@niamhgarvey @GTMLosAngeles @robrecht @Aerliss @Autistrain @neurodiversity It was great to be back in education & the first year was very positive. Then as I began to understand more (I enrolled only a month after receiving my dx) I began to see the harmful myths that did not correlate with my lived experience.
I had a wonderful cohort in the first year. I was the only male on the course & the other students were nearly all mothers of autistic kids & worked in education.
I gave press interviews on behalf of the course & university. I delivered training to university staff. I even delivered a session in my second year.
It was also about this time that I was doing a module on multi agency safeguarding of vulnerable adults & when reading the required texts I made the horrible discovery that I was being both exploited, disregarded & effectively ignored if anything I said disagreed with NT cannon.
That second year broke me & I never fully recovered the optimism, hope & enthusiasm I had for the field.
If you're considering going to study autism at university I should warn you, you'll be battling myths & stereotypes all the way. Unless you find an excellent course.
The final straw came when I experienced total autistic burnout & a worsening of my physical disability. The tutor suggested I press pause & come back to it. I was sent a form to do this. Filled it out & returned it.
They had sent me the form that would unequivocally remove me from the course. A year I'd spent five grand on.
They refused to award me a Post graduate certificate that I had already passed & paid for until I paid for some horrendous module that truly broke me.
During the middle of lockdown, completely isolated & now with no support from the university, organisations or anyone else I had to fight for the qualification I had undeniably earned. It was taken to an independent advocate & nearly all of my complaints were upheld. Though by this point I was completely broken by the experience. Meanwhile everyone (who wasn't autistic) continued to have fairly lucrative careers in the Autism Industrial Complex.
I was effectively dead to them. I'm still completely & totally isolated. I can't turn to anyone here because it's rife with nepotism & revolving door & merely the mention of certain people causes me to feel sad, angry, overwhelmed & trapped.
I'm not suggesting you would have the same experience & I sincerely hope you don't but that's a small fraction of the fallout from my M.Sc. Believe it or not there's worse parts.
So even though I have no academic support network, or colleagues, or income I still devote a significant amount of my time to studying, discussing & thinking about autism.
It was during this that I was introduced to the concept of "mate crime" I was then given repeated brutal examples of what it actually meant from people I trusted implicitly.
I have hope for my future career but I don't think it can happen where I currently live. In short my opinion is you already know more about autism than any "expert" save yourself the money & start your own business. Or write a book.
Autistrain
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Aerliss
Robbert van Eijndhoven
TheClothesHaveNoEmperor
Niamh Garvey
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Androcat