Note: This is excerpted from a 62,000-word book I wrote from 2017-03-11 to 2017-04-28. It began as an exegesis of the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight (which one of my high school classmates produced), but the tale, to coin a phrase, grew in the telling, becoming part autobiography and part critique of society. I haven’t yet published it in full, partly because I never finished it, and partly because it reveals information about loved ones that neither they nor I are comfortable making public knowledge.
Since this excerpt is around eight years old, I may not now stand by every single word of what I wrote then, but I’m publishing it here because I still stand by the majority of it.
I have omitted elements of the original piece that either felt out of context without the preceding discussion of Moonlight, referred to previous parts of the book, or felt uncomfortably personal. These are the passages of my own writing marked with “[…]”. (The original already truncated some quotations.)
Content warning: Detailed discussion of an autistic political science professor’s suicide; mistreatment of marginalized communities. If you have PTSD relating to suicide, you probably shouldn’t read this, and if you still feel you must, you should almost certainly consult with a psychiatric or psychological professional both before and after so doing.
—Aaron Freed
Tallahassee, FL
2025-03-21
[…] while I was revising this essay, the news of political scientist Will Moore’s suicide came in. I wasn’t that familiar with Moore’s work, and certainly didn’t personally know him, but he was considered one of the world’s experts on political violence.
That isn’t, however, why I’m addressing his suicide here; the relevance is that he was autistic, and his suicide note made it absolutely clear to me that his suicide was a direct consequence of the way society treats autistic people. I hold society directly culpable for it. I don’t expect everyone to share my ethical priorities, but I intend to establish that, if society treated autistic people differently, Moore would almost certainly still be alive today.
[…] autistic people have high unemployment rates. We also have high comorbidities with other mental disorders. It’s not clear how many of these are specifically caused by brain chemistry and how many are specifically caused by society’s treatment of us. Some of them may be, and indeed probably are, caused by both. I’ve described my own experiences with depression in depth; it’s estimated that up to 57% of us may suffer from it at some point, and we attempt suicide at roughly four times the rate of the populace at large. I also have ADHD, which caused me great trouble earlier in life but, since I’ve been given suitable medication for much of my life, has not been a major obstacle; ADHD and autism also have high comorbidities.
Despite the common comorbidity with depression, we often aren’t diagnosed with that either. Some of this may simply be because our symptoms present differently. Part of it is that our body language is also difficult from neurotypicals’. Not a lot of people even realize this. We have trouble communicating with neurotypicals because we don’t intrinsically understand their body language, but part of why they have trouble communicating with us is that they don’t intrinsically understand ours, and often assume they do. Further complicating this, our body language may vary widely from person to person. Even our facial expressions may have different meanings than commonly expected.
It doesn’t help that it’s not merely body language. Our voice tones aren’t always the same, either. A flat, emotionless affect can be a symptom of depression. It can also be a symptom of autism. When the two are combined, how do you even tell which is causing it? Sleep problems and difficulty concentrating, other common symptoms of depression, are also common symptoms of autism. And autistic people may not be able to communicate the symptoms of depression effectively to therapists: again, autistic body language is not intrinsically comprehensible to neurotypicals, or even necessarily to others with autism. Furthermore, since many autistic people may have difficulty with language, describing feelings therapists would recognize as depression may pose difficulties. Even high-functioning autistic people, who often have high fluency of language, may nonetheless have difficulty identifying and describing their emotions.
And so we come to Moore’s suicide note. A number of people who’ve read his note have commented that it didn’t sound like a product of depressed thinking. But that’s the thing about depression: it convinces you your thoughts are rational. They’re not. It’s a product of being in such extreme pain for so long that you stop noticing it. It’s like the proverbial frog in simmering water. It occurs gradually, so you don’t notice it, and since you’re no longer conscious of the pain, you assume depression isn’t controlling your thoughts anymore. But of course, it is. It doesn’t really feel like pain any longer – it’s more like the absence of pleasure, the absence of anything. People think of depression as an extreme case of sadness, but that’s wrong. It may start out that way, but over the long term, it’s better considered a case of anhedonia, the inability to obtain pleasure or fulfillment from activities that once provided them. And with that inability, your entire sense of purpose goes away, and that’s where the illness becomes truly dangerous.
