As you may know we have launched our own community space dedicated to providing a safe and welcoming environment for autistic individuals. After a long journey of searching for a place to truly belong, I believe we have the opportunity to create something special together. Let's work towards building a community that is as inclusive and horizontally organized as possible, but we can't do it without your support.

Share your skills and ideas in the comments below, and if they align with our community values, we'll invite you to join our collaboration chat to discuss how you can contribute further. You can also help by staying active, spreading the word, and donating to keep our server running smoothly. Together, we can build a space where autistic people feel welcome and valued!

The intent of autism.place is to create a multi-service online community for autistic people and allies with the principle of autism acceptance. As such, autism.place is designed based on autistic culture so that autistic users can feel at home and flourish. Our first service is a lemmy site, with hopes of establishing other Fediverse services as we grow.

Values

• Acceptance
• Understanding
• Compassion
• Growth
• Equality
• Mutuality
• Love

Autism Acceptance

Autism acceptance is founded in the perspective of neurodiversity, which recognizes a diversity of human cognition as fact and an evolutionary consequence of our environment. As such, autism is not seen as a problem to address or condition to cure. Rather, it is a valid neurological expression with its own strengths and difficulties. From a sociological approach, this perspective implies that many of the difficulties that autistic people experience are not inherent to their neurological type, but a consequence of general human culture. Therefore, autism acceptance involves not only accepting autistic people as they are, but also adjusting human society to be inclusive of them.

Getting Started at Lemmy.Autism.Place

We have provided an intro and guide to using lemmy.autism.place that can be accessed here. For list of our current communities, please visit this link.

Terms of Use/Rules

Make sure to read our Terms of Use to abide by the instance's rules.

Note: This document will be expanded and updated on as we grow.

After a few day long hiatus we have once again unlocked the ability to make posts in this community.

Hello I have temporary suspended this community due to off topic discussions. This community is only for discussion relating to this instance. The general autism discussions are reserved for the autism community. I will unlock the ability to post here in a few days. Thank you for your attention.

Tomorrow morning is part 2 (of 2) of my diagnosis. I am 42 now. I am pretty sure myself that I am autistic, I have not found a better explanation for my life being the "shape" that it is.

I would be gutted if a professional decided that I do not belong here though. Fingers crossed that I have guessed right, and that the doc see me as I am, not just my mask.

(Apologies for crosspost. Did not realise this community existed until after posting at autism@lemmy.world)

Edit: just to follow up on this. I have just been diagnosed with Autism. I am extremely relieved. He was very casual about it, and very supportive. We also talked a lot about PDA, he said that describes a lot of my work and life challenges. I'm seeing him again in about 10 days where hopefully he can give me a bit of advice about what to do with this info. Thanks to all of you that commented.

I know it would sound stupid for most people, but not here (I hope?)

So I am in my early thirties and I have a long history of not going enough to the doctor. When I was a child my mother was my referent doctor and she always have been in the "no need to take medecine if it's going to heal by itself" school of thinking (I don't mean that in a bad way: I still got my vaccines, etc, just that she would directly send me to specialists when there was a serious issue). After I left the house I never cared about changing my referent doctor (although of course my mom who lived hundreds of kilometers away couldn't fill this role anymore) so I just stopped seeing any health professional.

As it appeared to me more and more obviously that I was autistic, I wanted to get a diagnostic (it is needed here in France if I want to have accomodations at work and such, also I would get some money that wouldn't hurt). Among all of the steps I needed to consult a doctor. I asked some people I know if they knew doctors who would take new patients, looked all over the internet, made way more calls than it was comfortable... but I couldn't find any. The only appointment I could get had a 6 months delay, plus it was with a substitute, and I was so stressed about it that I messed up the date and came the previous day... In the end I managed to get some papers I needed but nothing more.

About a month ago I was feeling a bit sick and I decided it was enough and I needed something to be done. All the doctors were full, as always, or didn't take new patients, but some were noted as on vacation but with a substitute (and said substitute didn't specify if they took new patients or not). Rather than calling to check, I decided to just get the appointment. At worst they would send me a mail to tell me my appointment had been cancelled or whatever. Still it was very stressfull.

Anyway, my appointment went very well and this substitute doctor was very nice. She told me she would open her cabinet next year and would be able to be my refferent at that point, but also that before that she could work as a "temporary refferent" for most stuff. She looks like a great doctor.

That's all! I hope it wasn't too boring to read through my ramblings.

I'm currently working on a PhD, and I had a meeting that felt like an intervention with my advisor where she encouraged me to take a few months away from the program to take care of myself. For context, I used to work for the airforce, and apparently I picked up some pretty severe mental health problems that have lead to not sleeping and panic attacks when I read papers about military hardware (not ideal when my current interest is hardware side cybersecurity).

What the fuck does "take care of yourself" mean? Like, I don't know what to do with my hands. I've spent my entire life with a fast paced schedule, either with school work or some other crisis I've needed to attend to. Now I'm like... trying to accept going to therapy and I'm doing yoga with some people in my research group a few times a week, but i don't know what to do with my time otherwise. I feel like smoking all of the weed in this state playing video games and rotting in bed isn't the answer, but that's where I'm at. I'd love any advice or to hear from anybody who's been in that position of being told to take a few months off for mental health