Mr. Naomh?n Mhaonaigh:

There needs to be education for teachers because some of the treatment that other people in my class got because they were loud or could not sit still was horrific. I watched that and knew that was how I would be treated if I behaved how I was.

I engaged with mental health services between the ages of 13 and 20. I am 21 now. Nobody knew what to do with me so I was bounced around. I attended Jigsaw but it is only for minor issues so the people in Jigsaw tried to get me into CAMHS. I finally got into CAMHS when I was 18 but was told CAMHS no longer gave autism diagnoses. I was discharged because of Covid-19 and there was no follow-up. I eventually got into an adult mental health service and after 15 minutes, was told to leave and go to disability services. There is nowhere for me to go. My parents have paid for me to do private therapy but the therapists do not know what to say to me. The chances of finding a therapist who is informed on autism and transgender issues, because I am transgender and would like to discuss that occasionally, are basically zero. My mum has been my carer and therapist for most of my life. I applied for disability allowance and it was one of the most stressful things I have ever done in my entire life. It took me nearly six months to fill out the form and my application was denied. I know I should have pursued it and gone further but I did not know what to do after that. So much of all the public services we have are completely inaccessible because it takes so long to fill out the forms. Nobody answers the phone. Nobody wants to talk to you.

The ability is there to train people to not have these prejudices, especially in education, mental health and physical health. We can train people early enough and intervene so that their first and only experience is not that autism is a terrible thing. There is so much shame around it that people do not want to engage and parents do not talk about it. I have family members who are also on the spectrum but it is never talked about. It is always seen as a bad thing. There are organisations now but when I was growing up, there was very little positive representation of being autistic and having a job somewhere that you can progress. Many companies take people on but do it so they can point to the one person with a disability they hired and feel great. That is the wrong reason to do it. A lot needs to change to make anything you engage with in public accessible. You should not have to beg for things to which you are entitled. You should not have to fight all the time. It is so simple and easy to change these things but nobody wants to take responsibility for doing it. That is all I have to say.