Why are accommodations for autistic people often seen as unfair?

[YourPoisedFinch]

In my last job, I received some accommodations and explained them to colleagues when they asked why I was coming in late. Instead of understanding, they accused me of fraud and faking my condition to get special treatment. This isn’t just my experience—many people with mental health conditions and other invisible disabilities face similar challenges. They’re either not believed and resented for receiving accommodations or believed but then negatively stereotyped.

@Rosscameasdoody - this was my orignal post - quoting @cait967 .

OK. So you need to work to your limitations, not expect everything else around you to change.
There's no way the police could have acted in any other way here. Also the threshold for someone to get to A&E is very high atm , so this meltdown must have gone on for a long time,, and been enough of a worry for you to end up there despite being attended by police who are trained to calm. Do you wear a lanyard to signpost this could be autism related?

You can also say that we need both better accommodations for working families and reasonable adjustments for those with disabilities.

You don't achieve the former by making life difficult for the latter. Why not focus on lifting everyone up?

Autistic person here - diagnosed by the NHS, various other issues such as severe OCD, anxiety and depression.

Firstly, adjustments have nothing to do with anyone else. If adjustments lead to a sense of resentment it's usually because there are staffing issues (lack of flexibility because of lack of staff, lack of support for other health issues like menopause = understaffing, etc.). This is the management's problem. Maybe if workers stopped blaming other workers, we'd all have a better work/life balance.

Secondly, people don't understand autism. You can see this when they say 'Everyone is a little bit autistic'. This is made 100 times worse because in recent years, due to long waiting lists, we've seen a rise of the whole 'pay to play' phenomenon - people going private to get a diagnosis and, of course, if that's the 'service' people are paying for, then that's the outcome they're going to get, i.e. the diagnosis they want. Alongside this, also due to the long waiting lists, we see a bunch of other people self certifying or self identifying as autistic. In other words, autism doesn't seem very credible to lots of people because the world and his wife seems to have it now. Clearly, the problem that needs to be fixed here is the NHS. Make it so people can only be diagnosed by a psychiatrist (because according to the DSM autism is a psychiatric issue) who doesn't stand to gain by giving that diagnosis.

Thirdly, if both of the above is done, then reasonable adjustments will seem reasonable. Think of it this way, a family member is epileptic. They have reasonable adjustments. Everyone believes these adjustments are reasonable. They don't actually have to have seen the family member have a seizure to believe epilepsy requires reasonable adjustments but they trust the diagnosis.

Parents and carers should also be entitled to reasonable adjustments. Society has changed beyond all recognition in the past 50 years. That army of stay at home people who provided a robust support network (e.g. my mum's generation) is no longer available so we need to acknowledge that and build it into workplace expectations without punishment, e.g. through lost wages.

As for the menopause I saw mentioned, I believe there's a whole other category of reasonable adjustments that should be made for women, e.g. those with PMDD, going through IVF, struggling in pregnancy, having to deal with peri/menopause. In a society that supposedly respects diversity as one of our core British Values, we need to accept that not all women are rollerskating superstars who are in a permanent state of blossoming.

As workers, we should expect and demand more. People first. Profits later.

It's funny on here that everyone claims they / their DC / DH have Autism but can't grasp why some of us need adjustments

And we're the ones who supposedly lack empathy?

Autism isn’t self reported!

It’s been a long time since my son was diagnosed granted (17 years) but they wanted reports from parents, teachers, professionals involved such as speech therapy (he was non verbal) and they assessed him and put him through some tests to observe his behaviour. It absolutely was not phoning up and saying I’m autistic!

The problem is that, as @ThisKindAmberLemur says, so many people now have private diagnoses of autism and ADHD. Without doubt some of these diagnoses are being made too readily by unqualified private providers.

No one would dispute that someone with a proper diagnosis of a significant disabling condition needs reasonable adjustments. But when you’ve got people turning up with their autism diagnosis, from a private clinic, who are on the most mild end of the spectrum, then it starts to feel unfair. Arguably daily life is harder for, for example, a menopausal woman whose husband is having an affair and whose teenagers are going off the rails , than a young happily married man with a few minor ASD traits. So why should the latter get flexi-time, longer breaks, lighter workload, permission to leave meetings etc, while the former is expected to soldier on?

I think the problem is too many indiscriminate adjustments, rather than evaluating each case individually. And as is so often the case, the people who mainly lose out are the ones who genuinely need help.

Sorry quoted the wrong person. Should have been @Sunnysideup4eva

@ImagineRainbows that was then, this is now. Your son had a diagnosis when diagnoses were only made by teams of highly qualified professionals doing extensive tests. Now you can pretty much pay your money, fill in an online questionnaire, and get your diagnostic certificate.

There’s a fair amount of autism in my family, ranging from a non verbal cousin who will never achieve paid work or live independently, to other relatives who are just a bit quirky with some ASD traits. The frustration people have is that adjustments are being made for too many people who are only mildly affected.

No, she's extrapolating from self. Many think that everyone is like them e.g. neurodivergent.

And yet society treats them the same.

As I said earlier I have been challenged loads of times taking my son to disabled toilets. People don’t look and think he must have been diagnosed years ago when the assessment process was different or he must be on the more severe end of the spectrum. They don’t see the disability and so they assume it isn’t there.

