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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
A practitioner said autism assessment had more entry points but no gold standard
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, practitioners defined holistic care, said neuroaffirming practitioners were getting easier to find, and named what the system still lacked.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
A practitioner on the opening panel of the Melbourne day of the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium welcomed the growth in the number of people who could set someone on the road to an autism diagnosis. What was missing, the practitioner said, was an agreed route. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked whether it was easy in Australia to find a neuroaffirming practitioner. There were now more coaches, therapists and professionals providing touch points for diagnosis, the practitioner said, which was wonderful, but “what is lacking is a structure”.
The practitioner allowed that this preference might come from their own training, but held to the point. They wanted “a bit more structure around this is perhaps more of a gold standard”, they said, or an agreed way that practitioners should go about it.
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Sources the story draws on
- National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism: Introduction (opens in a new tab), Autism CRC
- About the Guideline (opens in a new tab), Autism CRC
- Choose your own adventure: Pathways to adulthood autism diagnosis in Australia (opens in a new tab), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 52(7), pp. 2984 to 2996 (Yunhe Huang, Samuel R. C. Arnold, Kitty-Rose Foley and Julian N. Trollor); Monash University research portal record
- Release of the National Autism Strategy 2025-31 (opens in a new tab), Department of Social Services (Australian Government)
- What you need to know about the government's first National Autism Strategy (opens in a new tab), Australian Psychological Society (Insights)
More from Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
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