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Apr 4 2024
The Internet on Autism Awareness Month and acceptance

One of the big discussions around April is the way we use this month. Should it be “Autism Awareness Month” as recognised by wider society, or should we embrace it as “Autism Acceptance Month”? My personal opinion is that we should always be led by the community. However, to understand the narratives surrounding April I wanted to dive into the various discourses that exist online. To better understand the general feeling of the internet.

What Are Big Charities saying about Autism Awareness Month?

I will start by saying that I am intentionally ignoring Autism Speaks. Their harmful and performative nature is such that I do not wish to give them a platform. Despite this there are a number of other Charities and non-profits that have opinions on this topic. First we have a charity that has started using the “autism acceptance” language.

In 2024, we’re asking everyone to get as colourful as possible with their amazing fundraising. Join us and thousands of other brilliant people in schools, workplaces and local communities to raise vital funds and help create a society that works for autistic people. 

Celebrate World Autism Acceptance Week by doing your own 5k Spectrum Colour Walk in a place and at a time that suits you. If walking is not for you, you can find lots of ideas on our resources page to help you fundraise your own way!

National Autistic Society Website

I feel that this quote is a good starting place for understanding why awareness has been hijacked. NAS here are openly using April as a fundraising opportunity. While fundraising is an important part of no-profit activities, this is an organisation that has a mixed history and supports Positive Behavioural Support (PBS). Despite it’s appearance, PBS is the same as Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) and is a deeply concerning thing to see.

Similarly the Autism Society starts leads with requests for money. It would seem that for many of these bigger charities, April is more about the money than the people it claims to exist for.

Autistic Led Charities and Non-Profits

I would start with Autistic Inclusive Meets here in the UK (of whom I am a patron). This organisation amplifies the voices of Autistic people on it’s social media and it’s website is very focused on what they are doing for Autistic people. It is a very different vibe to the bigger charities.

Next we have Neuroclastic in the US, another Autistic led non-profit. Similarly to AIM, they do not plaster requests for donations all over their website, they just go about their business of publishing the voices of Autistic people, including this article written by myself in 2021 regarding my views on Autism Acceptance Month.

To round up my collection of non-profits that focus on the people more than the month, here is Aucademy. Aucademy do extensive work on educating people, and are once again Autistic led. This organisation again focuses on acceptance over autism awareness month.

Blogs and Publications about Autism Awareness Month/Autism Acceptance Month

Ultimately, the goal of Autism Acceptance Month is to be more inclusive of the community it seeks to celebrate. It promotes not just education about the differences of people with autism but understanding and respecting them.

Delano (2024) for Autism Parenting Magazine

This particular article talks about the shift from autism awareness to autism acceptance and it’s importance for dismantling stigma around this topic. I myself have discussed the impact of reframing autism awareness month discourse into one of autism acceptance and the work we still require. All articles mentioned in this section were at the top of the google search to try and avoid my own biases.

Further Blogs

The Neurodiversity Movement has made a lot of progress in changing the way we think about autism and other neurological differences such as dyslexia, depression, etc., but autistic people still face a lot of challenges due to discrimination and lack of accommodations

Inclusive Employers Website

This is important to talk about, and they do go further to discuss that Autistic people are notoriously under- or unemployed. Autism Acceptance Month is framed as a progression from autism awareness to one where we have more equal access.

In promoting acceptance and further research into autism spectrum disorder, the quality of life in those on this spectrum may hopefully improve. A 2018 study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders suggested that experiencing acceptance may benefit mental health, while lack of acceptance may correlate to depression and stress.¹¹ Acceptance from people around those with autism spectrum disorder also improved self-acceptance, which correlated with greater self-esteem and lower depression.

Fiorillo (2024) for Neurology Advisor

You will notice that a lot of these offerings, despite advocating for autism acceptance, still use very medicalised language. However it is interesting to see so many places reframing themselves away from the traditional language of Autism Awareness Month.

