-school/first grade --- an undiagnosed autistic kid with a speech impediment trying to figure out in their exhaustive internal monologue how to talk to those other kids without being made fun of or worse. One might even think that I was pre-disposed to a life of philosophical thinking from a young age, as one of the earliest things I remember thinking about is the abstract idea of "nothingness" (which, as I later discovered, is what mathematicians model by the empty set in some sense). Nothingness was appealing to me because the opposite of nothingness often came with unpleasant experiences at a time when I had not learnt how to self-regulate. Perhaps the fact that I am also on the aphantasia spectrum helped in this habit of closing my eyes and meditating in the almost perfect darkness that I would see, and imagining how peaceful nothingness can be. 

There are numerous studies that show that at least as many as two-thirds of autistic kids experience bullying at school. I was not any different, so I was bullied. I was bullied so hard that I do not have too many memories from that part of school (as my mind dissociated all the time which is what led to the topic of this essay; more on that later), but I do remember a few specific horrible things that I won't necessarily want to write here about. Some of those memories are more like emotional flashbacks. 

When a very young child is bullied, what can they do? Perhaps they should talk to their teachers. What if a part of the bullying happens from some of the teachers as well? Perhaps they should talk to their parents. What if the parents themselves had a life full of trauma and they might see the difficulties one has at school as "normal issues" that everyone goes through? There is an invisible epidemic in our society --- it is called generational trauma. Parents who do not recognize how their own traumas shaped their lives might not be able to impart the necessary skills in their kids to avoid a repetition of trauma, because trauma is "normal" to them. (I should mention that generational trauma can sometimes also involve the parents themselves as perpetrators of the trauma that "repeats the cycle".) 

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) usually forms due to childhood trauma. When a kid is forced to go through physical and emotional abuse at an age when they have not learnt essential life skills to even recognize what is happening to them, such a kid sometimes recognizes maladaptive ways to get out of feeling abused. These maladaptive ways might (, like in my case,) take the form of simple compliance (with the abusers), and might even look like a version of Stockholm Syndrome. In the place where abuse happens, the compliant version of the kid might start showing up. That version could finally feel a sense of belonging as it would not feel abused as much (though the reality might still be quite different). Slowly but surely, that version starts developing its own traits, its own things that it likes and dislikes, its own abilities and dis-abilities that might look different from the "original version" of the kid that existed before trauma. For all intents and purposes, that version (or alter, as it is technically called) that is being presented in the place of abuse often grows in a manner that it cannot be called a made-up version, as the kid is that alter in those time periods. For the kid with DID, there may be little to no awareness that they have quite different personalities in different situations, as they truly believe in who they are at the moment. This might even result in some amount of loss of memory when switching from alter to alter. (Memory gaps are one of the common characteristics of DID, and they are quite relevant for me as a mathematician now, but I will get to it in a future essay.)

It is not that the kid has changed in the routine sense that all kids (and people) change. The body of the kid remains one but the mind now has various parts that all develop at their own speeds, as not all of them get to front equally. I grew up in a chaotic household and I have no recollection of when it would be the first time I would have dissociated. Therefore, I cannot claim that the alter that formed in my early school years was my first one, and it was definitely not my last. It just happens to be the first time I can recognize, in hindsight, that I dissociated into a new personality. Recognizing DID is difficult (and rare) because it is something that comes into being with the precise goal of hiding itself in ways that the mind can continue to function somewhat optimally even though it is going through extreme stress and trauma. 

In general, when a child's mind learns that dissociating into a new personality is a viable coping mechanism to survive abuse, it tends to use what it knows in future situations of heavy stress, thus creating more alters as life goes on. Each alter might be very different emotionally. When I am "the mathematician", for example, I might actually lose certain abilities that I would otherwise have, while gaining certain abilities that I would not otherwise have. This is not a superpower --- I cannot force an alter to come out, but I can be more self-aware to know what different parts of me need in order to flourish and feel safe to come out on their own in a healthy manner. Typically, someone with DID can often have quite a lot of alters, and it might be a difficult task to recognize them all very precisely. Until last year, I did not even know there was a part of me that could create music and there was a part of me that could draw abstract art. (These were events that happened shortly before I recognized my DID, and shortly after I was diagnosed with autism.) Both of those parts only came out for the first time in my living memory last year, and I am still trying to process them to some extent as they do not come out often. 

