The Myth of Neurotypical Help: Why They Never Actually Support Autistic Struggles
- Guest comment
Last update 14 Apr 2025
5 mins
Introduction
The following essay complements the previous article on statements that are often heared that have been presented in Why ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic People Often Go Unseen and Unaccepted. It’s tone is on purpose sharply analytical and emotionally charged critique to transport the message in an easy to understandable way. For a more serious and objective view visit the article linked above.
Essay
It is often assumed that neurotypical individuals today are increasingly aware, supportive, and accommodating of autistic people—particularly those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome or ASD Level 1. Inclusion has become a buzzword in HR policies, social media campaigns, and public discourse. Yet beneath the surface of all this performative support lies a persistent and painful truth: when autistic people face the kinds of challenges that genuinely define their lives, neurotypicals tend to disappear.
Not symbolically. Not with hashtags. But when it actually matters.
The most urgent and identity-shaping struggles for autistic individuals—like forming and maintaining social or romantic relationships, enduring systematic exclusion from communities, facing unexplained rejection, or requesting accommodations that can’t just be “taken home” after hours—are almost always met with discomfort, denial, or dismissal by neurotypical peers. These are not minor grievances. They are life-altering barriers to belonging, safety, and emotional survival.
When autistic people ask for help, they are often met with dismissive, contradictory, or outright false responses:
- “That’s not something anyone can help with.” — while the same people navigate these issues routinely, sometimes with minor hiccups, but never with the enduring impairment autistics face.
- “Just be yourself.” — while judging autistic behavior as strange or inappropriate the moment someone is authentic.
- “Everyone struggles with that.” — while refusing to acknowledge the vastly different scale and intensity of those struggles.
- “I don’t know how to help you with that.” — a statement that sounds empathetic but functions as an excuse; these are people with stable relationships, fluent social routines, and wide networks. They do know, they just don’t want to help.
- “Everyone has to figure this out on their own.” — a cruel deflection that ignores the literal diagnostic core of autism: impaired social communication. It’s like telling someone in a wheelchair that they need to learn to climb stairs themselves when asking for a ramp.
These responses are not just unhelpful—they reflect a deeper unwillingness to get involved where empathy would actually matter. In these moments, the facade of empathy begins to crack. The kind of help that is offered is almost always misaligned with the actual need:
- An invitation to chat or go out for coffee.
- A vague reassurance about how things will improve eventually (Spoiler: no they will not as long as noone helps with the problems and actually solves them)
- A token gesture such as money or a casual check-in message.
These are not solutions. They are useless emotional placeholders.
Critically, these interactions reveal something unsettling about the common neurotypical understanding of empathy. While neurotypical people often think they are ready to take care, there is far less willingness to act when support is really needed or is not just mentioned in some far distance - then it becomes uncomfortable, socially complex, or inconvenient.
Rarely will neurotypical individuals intervene when a friend excludes someone for being “awkward.” Usually they walk in flocks and exclude because they support each other. Rarely will they make space in their own circles for someone who doesn’t instinctively follow unspoken social scripts. Rarely do they defend the person whose differences are being quietly pathologized, or advocate within systems that marginalize. Rarely they will ever help to develop or keep romantic relationships intact or repair them, they love to destroy.
The result is that many autistic people experience not just exclusion, but abandonment—despite being surrounded by people who publicly claim to care - who in reality do not care about others.
This contradiction exposes a gap in how empathy is understood and practiced. For many neurotypical people, empathy is defined by comfort zones and social norms. It’s permissible only when it doesn’t challenge group cohesion, personal convenience, or emotional equilibrium. When true empathy would require discomfort or actual action—when it would mean standing against a peer, bending a social rule, or changing how one includes others or building bridges, taking action and entering personal spheres where they have not been previously, approaching others with topics where support is needed but not common—it frequently disappears.
This is not to say that no neurotypical person ever helps. But rather, it highlights a pattern: a systemic failure to address the needs that matter most, hidden beneath surface-level performances of inclusion. The harm isn’t always intentional, but it is often dismissive. And the silence in those critical moments—when someone actually could help—is deafening.
The discussion must shift. It is not enough to say that autistic people are being supported. Support must be measured not by sentiment, but by action. By whether someone is willing to push open a locked social door. By whether they will make real space, even if it costs them something. By whether they will ask, seriously, “What do you actually need?”—and then do it.
Until then, the myth of neurotypical help will be what it is now: A myth far away from reality.
