Make our world autuism-friendly
THOSE of you who have read my columns for a while know that I tend to focus on practical autism rather than politics.
Recently, however, Tim and I attended an event held by Greater Manchester Autism Consortium and spearheaded by Mayor Andy Burnham.
Anyone with a stake in autism was invited to outline the positive changes they felt needed to happen in future. Councillor Burnham attended in order to listen to people’s real life experiences and is dedicated to making a difference. It’s to our credit that Greater Manchester is taking the initiative in this way.
My own view is that in the wake of a rise in autism awareness, it’s important not to make well-meaning mistakes. A potential pitfall is the autism-friendly hours that are starting to happen in supermarkets.
Don’t gasp in horror, they are a good thing, don’t get me wrong – and they are certainly better than nothing. But I have a vision for the future and it doesn’t involve putting autistic people in a 9am timeslot where they won’t mingle with the rest of society.
The term ‘neurodiversity’ is sprinkled around like confetti, but what does it mean in practise? It means that we accept a world where people around us operate in a fundamentally different way from ourselves.
That means we develop an understanding of autistic behaviour such as anxiety and overload in public places. It means we learn how to take the pressure off people who work at their best in a familiar environment. It means we learn about autistic strengths and how best to capitalize on them, not always seeing autism as something that needs to be tolerated, but also something to be celebrated.
So, how do we do that? It’s dead simple. We train people in autism. We train them in understanding their peers from primary school upwards. We don’t make things autism-friendly at the expense of others. We have autism-friendly supermarket hours in the middle of the day, where everyone is welcome and people get to mix with those on the spectrum.
If people see autism more, they become less scared of it. If we don’t do that, if we say we have special autism days and special autism hours where everything is perfect for autistics, we consign our loved ones to a ghetto. And from what we know about race relations, with segregation comes intolerance and the whole battle starts again.
Let’s make our world autism-friendly, but let’s make those words mean ‘integrated’ rather than ‘separate’.
AuKids does quite a bit of autism training to raise funds for the magazine, so we’re doing our bit in this respect.
And here endeth my soapbox column. Back to normal next time.