New College information resource on autism and mental health
20 November, 2024
This blog post was written by the College's Autism Champion, Dr Conor Davidson.
Last week the College released a new patient information resource on autism and mental health.
The resource has taken over a year to produce, and I’ve been very impressed by the thoroughness and professionalism of the College information team.
Special thanks to Holly Davis-Bollard, the Mental Health Information Manager, who supported me throughout the development of this resource.
We kicked off this important project by meeting with the College’s Autism Working Group to help us to set out the requirements and limitations of the resource.
The information team then drew together a working group of autism clinical experts and autistic people with lived experience of NHS mental health services. We held three planning meetings to establish the key content of the resource, and then went through several cycles of drafting and redrafting, including incorporating feedback from the Autism Working Group.
I am incredibly appreciative of the resource working group members Dr Alison Lennox, Matthew Riley, Dr Miriam Isaac, Dr Sana Fatima and Verity Westgate for the work they put into this important resource.
The resource is primarily aimed at service users and carers, and covers a range of topics, including:
- What autism is
- Autistic strengths
- What the assessment and diagnostic process involves.
- Support available post-diagnosis.
The unique selling point of the College information resources is to provide evidence-based and up-to-date information on mental health conditions.
Autism itself is not a mental illness, but is associated with mental health problems of all kinds. The second half of the resource specifically covers autism and mental health, including:
- How mental health conditions can present differently, be missed, or even be misdiagnosed in autistic people
- Autistic burnout and its links with mental health
- The potential impact of psychiatric hospital admission.
- Information for friends, family and carers.
We also have a section for mental health professionals, in which we make it clear that the presence of autism should never be used as an excuse to deny people access to mental health services if they are clinically needed.
One of the biggest challenges for this resource was getting the tone right. In the world of autism and neurodiversity there has been a shift towards more ‘neuroaffirmative’ language in recent years.
For the most part we have adopted this style in the new resource. Examples of this include referring to autism as a ‘condition’ rather than a ‘disorder’, autism ‘features’ rather than ‘symptoms’, and ‘support’ rather than ‘treatment’.
We learnt a great deal from those with lived experience, and this input helped the resource to grow and develop into something much stronger than what we started with.
Some feedback suggested that our language could be more positive, for example ‘congratulating’ people on receiving an autism diagnosis.
We were mindful, though, that many autistic people and their families face significant difficulties and challenges in daily life, and such overtly positive language can feel invalidating for some.
I hope that we have struck an appropriate balance, but as we say in the resource: the words used to describe autism have changed a lot over time, and will probably continue to change as time goes on.
I know many members use our mental health resources on the College website and share links with their patients.
This new resource will be available for healthcare services, other organisations and individuals to buy as a physical leaflet.
You can visit the College’s website to find out how you can pre-order the autism and mental health leaflet.