Discrimination against Autistic people is comparable to the level of discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people 50 years ago. In this environment, obtaining a diagnosis can be an invitation for potential abuse and exploitation.
Thriving Autistic / ND communities, that act as local centres of Autistic / ND culture, can only come into existence if we can imagine new kinds of collaborations between Autistic / ND whānau and the rest of society, and if we allow designs to emerge organically from the collective intelligence that exists amongst intersectionally marginalised people at ground level.
The need to be resilient is something that Autistic people unlearn over time. We need to learn to be gentle with ourselves. With the concept of Autistic whānau we are exploring new terrain and new possibilities. It’s something that we can incrementally weave into the Autistic collaborations that are already established.
Thanks to wonderful Autistic conversations I think I am beginning to understand why I feel so much at home in the ocean. To date I had not connected it to healing from Autistic trauma, but now I see the connection with increasing clarity.
In 2022 the Autistic Collaboration community is in the process of co-creating and operationalising peer support services for Autistic Trauma based on the lived experiences of Autistic people all over the world. We invite our Autistic peers (you) to contribute lived experience.
This event is part of the Global Disability Summit and also part of the global Ban of Conversion Therapies project, towards comprehensive bans of all forms of conversion therapies (Applied Behaviour Analysis, or ABA, Positive Behaviour Support, or PBS, and various other rebrandings).
The cultural bias that is baked into the pathologising framing of the diagnostic process compounds the trauma and perpetuates internalised ableism. We urgently need to educate healthcare professionals and the wider public about the neurodiversity paradigm, the neurodiversity movement, and Autistic culture.
You are invited to listen to our series of international panel discussions towards comprehensive bans of all forms of conversion therapies. We are building on the results achieved to date, focusing on the human rights violations in countries that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
If I would have had access to some magical time machine for procuring books when I was a teenager, it would have spared me many surprises, and I might have been able to avoid a few detours on my journey through life to date.
Following the trail of where Hans Asperger picked up the term autism I ended up reading a fascinating 1919 German book by Eugen Bleuler titled ‘Autistic and undisciplined thinking in medicine, and how to overcome it’. The content is not at all what you would think. The sands of pathologisation have shifted significantly.
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