One of the most insidious things about mental illnesses is that they convince you you’re completely in control of your mind and looking at things rationally, when of course, your thoughts are about as far from rational as possible. But Moore’s note was written in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, as though he were a detached observer about his own life. He felt he had no reason to be depressed, so he couldn’t have been depressed, right? But depression doesn’t work that way. You can have every advantage in life and still be depressed. That’s not a personal failing. It’s simple biology.
It’s not entirely clear what causes depression; it may be partially a product of external circumstances and partially a chemical imbalance in the brain. There’s another theory that it’s simply a malfunctioning of the brain’s fight-or-flight response, since the first occurrence is often linked to a specific event. A ‘switch’ in the brain gets stuck to ‘flight’, and the resultant yearning to hide from the outside world often has little to no connection with events in the depressed person’s life.
When I was depressed, improvements in external circumstances alone didn’t always alleviate the problem. My relationship alleviated my depression for the time, but having the brain flooded with oxytocin and other hormones associated with the feeling of love can do that. It very likely altered the chemical composition of my brain for the time I was in a relationship, and once it ended, I fell right back into my depression. Getting my bachelor’s degree didn’t even register in my mind. My self-perception was so negative that I couldn’t perceive what a huge accomplishment I’d just made.
For me, the key paragraph in Moore’s suicide note is the one where he discusses society:
I didn’t “fit” in society. That isn’t a problem of society. Setting aside moments of petulance, I viewed it as a plain fact. There it was. What to do about it? Ask society to adapt to me? Hah!
Yes, actually, society should have adapted to Moore. Society is profoundly cruel to people who don’t fit in, and Moore was a victim of that. It’s a strange paradox of our culture that it’s extremely individualistic and, at the same time, extremely intolerant of eccentricities. This country is a terrible place to be an introvert. You are expected, 24/7, to put on a smile and be ‘positive’. Wanting solitude is ‘weird’. Who needs introspection? Quiet makes many people deeply uncomfortable.
Society frequently expects people who don’t conform to its norms to adapt to them without considering whether they’re even healthy for those who don’t conform to them. For that matter, it rarely even considers whether they’re healthy for those who do conform to them. I’ve repeatedly been asked to alter my methods of interaction with others to suit their communicative preferences. I’ve never once in my life seen others asked to alter their methods of interaction with me to suit my communicative preferences. My second depression, which lasted for around a decade, was hardly improved by spending most of it at a job that considered my own communicative preferences intrinsically ill-suited to it and directly blamed me for having them. To be fair, I don’t expect a retail business to be a driver of social change on behalf of introverts. But at the same time, I don’t see anyone else in society fighting for that change, either. Needing time alone should not be considered an intrinsic personal failing, yet frequently, I felt as though it was being treated that way.
Being told, for your entire life, that you’re at fault for personality traits that aren’t intrinsically harmful to others is exhausting. Moore is a plain, clear writer, which is evident even in his suicide note. Moore clearly indicates how thoroughly he’d internalized the blame for receiving that message:
Being a misfit manifested itself in two broad ways over the course of my life: (1) far too often I angered, insulted, offended and otherwise upset people, without expecting or intending to, and (2) I rarely felt that I was successful explaining my ideas, perceptions, understandings to others. […]
The best way for me to articulate why I valued honesty is that it hurt to lie. White lies (told to spare another’s feelings) hurt. As Holden Caufield puts it, being “phony” hurt. […]
Small talk is a hugely important social lubricant. Intellectually I came to understand that. But emotionally I could not deal. […]
Over the years I came to understand myself as adopting a tone that has been described to me by various women in my life as “that tone,” “obnoxious” or “condescending.”
