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“Acceptance requires facing that which makes you uncomfortable about us, thinking about why it makes you uncomfortable, and confronting any prejudice at the root of that discomfort.” ~ Kassiane S., Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Autism Acceptance Month (otherwise known as Autism Awareness Month) is celebrated in April every year, and while the month heads towards becoming an actually autistic led movement (or moves away from being corporate led), much more needs to be done in terms of awareness.
Neuroaffirming (neurodiversity-affirming) care is when scientific research and health care values the strengths and differences of autistic people. It does this by promoting the idea of neurodiversity – like the way biodiversity is a natural variation in humans and is vital to our survival as a species.
There is a difference between acceptance and awareness. According to Autistic Self Advocacy Network – “Acceptance requires facing that which makes you uncomfortable about us, thinking about why it makes you uncomfortable, and confronting any prejudice at the root of that discomfort. To accept us is to make a conscious effort to overcome that prejudice, to recognize that your discomfort with our differences is far more your problem to overcome than ours.”
There still exists harmful myths and stigma against autistic people that awareness won’t help to stop. Awareness is knowing that the autistic demographic has struggles, while acceptance seeks to understand the struggles, the root causes, and the systemic issues at hand.
Autism acceptance is meant to lead to positive change, inclusivity, and simultaneously lead to better mental health of autistic and disabled people, but in recent years it’s become something else. What started as a movement for betterment has become a hollow, performative act for non-autistic people and companies to talk how much they care about autism, but as soon as the month ends, so does their act.
Autistic people are still the most unemployed of all the disabilities at a staggering 80% being unemployed or underemployed. Most autistic women will never get a diagnosis or be misdiagnosed, and autistic people are susceptible to abuse and trauma due to behaviour therapies training them to people please.
Neuroaffirming care challenges the traditional model of disability (the medical model), which aims to cure disability and reframes it as being a different but equally valuable divergence. Under neuroaffirming care, there is no normal or better, nor is there a bad or a good—only a different variation of how our brains work. Think about how many kinds of plants there are, and how each one requires a different amount of sunlight, water or soil in order to thrive in its environment. It goes the same way for autistic and all other disabled people. We all require a different variation of needs, services and accommodations.
If you buy a plant, put it in the corner of your office with no sunlight and you only water it twice a week, it’s not going to thrive. The environment it’s in does not work for the plant. This doesn’t mean the plant is defective, it means the environment needs changing. This is exactly how neuroaffirming care works. It’s about changing the environment instead of changing the person and administering behaviour therapy.
Autistic people are still the most unemployed of all the disabilities at a staggering 80% being unemployed or underemployed.
