by Jay Fernando, reporter

It’s hardly surprising that a story headlined “Student Union bans clapping in favour of jazz hands” had countless people lamenting the ‘snowflake’ generation.

But to people like George Watts, who studies Autism at the University of Kent and is autistic herself, the gesture to prohibit the volume of clapping is not ‘overly-sensitive’.

She explains that loud noises can be the cause of severe pain for many others with the disability.

“There have been fMRI studies which show noises like applause can be experienced as actual pain by the brain. I find people understand the pain factor more easily”, said Ms Watts.

“Most people would be OK about not making a loud noise near someone who had a migraine or the flu.

“I had to say to my daughter’s school that if I have to stand next to the school bell when it goes off it has the same impact on me as someone suddenly slapping me around the face”.

Autism had been a subject that Ms Watts has found endlessly fascinating for years, but it wasn’t until studying it at university that she started to see the similarities in herself, leading to her diagnosis four years ago.

The 36-year-old master’s student has since become an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) advocate and sees autism as something that is important to teach people about.

“These days people have heard of autism and usually have ideas about what that is. Unfortunately, most of these ideas are false, myths or simply outdated knowledge”, she said.

“I do a lot of teaching about autism via an online course and a huge amount of what I do there is answering the same dozen or so questions over and over.

“So much of what I do now is trying to get people to unlearn the things they think they know about autism”.

Alongside teaching, Ms Watts made a short film last year to challenge what she saw as common ASD-related misconceptions.

Uploaded to Youtube, the video titled ‘Talking in Pictures’ features people who break the mould of what autistic people are perceived to be. Though it was well received enough to win an award from her university, she describes the whole experience as a bittersweet moment.

“On the day I was due to collect this, I heard that one of the people who contributed to my film had tried to kill themselves.

“This made me realise that at least 70% of the people it features have had serious mental health issues and that’s just the ones I knew about.

She describes herself as lucky to be paid to talk about something she’s passionate about and believes the work she does is necessary.

“I think it’s important that people like me speak up where we can as so many others have eerily similar life experiences even when out cultural backgrounds are vastly different”, she said

“So many people helped me when I first realised I was autistic. They made my life so much better and I’d really like to pay some of that forward.”