I always tell people that self-reflection and self-awareness are keys to having a good mental health. With enough awareness and resources, people with DID can learn to recognize their different parts and learn how to live healthily even though that might look quite different from how a "normal" person lives healthily. I feel privileged to have had the resources and support that I needed when all these mental health diagnoses came seemingly all at once last year. (That said, I was of course unprivileged in having had to live the first 30 years of my life with those conditions, without knowing how to best support myself back then, and worst of all --- without even knowing who I was.) There are others who are not as privileged as me, and that gives me a sense of responsibility to use my privilege to spread awareness via the platforms that I can. Neurodivergence is a hidden disability and society needs to be more aware of it in order to ensure that others who are not as privileged as me also get the support and resources that they need.

For the 14-15 year old version of myself, mathematics was one of the tools that would help me completely dissociate from the rest of the world. The part of me that I call "the mathematician" first formed around that time. I was so fascinated by mathematics that I would spend days on end either working on the same problem (often from the olympiads), or meticulously compiling all the ideas I had learnt in my notebooks. I have several notebooks filled with problems and concepts that were written in a manner as if I was writing my own textbooks. Functionally, some of them could serve as textbooks, but they were personal books for myself written by myself. My first recognizable passion within mathematics was in enumerative combinatorics, and I am grateful to my brother for giving me the book "Applied Combinatorics" by Alan Tucker as I might not have decided to become a mathematician without it.

Right now, some 15 years later, the mathematician alter is fragmented into further parts (which is a topic for another essay), which is why I do not like to claim affiliation with any one area of mathematics. I find it ableist when someone asks which areas of mathematics I work in, and I similarly find it ableist when someone asks me who I work with --- as both are highly nuanced questions for someone like me, though I can understand that they are quite natural and harmless questions for most people. 

The fragmentation of the mathematical alter is not a problem. I quite enjoy that aspect of it, as that allows me to go back and forth between lots of areas of mathematics that I seem to perpetually want to understand more of. The problem here is rather that the mathematical alter has not aged much since the time it was formed --- it has only really learnt to do mathematics very well when it is completely dissociated into it. It flourished at home because it had the privilege of parents who let their kids dissociate for hours if it is for studying. By the way, I should point out that this is not a good privilege to have as it is a privilege only in the academic sense, and it can simultaneously be seen as the opposite of privilege in senses broader than just academic. Many parents, especially in-famously in Asia, think that letting their kids study for hours on end is okay because studying is a good habit, and so they take care of all the other worldly needs of the kid to let them dissociate into studying. But such a kid ends up lacking necessary life skills when they grow up --- or in my case when that kid is just an alter, they never grow up. The mathematical alter never had a chance to grow up as it had already been crushed by the first year of college the first time it lost the shelter and protection of home (which is another story for another essay). 

Thus, while I am living a healthy and happy life now, it could not have been with the mathematical alter being my primary alter (also otherwise known as the host in psychology terminology) all these years. Some form of survival of the fittest is a good metaphor to think about how a person with DID (also otherwise known as a system in psychology terminology) evolves --- the mathematical alter was/is not "fit enough" to navigate life. Very naturally my primary alter went through a few more cycles of growth and splitting before growing into the person who I am today. 

Throughout this time, my mathematical alter comes back every once in a while whenever it is fascinated with new ideas (or old ones, as there are a few unresolved mathematical things it sometimes keeps wanting to go back to). Now that I am conscious of it, I know how to support myself in ways that I still lead an overall healthy life and not dissociate completely like I used to in the past. I cannot and would not try to force my mathematical alter to be back on any scheduled/frequent basis as that would be self-destructive of me. I cannot therefore work on mathematics research on a weekly schedule, but I can work on it more sustainably and productively on a longer-term schedule where it is a more inspired creative expression as opposed to a job I have to do. I let myself live my life ensuring I do not skip on the non-research aspects of my job, while knowing that research will be done whenever I have the inspiration and motivation for it in a natural way. Forcing it is only self-destructive, while the natural artistic inspiration does come in cycles regardless of whether I force it or not. In that sense, mathematics is similar to the other artistic endeavors that I have some talent in --- I cannot force any of them. 

