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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Seek the community before the diagnosis, one panellist told the newly diagnosed
In short
Asked for advice to someone just diagnosed, a Melbourne panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium agreed on community. One panellist questioned what a diagnosis is for.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
At the end of the Melbourne panel on autism and disability at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, asked the panel what advice they would give to someone who had just been diagnosed, or to themselves at the moment of their own diagnosis. Three answers came back to community, and the fourth accepted that and moved it to an earlier point in the process.
The first panellist to answer said to embrace community, calling it your rock, and to see the new identity as a birth and not a death, an image that had already been offered earlier in the session. The community could be a warm hug if you like hugs, the panellist said, or something that feels nothing like a hug, whatever a person needs it to be.
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Sources the story draws on
- 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
- 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
- Release of the National Autism Strategy 2025-31 (opens in a new tab), Department of Social Services (Australian Government)
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