Autistic Parenting: Supporting our Autistic children’s mental health when services won’t
This article was co-authored by David Gray-Hammond and Katie Munday
There is an ongoing crisis in services such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) when it comes to Autistic young people’s mental health. Failing to support our Autistic young people can have a big impact on our wellbeing as parents as we watch our children go through the same systemic discrimination that we have often experienced ourselves.
Support for the child means support for the whole family
Seeing the invalidation and gaslighting that can take place when approaching CAMHS can lead to trauma responses in ourselves. Importantly, appropriate mental health support will provide support to the whole family. Family members of traumatised Autistic young people can experience their own trauma by witnessing what has been conceptualised as “challenging behaviours” (Munday, 2023; Gray-Hammond, 2023). Witnessing self-injurious behaviours can be a particularly upsetting experience, especially when these behaviours are used against families when they reach out for support. The medical model centres “problems” within the child rather than in the systems which fail to support them.
Failures by CAMHS to support Autistic young people can create an environment that has the potential to traumatise the entire family unit; not just the young person. Stewart et al (2017) indicated that PTSD may be more prevalent amongst parents of Autistic young people, who are less likely to approach services for support with their own mental health. Unfortunately, such research ignores the possibility of parents being Autistic and having their own previous trauma (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2021). Again, the blame unfairly sits with the Autistic young person who must take responsibility not only for their own mental health but that of their family members.
Institutionalised Parent/Carer Blame
Institutionalised parent/carer blame is a significant issue for Autistic parents (Clements & Aiello, 2021) with some going as far as experiencing accusations of Fabricated or Induced Illness (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2022). CAMHS have been known to refer families to safeguarding instead of providing support with mental health. Another approach is to send parents on parenting courses such as the Cygnet Parenting Program from Barnardos. In these cases, it is clear that a child’s mental health concerns are being blamed upon parenting styles as opposed to environmental issues. Saying nothing of the deficit based ideologies which underpin these programmes.
Parent/carer blame can be a significant source of trauma that may deter families from approaching services again in the future. CAMHS and other services are creating a hostile environment that excludes Autistic young people in more ways than simply refusing to see them. There is also an inherent misogyny in parent/carer blame with mothers taking the most accusations since the days of Bettelheim. There is also a great deal of invalidation from service providers for Autistic parents who are seen to be projecting their own issues onto their children.
Minority-stress is amplified by CAMHS failure to support Autistic young people
Minority-stress can be understood as the collective pressure of multiple areas of discrimination and ostracisation. This can include things such as discrimination in the healthcare setting (Botha, 2020). Stigma is also a major contributor to minority-stress (Botha & Frost, 2018), of which there is a plentiful supply within services such as CAMHS. This stigma affects not only the young person, but also their parents.
“Minority stressors such as victimization and discrimination, everyday discrimination, expectation of rejection, outness, internalized stigma, and physical concealment of autism consistently predicted diminished well-being and heightened psychological distress”
Botha & Frost, 2018
It has also been suggested that everyday discrimination goes hand-in-hand with an expectation of rejection (Botha & Frost, 2018) which can itself make accessing services like CAMHS incredibly triggering for Autistic parents.
In conclusion
Parenting an Autistic child who is experiencing distress due to their mental health is a traumatic experience. To be clear, this is not because of the child themselves, but because services like CAMHS are inherently hostile towards Autistic people and our families. Reaching out for support can cause more trauma, effectively isolating already marginalised families. The very services which are meant to support us often do us more harm. It is clear that CAMHS has a long way to go in order to support Autistic children and young people, and their families.
Click here to sign the CAMHS petition.
Check out this seminar (free to Autistic parents) on burnout by David and Tanya.
Find more information about CAMHS here.
References
Barnardos Parenting: Cygnet Parenting Program. https://barnardos-parenting.org.uk/
Botha, M. (2020). Autistic community connectedness as a buffer against the effects of minority stress (Doctoral dissertation, University of Surrey).
Botha, M., & Frost, D. (2018). Extending the Minority Stress Model to Understand Mental Health Problems Experienced by the Autistic Population. Society and Mental Health, 10 (1).
Clements, L., & Aiello, A. L. (2021). Institutionalising parent carer blame. The Experiences of Families with Disabled Children in Their Interactions with English Local Authority Children’s Services Departments. Cerebra. University of Leeds.
Gray-Hammond, D (2023) Challenging Behaviour: The weaponisation of Autistic experience. https://emergentdivergence.com
Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2022) Creating Autistic Suffering: Fabricated or Induced Illness, state sanctioned bullying. https://emergentdivergence.com
Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2021) Creating Autistic Suffering: In the beginning there was trauma. https://emergentdivergence.com
Munday, K. (2023) The truth about “challenging behaviour”. https://autisticltd.co.uk
Stewart, M., McGillivray, J.A., Forbes, D., & Austin, D.W. (2017). Parenting a child with autism spectrum disorder: a review of parent mental health and its relationships to trauma-based conceptualisation. Advances in Mental Health, 15 (1), 4-14.
The post Autistic Parenting: Supporting our Autistic children’s mental health when services won’t appeared first on Emergent Divergence.