Sometimes I recognized what they were referring to. But, and this is the difficult part, I very frequently did not. Indeed, my ex-wife had to put up with more than a decade of me responding very defensively when she would make that observation. […]
I was tired of pissing people off, especially when I did not expect to or mean to.
Given how lucid and clear his writing is, I have to conclude that the problem wasn’t with his verbal communication. It must have been with everything else.
Most of us, when we are children, are very, very different from other children. We quickly learn to start hiding those differences, because our society is very, very intolerant of outsiders. Children have to learn that somewhere. They don’t intrinsically know racism, misogyny, queerphobia, and other exclusionary attitudes. They learn them from adults. And I suspect their intolerance of children with behavioral differences comes from the same place.
So we learn to start hiding our differences – we act more like the rest of society in an attempt to fit in. There isn’t much choice; if we didn’t, we’d continue to be bullied, and no one wants that. Even we want human connections. ([…]this is a pattern with children on the autism spectrum: many are quickly taught to hide their most obvious ‘tells’ from their peers.)
But this is a double-edged sword. Because outsiders can’t tell we’re autistic, they assume they’re reading our nonverbal communication correctly. This is not, in most cases, a correct assumption.
93% of communication is said to be nonverbal. We don’t intrinsically understand neurotypicals’ nonverbal communication, and most of us understand that we don’t intrinsically understand it. We know there’s something there that we’re not getting, and it’s frustrating. The most obvious tells, like body language and voice tone, can be taught to a certain extent, but there are intangibles. Neurotypicals appear to be able to look into each other’s eyes and glean information about each other’s emotions in that manner. If there’s a way this can be taught to us, I’m not yet aware of its existence.
Conversely, as I’ve said, neurotypicals don’t intrinsically understand our nonverbal communication, either, and often assume they do intrinsically understand it. 93% of what we intend to communicate is misunderstood by people who don’t even understand that they’re misunderstanding it, who then blame us for their failures to communicate with us. If fault should be attached to any party, the fault should be shared, since communication is two-way. You can’t blame a person who speaks only English for inability to communicate with someone who speaks no English: the problem is one of ignorance. It’s as if, every time we said the word ‘horse’, the outside world heard it as ‘dog’, and blamed us for their reaction to the word ‘dog’. But it’s not our fault that others perceive our nonverbal communication incorrectly. The problem is again one of ignorance, and the ignorant parties are frequently so ignorant that they aren’t even aware they’re ignorant of something. I can’t even begin to describe how exhausting this is. It affects every single in-person interaction I have with others, and probably ultimately explains why most of my best friends now are also autistic: they’re the only people who consistently won’t assume they’re interpreting my nonverbal communication correctly.
Moore was exhausted by social conventions that personally bothered him, and he blamed himself for being bothered by them. The possibility that others could be even partially at fault does not appear to have even registered with him. If blunt honesty bothers society, but dishonesty bothers an individual, is the individual at fault, or is society at fault for considering dishonesty beneficial? And if an individual, without intending offense, is repeatedly misinterpreted as being offensive, but is never given a comprehensible explanation for what is causing the offense, then is the individual at fault for communicating in a manner others find offensive, or are others at fault for not being able to explain what has been causing offense and how to stop doing it?
The unspoken assumption here is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to communicate, and that a person who can’t learn the right way is to blame for it. The idea that one form of communication may not suffice for everyone in society and that others may need to learn to communicate with those who don’t share their preferences hasn’t even been considered. Those who don’t communicate in the preferred fashion are simply blamed for not doing so. It’s their fault for not learning how others communicate; it’s not others’ fault for not learning how they communicate.
And this is ultimately a large part of the reason it’s so painful to come to terms with one’s identity as autistic. Autism is an identity issue, just as ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and similar issues are. Yet it’s rarely seen as one in society. So much of what comes naturally to others in society isn’t natural to us. Body language, eye contact, verbal tone, facial expressions, unspoken social conventions: we’re blamed for not understanding them. Everyone else gets them naturally; what’s wrong with us? And yet most of this is simply a product of the fact that our brains work differently. Our body language is frequently different from others’. Yet we’re blamed for not understanding others’ body language, and we’re blamed when others don’t understand ours. We’re blamed when we misinterpret others’ words, and we’re blamed when others misinterpret ours.
