Managing Anxiety in Autism: Going Full Improv with Dr. Nathan Keates

A chance meeting on 'X' has DDA chatting with Dr. Nathan Keates, in London, England about his Ph.D. thesis that postulates improv theatre has a benefit for autistic people when it comes to managing anxiety and more. 

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Managing Anxiety in Autism: Going Full Improv with Dr. Nathan Keates

 

00:06

Welcome again to DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. I'm your host, DDA Communications Manager, Evan Kelly. In today's episode, we are talking about autistic people. And through the power of social media, I managed to contact Nathan Keates. They're a lecturer and early careers researcher in the field of critical autism studies and the University of Sunderland in London about their PhD thesis. Now this is kind of cool. It's the power of social media again. Through a tweet, I'm not sure if we can still.

 

00:36

call it that, through an X, I'm not sure now. So he had posted a picture of themselves proudly holding the copy of their PhD thesis. Now, the thesis completed at the University of Kent's called Going Full Autistic in Improv, Reduction in Anxiety and Other Benefits. And that's exactly what it says. Improv as an improv comedy and how that might positively affect anxiety and other autistic valued benefits.

 

01:05

not only is Nathan a scholar, but they also previously worked in theatre. So Nathan, thank you again for taking the time to join me today from across the pond. That's alright, you're very much welcome. I enjoy talking about this. Now that's great. So just right off the top here, tell me a little bit about yourself. Well, as you said, I'm a lecturer at the University of Sunderland in London.

 

01:32

That's in health and social care. As you've said, my research and such is in critical autism studies and I have previously taught that at the University of Kent where I was doing my PhD. Previous to that, I've got a background in theatre so I have taught improv for quite some time, probably going on 17 years. So the PhD was basically trying to stitch my life together.

 

02:00

in an interesting way. So in 2007 I went to the United States of America and I talked some improv in a summer camp there and that was a wonderful experience, so wonderful that I thought I had to do more with it. And it took me a decade or so to look back to academia to start stitching things together but between that period I was practically doing stuff.

 

02:30

So that's a little about me. If that can be classified as little, I don't know. Theater, is that your first love before you got into the higher learning about autistic people and stuff? Yes, for sure. My aspiration as a child was to get into acting, and I did that until

 

02:58

Well, in part, I'm still doing it, but it's no longer my profession. Just because the way life turns, I found academia and I actually really enjoy research and I really enjoy teaching. And these are what I can do in a higher education institution. And so you got a PhD now, so we can call you a Doctor of Philosophy, which is quite cool.

 

03:27

Yes. You would have started, you got your first degree, then probably a master's and then a PhD. How long has this taken you to get this far? Very long because I didn't have that inclination to be in academia. I started in university in 2005, and then I

 

03:56

Then I found out I like teaching, so I then went back to university and I did a PGCE, so that's qualification for teaching, and then a few years later than that I then started thinking about how I could piece elements of my life together and I went back to university for masters. Then the idea of the masters was to go to the PhD. I did take a year break between the

 

04:25

but that was just to make sure the PhD was set up and I could actually get what I wanted. Cause trying to get all the paperwork done as well as finish the master's is a little difficult. Yeah, you know, my mom always said that a PhD means piled higher and deeper. So how long did that aspect take you? Oh, four years, four years of doing the PhD. I believe that is accurate. It's probably nearing five years in reality. Yeah, nearing five years, but.

 

04:55

I'll say four years because it sounds nicer, cleaner. That's impressive. What is your interest in autistic or neurodivergent people then? As I said, I probably didn't know anything about autistic or neurodivergent people before going to that summer camp. At the point where that happened, I started reading around with it.

 

05:24

I'd better find out about this. Just so happened that after that returning back to, because that was during my undergrad times, going to that summer camp, I went back to university and realized or found out that a lot of my friends were actually autistic and neurodivergent. And even retrospectively now looking back at who I was hanging around with and enjoyed spending time

 

05:54

probably also neurodivergent as well. Not that they didn't disclose anything, but just understanding from where I am now is very likely. So that's how that began. And then just getting along really well with autistic and neurodivergent people means that personal interest is sustained throughout the years and then academically.

 

06:21

It's just a great topic to ensure there's some development, positive development, in a way that's going to actually be helpful for autistic and neurodividend people. So my professional interest there is just because I do have that aspiration to try and improve people's lives, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's precisely what we do here at the

 

06:50

Many clients who do certainly identify as autistic here, but we you know We sort of run the gamut from developmental disabilities from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder down syndrome The whole thing but your your your thesis is focused on the autistic community, correct? Yes. Yes it is. Yes and Why did you choose yeah, we talked about it in like again the title is going full autistic and improv. Why did you choose?

