To help us meet your dietary, sensory, and accessibility needs at events, fill in the form below.
Table of Contents
Privacy Notice
We realize this is sensitive information.
- All fields are optional, including name and email.
- We will keep it private.
- We won’t share this information with anyone.
- The only people with access to this information are the Directors of Stimpunks.
- We will delete this information upon request.
- Here is our privacy policy.
If you’d prefer not to give a name and email address, leave those blank.
- Be warned that our system collects IP addresses for all form submissions.
- An IP address can be used to approximate your location on earth, including city and sometimes street.
- There is no way to turn this off.
- If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
Please read the data collection and privacy disclosure below the form before submitting your information. We disclose where your information is stored and what we do to keep it safe.
Making SPACE
When describing your needs in the form below, consider these two tables from “Autistic SPACE: a novel framework for meeting the needs of autistic people in healthcare settings | British Journal of Hospital Medicine“
Autistic sensory differences
| Sensation | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Sight | Visual sensitivities are common. Bright lighting (particularly fluorescent) is a common challenge. Visual stimuli which may go unnoticed by non-autistic people, such as the flickering of fluorescent lighting or computer screens, an overhead rotary fan, or highly patterned surfaces, may all cause sensory stress |
| Sound | Autistic people experience auditory sensitivities and auditory processing differences. Environmental noise can cause intense distress, particularly when sudden or unexpected. Sounds unnoticed by non-autistic people, such as the humming of electrical equipment, may be perceived by autistic people without ‘fade’ (where inconsequential sounds are no longer noticed over time). Autistic people may not filter out environmental sounds and therefore may struggle to hear a conversation in a noisy room |
| Smell | Autistic people are often highly sensitive to smell and may perceive olfactory stimuli that others do not. Common and usually inoffensive smells may be perceived as highly noxious. In contrast, some autistic people are hyposensitive to smell and may enjoy smelling pungent objects |
| Taste | Autistic people may be hypo- or hyper-sensitive to taste, needing either highly flavoured or very bland food. Food texture is important, as is predictability (see below). Autistic people commonly enjoy colloquially termed ‘same foods’, which may explain a limited diet and negative reactions to a change of brand or recipe for a known brand of food |
| Touch | Tactile sensitivities range from inability to tolerate the sensation of certain fabrics to an inability to be touched, particularly by strangers. This leads to predictable challenges in a medical consultation where physical examination is required. Knowing the tactile sensitivity profile of a patient is helpful because difficulties commonly arise with light touch, whereas a strong deep touch may be more acceptable |
| Temperature | Thermal sensitivity is common and may lead to apparently inappropriate or out of season clothing. The range of tolerated temperatures is likely to be person-specific |
| Proprioception | Proprioception appears different for autistic people. Some may need lots of proprioceptive input leading to a tendency to climb, swing, rock or jump. Others will avoid such movements and may experience balance difficulties during day-to-day activities |
| Interoception and pain | A particular challenge for some autistic people is accurately interpreting internal bodily sensations. This can lead to difficulties noticing hunger, thirst, tiredness, or a need to urinate or defaecate. Difficulties with pain perception can lead to unrecognised injuries but it must be emphasised that while reduced pain sensitivity occurs for some, others experience increased pain sensitivity, and this should never result in under-treatment of pain for autistic patients |
Recommendations for supporting Autistic SPACE in practice
Autistic SPACE: a novel framework for meeting the needs of autistic people in healthcare settings | British Journal of Hospital Medicine
- Sensory needs.
- Predictability.
- Acceptance.
- Communication.
- Empathy.
