Ms Hannah N? Ghiolla Mhairt?n:

In the Department of Health and HSE meeting we raised the particular issue around the CAMHS hubs and the exclusion of autistic children, and they said they would take that away to think about, so that is one of the questions we are waiting for a response on. We also brought it up in our meeting with the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, along with our concern around the use of the phrase "primary diagnosis of autism", because when we look at international research and literature, it refers to a dual diagnosis of autism plus whatever the mental health diagnosis is. Nowhere else is primary diagnosis of autism written about, which we feel is maybe the HSE trying to put its responsibility for autistic children at a remove. The Minister of State agreed with us that dual diagnosis was the preferable terminology. It is still within the CAMHS hubs documents. That has not changed. A number of TDs have submitted parliamentary questions for us on the issue, but the question is always whether the Minister will address the discrimination experienced by autistic children in CAMHS and the response is always that the children's disability network teams provide ASD treatment. What we have to keep iterating and reiterating is we are not looking for ASD treatment but for mental health services and mental health treatment. The HSE has moved away from saying "primary diagnosis of autism" to "mental health issues associated with ASD", which is basically saying the same thing. When we look at research, the question of why the autistic community experiences higher levels of mental health issues is so complex and cannot be reduced down to saying it is because they are autistic. They are a huge number of factors involved, as with neurotypical people. We are not really of the mind that this is being taken seriously enough and that is why we have prioritised it for today's discussion.