On the 2nd of April every year, we have World Autism Day. This is supposed to be a day for us, when services, businesses, and individuals celebrate our existence. Despite this, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have consistently proven that their support of us if performative at best, and harmful at worst. So today, I ask you to stand tall and push back against the erasure of this aspect of Autistic experience.
What does World Autism Day look like in the world of CAMHS?
A brief search for the aforementioned key words indicates that CAMHS will acknowledge our existence, but clearly have not listened to us.
Oxford Health’s teams work with children and adults from assessing the condition through to helping people get the support they need.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust (2021)
I am immediately struck by the suggestion of post-diagnostic support, which is something the Autistic community in the UK has been lamenting the lack of for years. Services are literally turning people away from diagnosis, let alone providing post-diagnostic support. In fact the state of diagnosis is so severe that I wrote an article on The Shocking state of autism diagnosis in the UK fairly recently. Had they listened to the Autistic community, perhaps they could have written about what they would do to fix their numerous problems.
They might also have considered actually asking Autistic people about this monstrosity of an image. Puzzle pieces are notoriously disliked and rejected by the autistic community. I did also find an offering from Devon Partnership NHS Trust (2022) which was literally just the diagnostic criteria. You can’t make this up.
Why should they be worried about Autistic young people and children?
CAMHS exist to support the mental health of children and young people. I have written about how Autistic children are more likely to have mental health concerns. They are 28x more likely to think about or attempt suicide (Royal College of Psychiatrists). Autistic children and young people also represent some 93% of Under-18’s currently being treated in inpatient psychiatric units (National Autistic Society, 2023).
It is clear that while they pay lip service to World Autism Day, CAMHS are consistently and systematically failing Autistic children to the point of significant harm or even loss of life. We don’t need them to publish feel good articles on April 2nd. We need them to look at the state of their services and commit to making them something that actually supports us rather than hurting us.
Where does CAMHS fit into the world of performative nonsense?
CAMHS, like many systems and services, leverages months like April and World Autism Day in order to appear caring and knowledgeable. This performance of sympathy feeds directly into tragedy narratives surrounding autism while also empowering those who erase our experiences. web pages like the ones mentioned above act as a false proof that CAMHS really do care about us. The problem is that they don’t. Many of them will happily ignore our pleas for change, or invalidate and erase those pleas so as to boost their own ego’s.
World Autism Day as a day of protest
My closing thoughts on this matter are that World Autism Day should not be a day for feel good stories. This should be a day when services like CAMHS are held to account. It’s a day of protest. Imagine the power we would wield if we collectively outed CAMHS in this 24 hours period, or even the month of April, and laid bare their failings. Consider what could change if we spent a month saying “how are you going to do better?”
As a collective, we far outnumber those who seek to erase us, and it would be impossible to ignore every one of us. So today, I ask every person failed by CAMHS to join our fight, and make World Autism Day the day when we say that enough is enough. Our children deserve better.