| SPACE framework aspect | Recommendations for implementation | |
|---|---|---|
| Sensory | Sight | Turn off or turn down artificial lights |
| Remove flickering or oscillating environmental features | ||
| Avoid highly stimulating decor | ||
| Promote the use of sunglasses | ||
| Sound | Consider environmental sounds | |
| Reduce auditory clutter | ||
| Avoid conversation in noisy environment | ||
| Promote the use of noise-cancelling headphones and/or ear plugs | ||
| Smell | Avoid wearing perfume or highly scented cosmetics or toiletries | |
| Avoid aerosols or chemical ‘air fresheners’ | ||
| Avoid highly scented cleaning products | ||
| Consider ventilation, open windows where possible | ||
| Taste | Respect sensory preferences when considering nutrition | |
| Consider taste and texture of medications | ||
| Consider non-standard medication formulations where necessary | ||
| Touch | Ascertain tactile preferences and modify examination technique | |
| Avoid casual touch | ||
| Promote sensory-friendly clothing choices | ||
| Sensory aids such as weighted blankets may be helpful | ||
| Temperature | Consider environmental temperature | |
| Adjust temperature where required | ||
| Proprioception | Understand the need for proprioceptive input | |
| Avoid making inferences from unusual body posture | ||
| Interoception and pain | Ask directly about internal sensations but understand that answering may be difficult | |
| Pay attention to verbal reports of pain where possible | ||
| Be aware that non-verbal expression of pain may be different | ||
| Consider the need for adapted pain scales | ||
| Predictability | Give realistic information in advance | |
| Ensure clear and accurate directional signage in physical spaces | ||
| Provide photographs or videos of the physical environment and staff | ||
| Allow waiting in a familiar environment (eg a patient’s own car or outside) | ||
| Ensure care is provided by staff familiar to the patient where possible | ||
| Acceptance | Neurodiversity-affirmative approach beneficial | |
| Understand autistic stimming and monotropic thinking patterns | ||
| Facilitate need for detailed factual information | ||
| Understand distress behaviour | ||
| Communication | Understand autistic verbal and non-verbal communication differences | |
| Know that communication ability is reduced by anxiety and sensory stress | ||
| Clear unambiguous communication required | ||
| Avoid phone-based appointment systems | ||
| Promote use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) | ||
| Empathy | Recognise that autistic people feel empathy but may display it differently | |
| Empathy towards autistic patients may be more challenging for non-autistic healthcare providers | ||
| Physical space | Expect a need for increased personal space | |
| Avoid proximity to other people where possible | ||
| Temporal space | Allow increased time to respond to questions | |
| Allow increased time for decision making | ||
| Emotional space | Expect differences in emotional expression | |
| Allow restorative solitude to recover (without additional input) if distressed | ||
The Form
What Information Do We Collect?
🔐 About Us and What We Do With Your Information
Chelsea, Inna, and Ryan are at the other end of our contact form. Get to know us on our About page. Alas, we can’t usually move at the speed of emergencies, and sometimes we take a week or two off for self-care. We get lots of spam and sometimes miss your requests in the noise. If you don’t hear from us within a week, feel free to contact us again.
About your information:
- We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make our services possible. Read our full Privacy Policy.
- If you submitted a form to us, your information will be entered into our forms software (WPForms and WordPress).
- A subset of that information will go to our CRM software (HubSpot).
- A subset of that will go to our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) if you receive money from us.
- This data retention is solely for legal compliance purposes. We will not sell or give your data to third parties. We will not use your information to market anything to you.
- Your IP address will be used to geolocate your browsing session. Our software does not allow turning off IP address collection.
- If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
- If you apply for a grant and your IP address is outside the United States, we will ask you to confirm you are in the United States. We’ll take your word for it and never ask you to unmask your IP.
- We collect as little as we can from you and do our best to keep it secure.
- We use 1Password for Business to secure our accounts with long, randomly generated, unique passwords.
- Your information will be reviewed by our directors: Ryan, Inna, Chelsea, and Norah.
- Periodically, nonprofit lawyers and consultants will have access to some information in order to audit our processes for ethics and legality.
- We delete your form submission and any documents you attach after determining whether to send you a grant or not. We consider personal information a toxic asset and don’t want to keep more of your data than we have to.
- We will also delete your information from our systems upon request.
- However, if you get a grant from us we do have to retain contact information about who we gave to and the amount given. We retain this contact information for 3 years as required by the Internal Revenue Service.
Nap Director and Self-care Expert
Doan Lotion Potion
Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct
At Stimpunks, we have sensitive conversations about trauma and mental health with our clients. We hold ourselves to the ethical principles and code of conduct of psychologists.
https://www.apa.org/ethics/code
Talking about clients to other clients, for example, is not okay.
When someone tells you the intimate details of their life, and you go and tell a bunch of strangers about it, you have done something wrong. It is perhaps only because this practice is so entrenched that we tend to forget this.
Mental Health and the Invasion of Privacy | Psychology Today
Further Reading
We have several resources on perceptual worlds and access. Are your needs addressed by them? Help us maintain these resources.
- Enable Dignity: Accessible Systems, Spaces, & Events
- Perceptual Worlds and Sensory Trauma
- Neuroception and Sensory Load: Our Complex Sensory Experiences
- Event Access Guide
- Access Survey
- Autism in Care Settings: Managing Sensory Load
- Three Therapeutic Approaches to Supporting Autistic People in Healthcare Settings
- Stimpunks Guide to the NeurodiVerse Issue #2: Healthcare Access
- Stimming
