Autisticly Aar’s Diary: Mental Health Awareness Day 2023
In a mental health crisis, neurodivergent’s mental health matters as suicide remains the biggest killer of autistic people. It’s a scandal!
Today is world mental health day which is a universal construct we every human has a state of mental health we can connect to feelings of joy, sadness, loss, grief feeling anxious but not all with mental illness. mental illness affects a quarter of the population and is apart of the neurodivergent umbrella but for those with learning difficulties, disabilities and conditions like autism and ADHD mental illnesses anecdotally are more common. But sadly with autism data proves these anecdotes true as death by suicide is the highest cause of death and life expectancy is lower than the rest of the population because of death by suicide.
These are alarming and something deeply concerning autistic people often document feelings of loneliness. Most of the population has experienced loneliness and most shared example was during the coronavirus pandemic due to high rates of chronic illnesses within neurodivergent people going back to socialisation has been a lot harder than those who are neurodivergent. People don‘t always recognise how we maybe less lonely due to social burnout, sensory overload, social anxiety and trauma can be a part of this and most people find it hard to maintain friends.
Far too often I’ve heard people documented their mental health challenges as neurodivergent people and been tough read and listen. Something I’m privileged that people have been vulnerable on my podcast open and honest about their mental health. Those of stories I read I know I’m priveleged a sad privilege that I haven’t shared the worst of peoples experiences. I too have experienced anxiety and depression, autistic burnout.
I’ve experienced anxiety and panic attacks from A young age and struggled to maintain friendships and feel confident in socialising. I found after I went to university and had to drop out within weeks for mental heath reasons and taking medication daily for my mental health. I was diagnosed with anxiety disorder at the age of nine years old in a doctors appointment then referred to CAMHS UK’s publicly funded mental health service under the NHS. I’ve throughout engaging it the neurodivergent social media community learnt that most have had negative experiences throughout the service. I was grateful to have had a decent psychiatrist to give me useful selfcare advice of how to breath, self-regulate and manage anxiety and thankfully since then I feel like I’ve had less panic attacks since I was a child.
I saw that psychiatrist since I over ending when I was a fourteen or fifteen year old. During that time I lost my aunty who was a close family, meant a lot to me at eleven when she was thirty-one due to health issues. Having that counseling was so useful at the time and for me talking therapies have helped. Although it’s not the same. Still throughout the counseling I was yet to understand what my autism diagnoses meant now I know some of those panick attacks were sensory overloads and meltdowns because things were too loud, too busy, too bright, too much. The issue with mental health in autistic people is things sometimes get too much and the world isn’t designed to include us we often feel and that’s in essence at the core of the mental health crisis for neurodivergent people.
When I was school-aged I was in fear, had anxiety and never felt great about being neurodivergent bit shamed and felt I didn’t fit in or didn’t know to stand out. For young people to feel themselves and have the security to be themselves different neurotypes have to be talked about in school. In the 2010s we were at the start of when people began talking about mental health in an open way but we still aren’t there yet that people feel things are truly getting better. There still then and still now a lot of stigma around mental illness and mental health and looking after yourself which should’ve been the point for an alternative but it wasn’t. We need education of neurodivergency and neurodiversity and real education on mental health and mental illness and real investment and interest in compassion and empathy.
Autism isn’t a mental health illness nor is ADHD or dyspraxia but improving what causes trauma, anxiety and depression for neurodivergent people is in our interests. Today should be a reminder of how many lives need saving. It’s a real crisis. People can hate being autistic, dyspraxic, having ADHD, dyslexia but no one should make you feel that way. Mental health crisis needs to be the forefront of any policy on neurodivergency and neurodiversity it’s where its the salient issue and the thing that can save lives of neurodivergent people. I know that currently mental health services are under funded, under-staffed with months to years long waiting list, misdiagnoses, the wrong medications, wrong therapies. The interviewee I was recording today with Saranne on the thing she would want to improve for neurodivergent people is having the suicide rate to go down in autistic people. We don’t want to be fixed but we need mental health interventions and mental health services designed with neurodivergent people in mind.
