What's Next for Autism Awareness?

There has been a lot of talk about moving from awareness to acceptance of autism, yet the presently accepted definition doesn’t truly reflect what it means to be autistic. One can’t be truly aware when one’s knowledge is incorrect. When the most prominent “charity” related to autism, Autism Speaks, has no autistic board members, and seeks to “cure” autism, essentially through eugenics, things aren’t looking very good for the future.

The world is not very hospitable to autistic people presently. To give some stark statistics, the average lifespan of someone on the autism spectrum is significantly shorter than the general population, with studies finding 36 on the low end 54 at the high end, with suicide being one of the most common causes of death, with rates 4 times higher than the general population (8 times higher when viewing only female statistics).

The way the medical system views and treats autism is frequently misguided, degrading, dehumanising, and abusive. Unless the clinician specialises in autism (and oftentimes even then), most in the industry don’t have any better understanding of autism than the average layperson. This lack of understanding leads many to judge autistic people that don’t emote in the way they expect as exaggerating, attention seeking, or uncredible. With autistic people having significantly higher incidences of many severe medical conditions, this leads to significantly lower quality of care and quality of life on average.

Not only is knowledge about autism atrocious in the medical system, myths and stereotypes run rampant in society and media. Autism is not a disease. Vaccines do not cause autism. Bad parenting does not cause autism. Autistic people have emotions. Autistic people can feel empathy. Not all autistic people are savants. Not all autistic people are intellectually disabled. Autism is not an epidemic. Autism is not overdiagnosed. Not all autistic people are introverts. There is no way to cure autism. One does not grow out of being autistic. Being nonverbal is not the same as being intellectually disabled.

So, what are the next steps? There is a lot of work to be done just to correct all of the problems listed above, and they account for only a fraction of the difficulties that face autistic people daily. Only then could we hope to say there is autism awareness. After that, we can work toward acceptance. Hopefully, one day we can reasonably aspire to seeing autism appreciation. Autistic minds have forged the modern world, after all.