And, in so many cases, this is a professional obstacle. The ADA is supposed to protect us, but there’s little understanding of the unspoken societal assumptions that hold us back. […] my first employer blamed me for their miscommunications with me; they don’t even seem to have considered that they simply weren’t communicating in a fashion I found comprehensible, or they considered its incomprehensibility my fault. This seems to be a recurrent pattern for autistic people; it certainly happened in Moore’s case. As I said, he’s clearly an incredibly fluent writer; an inability to understand language is not the issue here. It appears to be tone, body language, and all the other nonverbal aspects of communication that come naturally to others. We have to learn 93% of the parts of communication that others understand naturally. And it’s not taught in school. The resources for learning this aren’t widely available. I will openly confess to still not understanding much of it.
But at the same time, if we don’t understand others’ 93%, why do others assume they understand our 93%? The idea that the misunderstanding could be mutual never registers with others. As I’ve described in detail, our body language and even voice tones can be wildly different from neurotypicals’, who rarely ever consider that we may be communicating wildly different messages than they assume we are. Others simply assume they understand what we intend to communicate nonverbally without questioning whether they assume correctly. As I’ve said, this is exhausting.
By autistic people’s standards, Moore’s life was a resounding success. Most of us have trouble even maintaining employment. Moore was a highly respected political scientist whose work was widely recognized in academia and who made an incalculable impact on multiple generations of his students, many of whom considered him one of their most significant mentors. His work in studying the denial of human rights, repression, dissent, and similar topics was regarded as pioneering in the field. Yet he ultimately felt like he had nothing further to offer the world, and that his life had been a failure. Because he sometimes annoyed others, he seemed to think his entire existence was worthless.
And yet, apparently, no one was ever actually able to provide him a satisfactory explanation to him of why he annoyed others. What’s particularly ironic is that, if there had been more autistic people in his life, they may actually have had a better chance at picking up on it. One of us probably wouldn’t have assumed we were correctly reading either Moore’s or others’ nonverbal communication, and perhaps would have been able to identify factors common to the conflicts.
And I’m not sure I actually have words to express my condemnation of academia’s institutional treatment of mental health issues. The milder ones are insufficient to describe the outrage it causes me, and the stronger ones are either obscenities or might seem like hyperbole. I don’t intend either. According to a study by professors at Ohio State University and the University at Delaware, other professors cited, verbatim, the following reasons for not disclosing mental health issues to colleagues:
And there were many others like these. This isn’t merely a case of widespread violations of the ADA. This isn’t merely a case of widespread indifference. It’s a case of widespread malevolence. It’s a case of widespread, active hostility to people who are already marginalized in society, already face far more issues than the general populace, and it appears to be a product of institutional culture.
Society caused Will Moore’s suicide. And, as I’ve said, attempted suicide rates are indeed about four times higher among autistic people than they are among neurotypicals. It’s impossible for me not to conclude that society causes a lot of autistic people’s suicides. Until we improve our society, this will continue. I personally regard this as ethically a collective murder by indifference. I don’t expect this ever to be legally prosecuted, but I hold society collectively responsible, and changing these behaviors will be a central concern of my life going forward.
[…] I have few complaints with my own life right now. But society treats us horribly in general. This needs to improve.
—Aaron Freed
Sarasota, FL
2017-03-11 to 2017-04-28
I published this today because I learned that autistic people in the U.S. have a life expectancy of 36 years. The general populace’s is literally twice that, at 72. Our suicide rate being nine times the median is a major contributing factor.
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
988 Lifeline (United States)
The Samaritans (United Kingdom & Ireland)
Talk Suicide Canada
Lifeline Australia
Lifeline Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Suicide hotlines in other countries
Please don’t leave us.
Aaron Freed
Tallahassee, FL
2025-03-21