A solitary journey: Why mental health services need to do more to support the needs of autistic children and their parents
Children and teenagers are falling through the cracks in an under-resourced support system that fails to join the dots between being on the spectrum and other conditions such as ADHD
Like many parents with autistic children, Fiona O’Leary has had to grapple with narrow-minded attitudes. The Cork-based activist remembers times when people expressed concern about her eldest son apparently not being “normal”. One incident that particularly stung was a cinema trip where a stranger approached her son and asked: “Well, what’s wrong with you?”
What non-autistic people often fail to understand, she says, is that children’s seemingly unusual behaviour may be normal for them. For ...