 

07:20

in improvisation as a basis for your study? Um, yeah, as I say, it was about pinning things together. So having taught improv and having taught it to autistic, that summer school was, summer camp was kids, predominantly anyway. So having, having that experience and trying to pin things together, I went into my masters, didn't know what I could do. So actually my master's research was

 

07:49

autistic comedians and looking at comedy and then I moved from that onwards to improv. So it really was just pinning things together and you have to be interested in your PhD in order to complete it. So coming from that interest, by all means in academia we talk about conflict of interest, you could suggest there is because I have taught it but...

 

08:18

there was a cutoff where I really have no interest in financially gaining from autistic people engaging in improv. Yeah, but nonetheless, that has its own debate, but we don't need to talk about that on your podcast. And so you mentioned that your study group, I guess, wasn't that big. And so did you take me through that process of sort of studying people?

 

08:47

with autism within the improv environment? So yes, the second part of my thesis looked at autistic people engaging in improv and such, and the whole process was quite a big process. I had to start with understanding what was already out there, what literature existed, then I wanted to understand, well, there's not even a lot

 

09:17

whether the past literature around that actually fits to the global community of improvisers. And then from there I started looking at autistic improvisers' experiences, non-autistic improvisers' experiences, and then eventually get into that point where I could set up classes for autistic people and then explore what that could be. So I had 17 people in that class.

 

09:46

second part of the thesis where I looked at that study in various ways. So I was looking at how to implement the classes in an appropriate manner, so conducting some research where I look at if the classes were suitable, if not adapting it, and that was cyclical when it was constantly going through these phases with different groups. The groups themselves are quite small because Covid

 

10:16

because it was necessary for people's comfort as well. We were online, so there's various reasons why each group was small, but I had multiple groups, so that was happening. I also looked at the benefits in general, and then I also measured and asked about anxiety. So those are the three sections of that last study, which is quite hefty, as you might be able to tell. I hope you can tell.

 

10:43

It's like when you're measuring anxiety, I mean, that seems to be a big part of your thesis. Do autistic people do better with anxiety in improv? How did you measure that anxiety? I was interested in just understanding generally about anxiety. I used a measure around state trait anxiety, so the general state someone has in the moment. Is that reducing?

 

11:12

maybe even if someone's traits, their general anxiety levels, would that decrease? The answer is no, that's the one thing that didn't happen, but I also looked at social anxiety and there's a measure called Leibowitz social anxiety scale, I used that looking at social anxiety and that did seem to reduce for within that study. So we can suggest that for some autistic people social anxiety will decrease.

 

11:41

But I did find this social avoidance won't decrease, and there's lots of reasons we can explain that one, but just hypothesizing around why that could be. And I also looked at uncertainty, and we don't want to talk about uncertainty in a way that is a misnomer. Everyone experiences uncertainty. What we want to look at is if certain things can reduce uncertainty for everyone.

 

12:10

and improv seemingly can do for the general population because it has been done by a wonderful academic over I think in the States USA called Dr Peter Pelsman. He works, he does a lot of work on improv and on anxiety and uncertainty. So he's done that and I used this concept of uncertainty to see if that would reduce and it did seem to as well. So these were the things I was interested in but I also wanted to understand exactly

 

12:39

what was working, why it wasn't working, you know, just generally understanding qualitatively about it as well, because we can measure these things, but sometimes measures aren't really gonna capture what we need to, because we start making lots of assumptions when we start measuring. So I asked the qualitative stuff as well. And with that, we have to acknowledge the fact that the social world is not constructed for autistic people nor neurodivergent people. That is obviously-

 

13:07

obviously going to create issues, so we have to understand that anxiety could rise when they're not in improv and when they are in improv maybe it goes down, but the first class is always going to be anxiety-provoking, so that's going to shoot sky high, and if things don't quite go quite right in the class, anxiety is going to spike as well. But in general, anxiety seemed to be quite low qualitatively during the classes, and I only really looked at pre-post for the measurements.

 

13:37

So that was true as well. And there's always gonna be other aspects that create or decrease anxiety, including those outside aspects. Even just, everyone might experience, if you're in college in the States, then that could mean, oh, you're worrying about your workload, or maybe if you've got stuff in the job and you're worried about...

 

14:05

something in your job that was going to increase anxiety anyway. So, you know, we can't, we can't just reduce down, reduces down to a yes, no. Well, yeah, exactly. It seems like, you know, for lack of a better term, bit of a spectrum that you're trying to try to cover there. So, but how many, you know, when we're talking about classes, improv classes, how many would you have done with these 17 participants in order to generate,

 

14:34

some of the answers you're looking for. So this is actually quite a let's say cool thing with this. It was COVID times, it was online, so there's limited, there's limitations about what I could do. I only ran four online classes and I and during COVID time I still seem to manage to find a reduction in social anxiety and uncertainty. I think that's pretty impressive considering it's not a lot of time. But so I was quite quite

 

15:03

I wouldn't say surprise, but I was quite happy to find such a result. I don't want to say I was going to say clear as though it's not clear necessarily, but you know, it's it's there, it's significant. And with all that qualitative data, it was it was quite there was some some clarity to I suppose. I don't want to oversell some. Now, did you obviously this was just focused on

 

15:32

autistic people? Did you look at any other sort of neurodiverse people with different disabilities, or just autism? So in another study that I did in the thesis, I looked at autistic improvisers, I looked at neurodivergent improvisers that weren't autistic, and I looked at neurotypical improvisers. So in this one, I did look at neurodivergent improvisers and neurodivergent people.

