Autistic person here:
I often ask people how they are feeling. Even though 90% of the time I can correctly tell by changes in a person's behavior, language, facial expressions, intonation, etc, I am aware that I can't literally read minds and the most obvious solution to this is just ask.
The 90% correct guessing figure comes from asking people and validating or invalidating my guess.
However, in at least my personal experience, neurotypicals almost never read my emotions correctly, will tell me how I am feeling, and essentially never ask. If they do ask, they will often get frustrated by how complex my emotions are, to the point that they vastly oversimplify to the point of caricature.
Then they go on to do or say things based on how they think I feel or felt and functionally spread lies about me constantly, which I am constantly bewildered by.
I would say that I am far more empathetic than most neurotypicals I meet or know, far more likely to spend my time and energy being emotionally available for them than they do for me, far less likely to assume my initial impression is correct, far more likely to truly engage.
As to the increased suicidality of Autistic people yeah that tracks with my lived experience.
Not in that I've personally considered suicide, but I am in constant tension of wanting to communicate with people vs essentially always being misinterpreted.
So I've just grown to be more and more content with mostly being alone.
Basically everyone I ever once thought I loved or trusted has been so utterly incapable of giving me 10% of the emotional support or availability that I feel I give them that I've learned that most people will exploit me and then scream at or assault me or have some kind of total emotional breakdown which they then blame me for whenever I am able to tell them how I feel.
Its beyond exhausting.
As an example that happens frequently to me: I also have a form of neuropathy, which often causes me to be in extreme amounts of pain for no obviously visible reason. I will tell people, I am not angry with you, I am in extreme pain, I have neuropathy, and they will just say no you aren't, no you don't you're just angry for (insert projection of their own insecurity here).
I am sorry to hear this. Please try to find more spectrum friends. It’s astonishing how nice it is to be friends with someone that can just be like. No worries I get it. And that’s it. Cause we both are empathetic of others and not just for show like most typicals. Typicals aren’t listening most of the time they are just waiting for their turn to speak. When I’m doing that it’s so I don’t forget my thought. Otherwise. Full focus on who I’m engaged with. It’s just so different and I think divergent to divergent is the more rational version of communication as we don’t run on MASSIVE assumptions like you are pointing out the typical in your life do.
As an allistic person who also puts lots of effort into being understanding and prefers to be conscious of and verify/disprove my assumptions, I agree that most people are maddening when it comes to this crap. I can have a full, detailed breakdown of my internal state ready to go and they'll just project onto me if they're riled up enough to not really be listening.
I've found the best trick you can pull when somebody does that is to find what you agree with them about and talk about that for a while. Once their head cools off a bit more and the conversation cools back down to normal emotional temperature, you can calmly tell them how you were really feeling and how it hurts to be misunderstood like that. Usually that elicits an embarrassed apology, from adults. If it doesn't, they probably don't want to be your friend, they wanted to be your abuser, and you their punching bag.
All just in my experience, of course.
The absolute worst, in my experience, is people who believe they are 'empaths', people who are hugely into superstitious nonsense like astrology or literal witchcraft, people who think they can 'manifest' things.
Those kinds of people have whole worldviews built around themselves being special, enlightened basically having superpowers.
They have no problem telling you how you feel or what you are thinking or why you did something, but if you even attempt to correct them, god forbid tell them they're literally delusional, they'll freak out and have a huge breakdown and cause as much drama as possible with everyone they know.
I have had waaaay too many of those kinds of people in my life.
I agree with you that most normal people would be embarrassed to learn they misread someone, but I seem to just have very bad luck of being surrounded by people who are just incapable of basic human decency.
Oh they absolutely are the worst.
I'm sorry to hear that, those types are so much trouble to deal with. I had a deeply narcissistic roommate in college who felt they always knew what others were feeling/thinking. They got quite abusive by the end and it really messed me up for a while. All that to say, I know that type of pain.
I think maybe narcissistic types tend to seek out patient, understanding people. Maybe consciously they think they're looking for love and understanding, but unconsciously it seems like they're looking for people they can reliably abuse when they're having a bad day, y'know?
I don't put up with those sorts anymore, it makes life much simpler.
This has been pretty widely discussed under the name "the double empathy problem", although as always it's good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other's communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they're speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.
I wasn't sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I'm crazy indicates it's pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.
Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
The idea is older than Milton. In 1988, Jim Sinclair wrote "Some Thoughts About Empathy":
https://web.archive.org/web/20090321213935/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/empathy.htm
CW: self-harm
Between 11 and 66% of autistic adults think about suicide during their lifetime, [...] according to figures from 2020.
There's a big difference between 11% and 66%, that statistic is not useful without more information
So the ovious question is: how good are autistic people at reading the feelings of other autistic people?
Actually, excellent. In groups, they cooperate in a better way than neurotypicals.
don't know about that specifically, but what i have read in general is that austistic people as good or better at communicating with each other than allistic people are with each other.