I don’t know how easy it is to get a diagnosis these days but the massive wait list would tell me it’s not as easy as you think. But regardless the attitude of anyone can get a diagnosis is why people are so unaccommodating to those who can’t function without them.

The latter wouldn't get whatever adjustments they asked for just because they have Autism

I was diagnosed in 2012. At the time I was unemployed and on the work programme. I went in one morning (after struggling with lack of accessibility. It was minor things like things in large print) and said I need a quiet room because of my now diagnosed disabilities (I'd just been diagnosed with Autism and Hyperacusis) I was told no because I've just been diagnosed so it can't be that bad. I'd spent a lot of my teenage years struggling with depression

You (as I did) can go to bed with normal hearing and wake up with hearing problems.

The lack of adjustments and refusal to believe that I was affected how I said I am, is pretty much the reason why I came off JSA and have spent the last 13 years on ESA.

DH has a health condition, went through occupational health in work in a previous job.

The 'reasonable adjustments' essentially involved obeying the law regarding rest breaks between shifts and allowing him to take his contracted breaks. They said they couldn't guarantee either of those things...

Because OF COURSE it is relevant to ask! You cant have some doing fewer hours for the same pay, that isn't a reasonable adjustment, that is UNFAIR

Actually it is not an unreasonable expectation for police to be trained to consider whether behaviors could be an autistic response. We're talking about a condition that (according to people on this thread) seems to be something that majority of the population are now diagnosed with so why wouldn't police be trained in the signed?

Even if (shock horror) people are talking out of their arses on this thread and have no idea how autism diagnoses work and (shock horror) it's not the case that 'everyone has an autism diagnosis this day', it's something that impacts somewhere between 1% and 5% of the population, and that's not small numbers of people. And if you're trained it's not that hard to distinguish an autistic meltdown from a some sort of psychotic event (and I would suspect the autistic meltdown is more common).

You need to manage an autistic meltdown very different to a psychotic event and had the police been trained it is likely they could have descalated quickly saving a lot of police and A&E time, and helping OP as a side effect (if that's all you see it as).

@ImagineRainbows the NHS waiting list is longer than ever, and the NHS diagnostic process is the same as it was. But the private sector is now massive, and as far as I can see, it’s less regulated, and diagnoses are given out like smarties to anyone who’ll pay.

@TigerRag obviously employers vary, but I would say the experience now would be very different to 13 years ago. There is a lot more understanding, acceptance, and consequently willingness to make accommodations.

Well the National Autistic society states that some private diagnosis are not accepted by the LA and NHS. So I would guess those unregulated diagnosis’s “given out like smarties” are in fact not valid. But a private diagnosis conducted according to the DSM criteria is no less valid than an NHS one.

"Now you can pretty much pay your money, fill in an online questionnaire, and get your diagnostic certificate."

Can you give me an example of somewhere that diagnoses autism like this? I don't know anyone who has had an autism diagnosis following an online questionnaire only and I can't see how an online questionnaire only could possibly establish that the DSM-5 criteria are met. There's no set rule on which medical professionals have to be involved. I was assessed (over a full day) by both a clinical psychologist and an SLT, and I would not have been diagnosed without my social communication actually being assessed. Whilst restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities are probably more self-reported, the report makes it clear that what they observed in my behavior backed up what I was saying. And I would not have been diagnosed only one of the two - both are required.

I would have met the DSM-4 criteria for Aspergers and they're pretty much the same as for autism now except for autism you can have to have language delays now (for Aspergers this was the real differentiator).

I thought we'd long moved past this idea of autism as a linear spectrum where you're either mildly affected or severely affected. I tend to see spikey profiles used more now, as someone may be significantly impaired in one area and not badly impaired in another, so a "severe" or "mild" diagnosis is unhelpful and inaccurate.

But that's very much a simplification and really only applies to people who are paid hourly. Most people who earn a salary no longer fall into strict pay scales if you are outside of public service employment. So for example, I work in a specialist area in Financial services. I work with around 20 people, I can guarantee that none of us earn the same for what is essentially the same job. People will have tupe'd, moved internally, applied externally etc and we all have different contracts and salaries. When i reduced my hours, i took a % pay drop but I might still be earning more than someone doing full time hours and neither they nor I would ever know unless we compared. Not even everyone has the same Full Time hours as this varies between 35 and 40.

As i said before, it's about value to the business and what that is worth and just because someone works less hours physically, there is no guarantee that they are contributing less.

If we are talking about sitting on a check out at Tesco then yes that does apply but then staff in Tesco are only paid for the hours they work.

mumsnet challenge: Stop equating having children or elderly relatives to being disabled: Fail.

@ImagineRainbows I suppose it would depend on the employer, as to whether they asked to see details, or just accepted a letter from a private clinic. The point I’m making is that ASD diagnoses these days are not all the same, because the clinical assessment involved varies so much. As a previous poster said, private services will try to give the paying client what they want, and invariably that will be a diagnosis. No one would pay money to be told there was nothing wrong with them.

I believe there are a lot of private providers around. Mostly ADHD but they diagnose ASD too. I’m sure some of them are excellent but some are not, as that Panorama programme showed.

And these attitudes are why 85% of autistic people are unemployed