 

16:01

But I didn't measure anything. Those were interviews I conducted. And they had experience of improv. So it's just understanding their experience of participating in improv in whatever capacity they did. You talked about reducing anxiety, but what other benefits did you notice for autistic people involved in improv? So other benefits included there's a way of looking at quality of life. So qualitatively

 

16:31

looking at quality of life, we found that there could be aspects of emotional well-being that occur, there could be aspects of social relations that occur, and such things like this. For all improvisers, going back to my first survey that I conducted, we can tell that there are some social developments and communication developments, but we don't want to apply this to autistic people, because then we're going to lead down a track of

 

16:59

let's do social skills training which is really really inappropriate. Never do that. Let's go and force autistic people to mask. That's not appropriate, it's not good. We want to enable autistic people to have their own autistic sociality which does occur, it does exist. There's various research that says that. And in improv it's a social art so I preface what I'm

 

17:29

Improv can provide a space where you can develop socially and develop your communication and that occurs for no matter what neuro type you have. So that's another benefit that you can have. Improv can be like a well it does have a community so you could find a community of people that you want to engage with as well so that's something else that.

 

17:56

that can exist and that was threaded through the whole of my thesis because it happened with the first survey and even at the end I was talking about autistic space and how the autistic learners in that class enjoy being with one another so that was already creating a form of community there and some of which did go on after the class to continue doing stuff together.

 

18:26

Now, within those classes, I mean, I get that you were sort of focused on the autistic people. Were there neurotypical people involved in the class at the same time? No, simply no, no, that would also damage the autistic space. It was literally stated in a focus group in those classes that if there was one autistic person there, that would ruin it all. Like if we were actually in person in a community hall and the other half of the

 

18:56

their attention, the autistic participants attention would not be on their class, on the improv, but the other people in the room. And also, even if it's with the online class, if there was a neurotypical person there, they would be concerned or worried about whether they would be paired with them in a game. I was putting people in breakout rooms during this process, so they'd be worried that they would be paired with the neurotypical entering a breakout room. So

 

19:26

So it is important to understand that it can be easier for autistic people and neurodivergent people probably to be paired with other autistic or neurodivergent people. Many of the participants did state that it didn't mean need to be an autistic person necessarily because neurodivergent people can be quite welcoming and such and quite accommodating anyway, so neurodivergent identity is quite adequate according to what I was told.

 

19:56

Now, the group you're, I guess they would be qualified as a high functioning autistic? We don't use that. Just because that creates distinctions between people that are really inappropriate and just inaccurate, essentially, it creates stigmatization of people. You're high functional, you're low functioning.

 

20:25

it doesn't work at all. I got a research around this as well. I conducted a survey fairly recently around the viewpoints of autistic people around language, and it was a very small amount of people that were okay with function labels. Most people were, most autistic people were not, and even within those people that did find it acceptable to use function labels, there was a little bit of difficulty understanding exactly how it was because

 

20:54

Some of the points within it suggested that, well, I don't use it for myself, but I'd use it for other people. Well, it doesn't quite match fully. I can't talk a lot about this just because it's not published, but that's a quick overview around that. Yeah, I agree. The whole language about that seems to be evolving a little bit. I've been involved with Developmental Disabilities Association for about three and a half, four years, and it's been very eye-opening for me.

 

21:24

You know, you sent back some edits to me before we engage in this conversation. You want autistic people, whereas by and large, the association here tries to put people first, like person with Down syndrome, person with autism, where it's the autistic community, as you've sort of shown me, it's the other way around. Yes, yes it is. And so, yes, thank you for that.

 

21:53

bit of education. Now, what sort of limitations did you find in your research, or perhaps were there some instances where improv sort of didn't do what you hoped it would? Yeah, there are difficulties with coming out with solid concrete conclusions, which I've tried to be careful with during this as well, because I can only say improv may work.

 

22:22

for some autistic people. And that's because inside the class, I also have people that just didn't get on with it. I had someone that really wanted to enjoy it, but just struggled too much to engage with improv and its natural needs, requirements. And someone else just didn't like acting out basically. So there's no value to them to engage in improv when the whole...

