CW: health, death and its causes, including self-inflicted
About six weeks ago the third episode of The Autistic Rant Hour, my podcast miniseries, was released by the Autistic Culture Podcast Network. I called it “We’ve run all the tests and there’s nothing wrong with you”, and it was about Medical Gaslighting, from both the personal and systemic perspectives, as experienced and understood by myself and my wonderful episode guest Simo_tier (pronouns: it, they).
This was by far the most resonant of the podcast’s episodes, and no wonder: Autistic adults die 6 to 15 years earlier than their peers (CW: gender-exclusive language in the cited research) and are at last 5 times more likely to die by suicide specifically because of lack of training among medical staff. One of the strongest barriers to medical care for autistic people is anxiety over prejudice by medical staff, reportedly 2-3 times more than for allistic people. And the medical gaslighting is effective: 72% of autistic participants in this research did not even know if their symptoms merited a visit to the doctor.
Commiserating with each other on air and calling for disability-solidarity was great, and I hope this episode could make some people feel less alone. Many of you responded to Simo_tier’s battle cry and shared your experiences. But what can we do to deal with these problems while we endeavor to snatch another year of autistic existence out of the jaws of death?
Juliane, a listener, replied to my Mastodon thread with the following helpful advice, and has given me permission to share it here too.
Read about it in my latest blogpost:
https://prepped.to/blog/how-to-deal-with-medical-gaslighting
#ActuallyAutistic
#MedicalGaslighting
#Health
#AutisticHealth