In hindsight, I was operating like this already without knowing about my mental health diagnoses back in my PhD. Working in that manner is how I completed my PhD in 7 years, which would be considered long for someone with the prior mathematical background I already had (at least on paper) when I entered into graduate school. I am grateful that LSU ended up giving me the opportunity of extra time (though that was also an administrative struggle and that process needs to be smoother for the sake of the students), and that my PhD co-advisors were as inclusive of different intellectual needs and styles as one could hope for. I would not have been where I am today without their unspoken encouragement to explore mathematics creatively for its own sake, at my own pace and on my usually erratic and irregular schedule. 

In academia, this way of working is sometimes not appreciated, or even recognized. Universities want at least a pretense of working on research every week, otherwise why would they fund our salaries as research mathematicians? Research is, after all, a job to them, and not an avenue of creative expression that cannot be forced. But in order to be truly inclusive, they need to understand neurodivergent people's different working needs. As I tried to explain earlier, for some mathematicians it is actually destructive to work on mathematics every week, but it may be constructive to work on it every once in a while as a form of artistic release. If such a mathematician is producing a "reasonable amount of good papers" (which would be another contentious philosophical topic to discuss for another day) over longer periods of time, then should we not be inclusive to such mathematicians in our academia regardless of whether they can "show something" on a week-to-week basis? Morally, we should be inclusive to them but we (as academic institutions) do not know how to truly be so --- practically, academia often has certain unwritten assumptions about how a working mathematician should look like and work like. 

My mathematical alter has survived several years of not knowing whether it could survive one more year. I have by now recognized its importance in protecting my life at times when I needed it, which is why it is very close to my heart. It is, after all, the one that feeds me and the one that facilitated me in recognizing who I truly am over time. I would never leave mathematics, because leaving mathematics would mean leaving a part of me behind. Thus, mathematics would continue to remain my spur of artistic expression every once in a while no matter what long-term profession I end up doing, but I do worry that mathematics would leave me. And by this last "mathematics", I mean the research part of mathematics academia, which is not yet up to speed with all the ways that it needs to be inclusive in. 

We ask job applicants to write their statements of diversity, equity, and inclusivity, but that is not enough if it is not an active topic of conversation. There needs to be more of an open dialogue in mathematics departments about what the needs of marginalized communities actually are.  Some of the needs might not be well-known or even well-studied, like in the case of the needs of neurodivergent mathematicians. Cambridge University's Ethics in Mathematics Project started because, in their words: "Only mathematicians can talk to mathematicians about ethics: the discourse of philosophers is often not appropriate and specific enough for mathematicians, and simply will not address the specifically mathematical, technical ethics we face." Since the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia is an ethical issue, only mathematicians are well-equipped to provide an appropriate discourse about neurodivergence inclusivity in mathematics academia. But there is not enough representation, and not enough public understanding of the key issues here. This is why I appreciate groups such as Sines of Disability, and I hope more neurodivergent mathematicians join it as only neurodivergent mathematicians are in a position to work on the ethics of neurodivergence in mathematics academia. And I would say it would be a shame if not enough people worked on it to help drive the change that is needed! Being a mathematician with a philosophy background and coming from a neurodivergent standpoint, I find it my moral obligation to talk about neurodiversity inclusivity issues in mathematics academia and life in general, and I hope that more people come forward and talk about these nuanced issues as well. Because, after all, I can only authoritatively talk about the issues I face. Different neurodivergent mathematicians might have some common needs, but they have a lot of unique needs that are unique to their specific neurodivergences --- and we need more representation in order to create the dialogue needed to understand all those needs as a community. 

Writing about all this feels like "coming out" to the mathematics community and I hope it inspires someone to explore further how they can foster an inclusive environment in their own departments that allows mathematicians with different needs feel supported. I believe it is best to not come out all at once, since that would perhaps require me to write a book's worth of material as I do have a lot more to say. I think this is a good point to pause and set the stage for a future essay in which I will elaborate in more detail some of the more subtle philosophical and neuroscientific aspects of this discussion on neurodivergence inclusivity in mathematics.