Although many countries are now relaxing the lockdown measures and rolling out a COVID-19 exit strategy, life will not completely go back to normal. Certain measures will remain in place, especially the social distancing measure (I prefer the term physical distancing).
Although measures are now more relaxed and less difficult to follow, when we go shopping, exercising or just going out, we can see people not following the guidelines. That can be frustrating for many people, but it certainly is making a lot of autistic children, youngsters and adults confused or angry. For an autistic mind rules are very important and often strictly interpreted, in a kind of black and white matter. What is difficult for autistic people is to contextualize things (see my book: Autism as Context Blindness).
There are different contexts that make people not follow the guidelines in their behaviour. It can help people on the autism spectrum if we push the context button. I wrote a ‘social article’ for Scottish Autism: How to cope with people not following the COVID-19 guidelines. You can find the article on the COVID-19 support page of Scottish Autism, where you will find a lot of other useful resources as well.
One thought on “How to Cope with People not Following the COVID-19 Guidelines”