 

22:50

concept of it is to act out sketches and act out stories. So in fact they went back to something where they could improvise in a way that was better for them and they through the process of engaging in the research, my research, they actually returned to something they previously done where they could engage with improv but in a more suitable way for them. So there's some limitations there. Improv is not a panacea which is a quote from another

 

23:21

Now, in terms of the improv itself, were you sort of leading towards, when you talk about sketches, are you leading towards serious drama type things or more comedy? Was there an element that was a better vehicle, if you will? The late, great Keith Johnstone would say that comedy will become...

 

23:46

more easily and first if you want to be dramatic and serious that takes a lot of effort you need to develop as an actor to get there. So having that fun, having and sharing that fun is naturally going to create comedy more than create something serious. There are going to be people that enjoy more serious presentations of the scenes they want to do and that's okay. It just means that people

 

24:15

need to be on board with exactly what they're co-creating. But in general, you're going to lead towards the funny, certainly to begin with. Now, in terms of your classes online would have been perhaps a little bit more difficult in some ways in terms of movement. Was it more about the speech and what was coming out in terms of

 

24:42

ideas or movement was involved in some way? This was a concern I had before I started the study. I wasn't so keen on putting it online because of this thing you're talking about. You need the space, you need that physical interaction, and it becomes very much more difficult. During that time, I was also providing classes. In the end, I ended up providing classes online

 

25:12

and what I did was I delivered film acting for improvisers in a way because then you you are that's what you're doing then we have this aspect of it as well so you've got a frame around you you can improvise within that frame you can still move you can still do physical things and for the classes that's all that was required delivering some more something more means that

 

25:40

we get lots of other film aspects and cinematography and such that can happen. But that's not why I was delivering in the research. Now you spent a lot of time or sometime at least in the US. Can you tell me about your experiences there? Yes. So I assume you're referring to the summer camp again. But I have been around the US in other occasions as well. So part of

 

26:08

of my enjoyment of improv is that I did go over and train and I went to Hollywood which is very nice. Yeah it was nice to train over there so that experience was really useful, it really shaped how we can look at improv more broadly and I think when doing that you could then see how broadly you can teach or apply improv in live.

 

26:38

for autistic people maybe that also helps to be able to understand the form. In my VIVA, it was questioned whether the fact that because of COVID I was delivering the teaching, which was not the original plan. They questioned me on this matter, like did that impact the research? And actually it did because I have a lot of experience with autistic people and have a lot of experience with improv, these things.

 

27:07

coincided in a way that's actually really conducive to the outcome that was being sought. I originally wanted to bring in a really experienced improv teacher and I wanted an autistic teaching assistant which I ended up having in my study anyway, but originally the plan was to have them both there at the beginning. So that change matters and I think my experiences in the US really helped.

 

27:35

in the way that I could think about the pedagogy being delivered and how that could be framed. And it was, there's a vast amount of time between my first experience in the United States and now and obviously that bit in between. And from going from that initial experience of delivering improv for predominantly autistic kids, that that

 

28:05

Progress was quite an interesting one because obviously, it was only really beginning back then, an improv, let alone anything else. So that's the insight I think I can deliver for that question. That's my experiences there. How as a society can we do better for the autistic community? In many, many ways. In many ways. We have to, I believe, we have to stop

 

28:35

creating additional labels that aren't helpful. If we want to meet needs, we have to meet individual needs. We have to listen to autistic people and neurodivergent people, hear their voices and actually do what's required, do what's been said. So that means removing any of the norms that are supposed to exist because why should they exist? There are reasons academically.

 

29:05

but it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So if it's not working, then we need to change fundamentally. So we listen to autistic people, reduce the norms that exist, enable autistic people to engage with. Such things as improv without it being for a reason other than out of interest. That's another thing. Like neurotypical people can go and do improv. It doesn't have to improve their.

 

29:31

communication. They can just go and do it for fun and then eventually they will, as per my interview study, find out actually there's lots of value here and that's different to that. So that's probably my quick to sense, I should say sense, shouldn't I, on that one. Now what does the future hold for you? Are you going to move on in your career as a lecturer or are there other areas of autistic study you'd like to embark on?

 

29:59

Yeah, so at the moment I'm looking at higher education and inclusive pedagogy. I'm interested in mental health and well being obviously, so I'm going to keep with that topic as well. And there's endless endless supply of things I could do. I'm beginning. I'm an early careers research now and early academic, so there's so much I can do and so much that I would like to do isn't.

 

30:28

just about being realistic to these goals. What should I do? But predominantly I'm gonna stick with working with autistic people and that's gonna be the starting point. Well, that sounds really great. I think we've run out a little bit out of time. So you have been listening to DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. Our guest today has been Nathan Keates all the way from London, England.

 

30:57

Nathan is a lecturer at the University of Sunderland in London and an expert on how theater and improv can be beneficial for some autistic people. Nathan, thanks again for speaking with me today. Thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.