Nuerodiverse colleague

[moana35]

I am having a few problems with a colleague at work. She is neurodiverse so adjustments have had to be made but these adjustments are meaning that myself and my colleagues are doing alot more than we did before she was employed.

She is very black and white about time so she will not be at her desk until her digital smart watch says the start time on her contract and again she leaves at the exact time she is supposed to finish even if in the middle of something. Lunch is an hour but due to needing to re compress for the afternoon she needs to take 75 minutes as she needs to go for a walk and eat. She has to sit in front of a window which means all our places in the office have been changed.

From Monday we are not allowed to drink coffee at our desks anymore only tea as the smell makes her gag.

Aside from this she is a very good worker and gets her work done to a good standard but it is impacting on the morale of the team. She is also exempt from training mornings if they are "small room " based as she can't sit in a room with a big group of people. She will be allowed to do her training online.

Management say as she declared her nuerodiversity at interview these adjustments have to be made for her I get reasonable adjustments and I have an autistic son but are these adjustments reasonable to the rest of the team.

If we took 15 mins extra for lunch or asked our colleague to not drink coffee I am sure we would be spoken to by management,

Has anyone else come across this in the workplace.

No one is saying that ND is THE issue, but it is on this thread.

I have a genuine question: where do you draw the line between 'this is my ND and I will never be able to change this particular issue of mine or learn to manage better' and 'i can try to make some changes here, let me see how I go about this'? How does this work for you?

I'm asking because each and every single person is set in their ways. It's because the sexist person can't look beyond what they know. Otherwise they would. And yes. It's not a disability. But do you want others to define you based on your disability?

You say you have a strong sense of injustice and black and white thinking. I had exactly the same, but for a different cause than ND. I had to take a very close look at myself for many years to rewire to a degree. And I did that because it was unbearable and ruined my relationships. I'm not saying that this is the case for you and that anyone will be able to lessen these. I'm saying that there are NT people out there who might feel these exactly like you do. How do we know the OP doesn't? We don't.

ARFID is a pretty new term and the advice is feed someone with ARFID what they can eat. Before that it was known as selective eating disorder and both can lead to failure to thrive. So in the past plenty will have died. We're just a bit more informed these days.

You also didn't google very hard https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1855319/mum-heartbreak-son-dies-eating-disorder

Well obviously I can only speak for my experiences here. I've spent my life trying to cover up and work with my "issues". To fit in to the neurotypical world. I have been shamed and bullied for traits that I cannot control. Been deemed lazy and stupid, socially awkward and difficult. After a while, you end up believing it. You live in shame that you do not deserve. It came a great mental cost resulting is very poor mental health and some shitty situations. You might self harm to try to deal with it.

Trust me, ND people spend their lives trying to work with the issues they have. And no, I don't want to be defined by my disability at all. But is it too much to ask for people to try to be understanding? To make the world a litter easier for people that find it so difficult?

Being formally diagnosed gave me answers and the strength to say actually, I'm not lazy, stupid or rude. I don't experience the world in the same way as others and I want some understanding so that I am treated fairly. The only actual accommodation I have asked for at work is a preference for written communication over verbal, as I struggle with processing verbal communication. I cannot compensate for this, it is simply not possible. All attempts to accommodate this myself in 40+ years have failed despite best efforts.

I do not think I am unreasonable here. When this need is met, I excel at my job (engineer). I also asked for breaks in long meetings which is not a formal accommondation is it was deemed good practice anyway.

And yes, the OP might struggle with injustices too. But the posters on here are trying to tell it from the view of the ND person. This person is almost certainly not having a good giggle at the special treatment.

This is heartbreaking.

Oh bore off. You clearly have some deep seated issue about nd people and the fact we're allowed adjustments. All you've done in this thread is make assumptions and insist we're all terrible people for some spurious reason or other because we're nd. Not to mention act like we're one homogenous being. You wouldn't do it to someone who had an adjustment for a visible disability.

And you do have an advantage if you're not nd. The same way I have the advantage of not being physically disabled or someone else has the advantage of not having crohns or someone else has the advantage of not having depression. I know this might be a bit mind blowing for you, but we all have different advantages and disadvantages in life you know. No one has said ND is the only disadvantage in life.

Im surprised at your response. I don't feel I received an answer. I was hoping to understand a bit better how this works for you, but don't feel I could learn something from it.

You do realise this like saying 'well I don't have ME but I know what it feels like because I'm tired too' ableist btw.

although you probably don't believe in that either

I'm not really sure what to say. I was explaining why a ND has probably already done all of the work to mitigate their issues, and have reached a point where they need accommodations.

You come across as someone that has read about ND people in the daily fail and just wants to froth about them.

Loads of people can't have their coffee with them whilst working. I don't have a desk and nor can I carry a hot drink around. Lots of people can't access hot drinks whilst working. No ones is hard done by because they can't drink coffee for a few hours a day. If someone complains their kid can't eat sweets at school they're told to suck it up as there's plenty of other times they can eat them. The same can be said for coffee frankly.

Some people have to be on their feet all day at work. That doesn't make it unreasonable to expect to sit down at a desk-based job.

And it's 7-8 hours a day for most.

