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Findings, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2023
A panellist took research to the doctor and flagged a gap on autistic ageing
In short
At the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, a panellist said autistic people have to educate the professionals around them, and that research on older autistic people is lacking.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
One panellist’s answer to a question about communication at the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium became an argument about evidence. Autistic people, the panellist said, have to educate the people around them all the time, including their doctors, and research on autistic ageing was badly lacking.
The question came from Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, and arose from a difficulty he had described a moment earlier. It was being in a meeting and not getting something straight away, then leaving and realising what he could have said, or that a person had been rude to him, or that they had been really nice and the deal would have been done if he had reciprocated. He asked how autistic people communicate to neurotypical people something that is so simple and yet so complex.
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Sources the story draws on
- Premature mortality in autism spectrum disorder (opens in a new tab), The British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 208, no. 3 (Tatja Hirvikoski, Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz, Marcus Boman, Henrik Larsson, Paul Lichtenstein and Sven Bölte)
- Autistic adults at substantial risk of injuries and age-related conditions (opens in a new tab), Karolinska Institutet (news release on a study in The Lancet Healthy Longevity)
- Who can access the NDIS? (opens in a new tab), Legal Services Commission of South Australia, Law Handbook
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