Conclusions

There is a growing push to shift away from Autism Awareness Month into Autism Acceptance Month. While I agree that awareness has it’s place, it is often a domain where people speak over us rather than listen to us. Whatever your preferred name for April, we can all agree that it’s necessary to do more work to demedicalise and destigmatise autism. Autistic people still do not have equal access to the world, and it’s time that changed.

An image for Autism Awareness Month showing a crossed out puzzle piece next to a gold symbol with a green tick On the left it reads "Autism Awareness Tells YOU we are here Often uses deficit models and pathology paradigm Sounds like we're hiding in your house" Next to it is "Autism Acceptance Tells US we are welcome Embraces the neurodiversity paradigm Makes our needs sound less like special treatment"
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David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
Apr 2 2024
It’s World Autism Day: CAMHS are still failing our children

On the 2nd of April every year, we have World Autism Day. This is supposed to be a day for us, when services, businesses, and individuals celebrate our existence. Despite this, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have consistently proven that their support of us if performative at best, and harmful at worst. So today, I ask you to stand tall and push back against the erasure of this aspect of Autistic experience.

What does World Autism Day look like in the world of CAMHS?

A brief search for the aforementioned key words indicates that CAMHS will acknowledge our existence, but clearly have not listened to us.

Oxford Health’s teams work with children and adults from assessing the condition through to helping people get the support they need.

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust (2021)

I am immediately struck by the suggestion of post-diagnostic support, which is something the Autistic community in the UK has been lamenting the lack of for years. Services are literally turning people away from diagnosis, let alone providing post-diagnostic support. In fact the state of diagnosis is so severe that I wrote an article on The Shocking state of autism diagnosis in the UK fairly recently. Had they listened to the Autistic community, perhaps they could have written about what they would do to fix their numerous problems.

An image from CAMHS of a person wearing a jumper with colourful puzzle pieces and the date of World Autism Day

They might also have considered actually asking Autistic people about this monstrosity of an image. Puzzle pieces are notoriously disliked and rejected by the autistic community. I did also find an offering from Devon Partnership NHS Trust (2022) which was literally just the diagnostic criteria. You can’t make this up.

Why should they be worried about Autistic young people and children?

CAMHS exist to support the mental health of children and young people. I have written about how Autistic children are more likely to have mental health concerns. They are 28x more likely to think about or attempt suicide (Royal College of Psychiatrists). Autistic children and young people also represent some 93% of Under-18’s currently being treated in inpatient psychiatric units (National Autistic Society, 2023).

It is clear that while they pay lip service to World Autism Day, CAMHS are consistently and systematically failing Autistic children to the point of significant harm or even loss of life. We don’t need them to publish feel good articles on April 2nd. We need them to look at the state of their services and commit to making them something that actually supports us rather than hurting us.

Where does CAMHS fit into the world of performative nonsense?

CAMHS, like many systems and services, leverages months like April and World Autism Day in order to appear caring and knowledgeable. This performance of sympathy feeds directly into tragedy narratives surrounding autism while also empowering those who erase our experiences. web pages like the ones mentioned above act as a false proof that CAMHS really do care about us. The problem is that they don’t. Many of them will happily ignore our pleas for change, or invalidate and erase those pleas so as to boost their own ego’s.

World Autism Day as a day of protest

My closing thoughts on this matter are that World Autism Day should not be a day for feel good stories. This should be a day when services like CAMHS are held to account. It’s a day of protest. Imagine the power we would wield if we collectively outed CAMHS in this 24 hours period, or even the month of April, and laid bare their failings. Consider what could change if we spent a month saying “how are you going to do better?”

As a collective, we far outnumber those who seek to erase us, and it would be impossible to ignore every one of us. So today, I ask every person failed by CAMHS to join our fight, and make World Autism Day the day when we say that enough is enough. Our children deserve better.

The following buttons link out to ways of staying in contact with this campaign

Buy CAMHS in Crisis Book
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Visit the CAMHS Crisis Webpage
David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
Apr 2 2023
World Autism Day 2023: A reflection on the work still to do

The date is April 2nd, 2023. This means another World Autism Day (part of the wider Autism Acceptance Month) has arrived, and as the month progresses, we will, as a community, share in the triumphs and comfort one another in our losses.