How was mentioning ARFID a red herring? Someone asked if food phobias can be diagnosed and i answered their question saying yes it can but that it comes under different terms. Are we not allowed to answer questions in case it explains something that is actually medically recognised?

I'm not really sure what your argument is as to why someone MUST have coffee at their desk though? They can have it at lunch/break away from their desk (op hasn't been clear if they get these but we were always allowed a 10 min am/pm break when I worked in an office 8 hrs a day).

Yes so if someone really can't go a few hours without a coffee that would indicate a problem of some sort really. They should probably seek support. Of course it's highly unlike anyone will because 99.99% of people do not NEED coffee. Not to mention there's plenty of other ways to get caffeine in if you're that desperate you can't manage without it.

It's ironic in a way that people say asking for no coffee in the office is unreasonable, but insist their completely non medical need to have a coffee is reasonable. It's also Interesting that on MN lots of people agree that things like fish or curry shouldn't be eaten in the office as it's smelly and unsociable but can't extend the same empathy to someone who finds coffee smells overwhelming.

personally I'm not convinced the coffee adj is actually reasonable, but I can empathise with the colleague as I have a child who literally can't be in the same room as some foods and so I would happily do this, but the stretching to insist people NEED coffee rather than just like having it, is ridiculous.

Because being able to drink something you like at your desk is a very, very basic expectation of desk-based jobs.

Also, I'd like to point out you made a strawman then typed a multi-paragraph take down of it.

I agree there are many unknowns and many of the points you make will remain unknown. The point is there have been changes to other employees due to making adjustments for this new employee and how reasonable this is. True if this new member of staff had a peanut allergy then they could well be a band on peanuts at the workplace which would be reasonable, it depends what is reasonable. The tea or coffee point seems to me to be unreasonable given that that the smells/practice of drinking tea and coffee occurs in everyday life and it has been common practice in this workplace to drink at the desk. The workplace is for all and is a community and therefore the needs others all should to be considered and taken into account.

Your team can't manage despite having two new colleagues? It sounds like there's something else wrong not just your list of perceived grievances.

So you only drink coffee and nothing else?

I’ve read the article you linked to. The coroner seems to have concluded that Alfie died of malnutrition but I didn’t see the coroner mention ARFID.
Anorexia was mentioned, which I’m not questioning at all.

Do you know what ARFID is, and therefore why it might be linked to that malnutrition you mention?

My grandmother (who quite possibly was ND) only drank tea. Nothing else. All day every day.

what would happen if an ND person, or anyone with food/drink sensitivities who could only drink coffee work in that office I wonder. Whose needs would trump whose?

Are you sure she's being paid for the 15 minutes. I would very much doubt it abd therefore dont see why you are concerned about it.

Please stop with the strawmen. If you can't address the points people are actually making, don't bother replying.

No, I'm just struggling to understand your sentence in context. You've been through what I've been through, probably more because you mention child abuse. That's horrible and I think no one on this thread is denying that. Your assertion that autistic people think that autism is The Problem and NT people all have easy lives is a straw man argument.

However, you are still NT. Counselling and therapy are designed to work for you. They are not designed to work for me. There is evidence starting to emerge that mindfulness training, which is often used as a first line therapy for all sorts of things, including panic attacks and PTSD, is counter-productive for some autistic people. So, where you've been able to access appropriate support for PTSD after abuse, I haven't been able to acces that after multiple sexual assaults, and some of the prescibed therapies have made it worse.

I was undiagnosed as a child, so I was referred to CAHMS after attempting suicide. I was masking in CAHMS counselling sessions because I didn't know how not to. How were the counsellors going to help me when I couldn't show my authentic feelings to them? When I explained my difficulties making and keeping friends to them, they told me to feign interest in "small talk", in other words to lie to people and mask even harder. Being told to mask even to our friends is actively harmful to autistic people, what we need is to find our "tribe" who accept us, not hide who we are.

I explained already how autistic women and girls are nearly three times more likely to be sexually-assaulted than the general population. We are also more likely to be bullied, abused, and manipulated because of our limited social skills. We are catnip to abusers because we are vulnerable. And when our diagnoses were "missed" until adulthood, the adults in our lives when we were children were unaware that we needed extra safeguarding.

In other words, we are a lot more likely to be subjected to abuse, and there's very little recovery support for us. To deny that autistic women, as a class, have it worse than NT women is utter bullshit. When we assert that autism makes our lives harder, take it at face value without adding a non-existent denial of other people's problems to our words. We aren't saying that NTs have easy lives, but that ours are made harder by autism.

Ultimately as someone who has 2 disabilities ( not visible) it's up to me to manage and isn't anyone else's business.

All the sad and shocked nonsense is really irritating, like people with disability are children that need protection.

One of my adjustments is obvious,and has been commented on.
I dont need or want to discuss thank you

The other is not obvious and if I need to adjust to my surroundings I will, quietly and with no need for drama.

WPRA should not impact on others working conditions negatively, mine dont, it's REASONABLE adjustment
The debate over banning coffee is ridiculous, its likely this person is going to encounter coffee in the workplace , so either wear a mask or WFH
The managers are at fault here.