Ellie Wilson

Yeah, I think what you're referring to is stigma.

There is stigma associated with behavioral health disorders, in part because sometimes people do misattribute them to how you're raised or how you discipline your kids.

These concepts are highly cultural.

And so if we engage with them with the express purpose of being culturally responsive when we do it, we tend to be

a lot more effective in being able to dismantle some of those ideas.

In our space, the word we use for this is neurodiversity affirming, right?

So if the opposite of stigma is affirmation, what we try to do is still center resources that are factual.

It's not about spinning a narrative.

It's about helping families and specifically parents

understand that, first of all, they did not cause their child's autism, that they can and should be allowed to look at their child as a profile of, yes, needs and challenges, but also strengths and gifts, and that their child's needs

matter and that there are ways in which parents can access supports for those needs in a way that doesn't require them to talk about their child like a tragedy.

Yeah, sure.

So let's have a little language lesson.

There's some language that we can use here.

First of all, you probably have heard the words before, someone has high-functioning autism or someone has low-functioning autism.

If I may, respectfully, I'd like to suggest that we move away from that binary.

Barry before was talking about sort of like the horizontal nature of the spectrum or the ripple effect of the spectrum.

And that is probably a lot more accurate and frankly affirming way to talk about autism amongst autistic people at the very least.

That is great.

And, you know, what are we so surprised by?