This month can be a bitter tasting pill for many, with World Autism Day representing a day that should be ours. Sadly, it is often claimed by those whose agenda does not align with the very Autistic people that they claim to support. Today, and all of April, for that matter, serves to remind me of the Autistic people who have left us. The ones for whom this world was simply too cruel to withstand. I often see positivity that change is slowly happening; the change isn’t fast enough, there are no acceptable losses on the road to liberation. Every Autistic person we lose is a scar on our history, and an indictment of the world we live in.

Yes, perhaps the days of asylums is coming to an end, but what of the countless Autistic people here in the UK who are locked away and abused in psychiatric institutions? Can we truly say that the asylums are gone when one can be placed into carcerative care, simply for being Autistic and in distress?

What of the CAMHS crisis that has been ongoing in perpetuity? Can we really say that Autistic people are liberated while our children are being denied their identities and/or turned away from help for being Autistic? Every single day, Autistic people are fighting to exist. While the nature of our fight might be becoming less overtly life-threatening, we still have to recognise that our dramatically reduced life expectancy lists filicide and suicide as to of the biggest factors.

Yes, the world is changing, but it’s not changing fast enough.

Speak of normativity and structural oppression to the average person, and you will be met with blank stares or even gaslighting. To create a truly inclusive world we have to start from the bottom up. We have to consider the foundations that our world’s power structures are built upon. You don’t destabilise oppressive regimes from the top, you foment revolution amongst the people it rests upon.

If I can ask one thing of Autistic people this World Autism Day, through out Autism Acceptance Month, and moving into the future; be resolute in your commitment to shifting the views of the masses.

While change at government and legislative level is vital, it ultimately will fail if we do not change the hearts and minds of our similarly downtrodden friends, family, colleagues, and loved ones. We have to recognise that we are all sharing in oppression and that we have the collective force to cut free from the chains of normativity. We can, together, create a neurocosmopolitan society. We can lay a new foundation for those that come after us to build upon.

I am Autistic, I am proud, and I refuse to accept the way that things are.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
Apr 2 2022
Shifting the paradigm on world autism day

April 2nd.

It’s a day that so many of us dread. For as long as “world autism day” has existed, it is a day where (much like every other day) adherents of the pathology paradigm do their best to drown out the voices of those that proudly display their Autistic selves.

Why are we so loud about our experiences as Autistic people? It’s not because we’re trying to take away access to support services for Autistic children, as a certain type of parent will have you believe. It’s because we want to make sure that Autistic people receive support that is not only accessible, but of good quality.

But is this far enough?

Truthfully, no.

Yes, in the current world, we need access to that support. We live in a world that disables us with it’s oppressive nature. The higher your support needs, the more our world seeks to dehumanise you. Should we not be aiming higher than supporting people in a world that treats us like a phenomenon to be studied and experimented on?

Imagine, for a moment, a world where everyone is treated equally. Imagine a world where no one has privilege over another, and no group is marginalised. Imagine a world where being Autistic is no longer a medical issue that requires diagnosis.

This is the world we should be aiming for.

Sadly, societal neuronormativity makes such a world feel impossible. Even the most neurologically queer of us have been raised and indoctrinated into a type of groupthink that makes the act of queering oneself away from said normativity feel like an extreme sport

For some of us, being true to ourselves means putting our life at risk.

In order to move beyond our current society , we must do more than queer the self. We must dismantle the system in which we live and rebuild it. For the new system to work, terms like “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” must become irrelevant. We need a societal divergence towards a new normal, one in which normal no longer exists.

For this to work, we need to move away from discussion around “disorders” and “conditions” and towards a world in which identity and culture take centre stage. A world where no one needs supporting because society works for everyone, rather than a select few.

This world autism day, we must step forward with a renewed fervour for not just the destruction of ableism, but the belief that a better world is possible. Let April 2nd 2022 be the day that we choose the neurodiversity paradigm.

Perhaps, this time next year, we can wake up to a society that’s just a little bit more accepting than the one we’re in today.

One day, trauma won’t be the collective experience of our autistic culture.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
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