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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Diagnosed at 46, a panellist said self acceptance began with finding their people
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, panellists described carrying internalised ableism for years, and said finding community was central to putting it down.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
A panellist diagnosed at 46 told the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne that the diagnosis was the best thing that had ever happened to them, because of what came before it. “I spent my entire life thinking I was fundamentally, shamefully, secretly broken,” the panellist said, and could not tell anyone, because whenever they tried to describe their inner experience they were told they were attention seeking, or oversensitive, or that what they felt was not true.
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked the panel for its thoughts on ableism within. A person can go through life for 40 years without thinking of themselves as disabled, he said, and once they are living with a diagnosis their conditioning still triggers. The panellist diagnosed at 46 answered that their experience had been the opposite of the one Gold described, because they had always believed they were broken.
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Sources the story draws on
- Extending the Minority Stress Model to Understand Mental Health Problems Experienced by the Autistic Population (opens in a new tab), Society and Mental Health, vol. 10(1), pp. 20 to 34 (Monique Botha and David M. Frost); record on the University of Stirling research hub
- Social Identity, Self-Esteem, and Mental Health in Autism (opens in a new tab), European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 47(7), pp. 844 to 854 (Kate Cooper, Laura G. E. Smith and Ailsa Russell); University of Bath research portal record
- 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
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