April is the official month for Autism Awareness, and this past Sunday, April 2, was World Autism Awareness day. Maybe you’ve already seen people sharing images and articles on social media this month as a way to spread awareness about autism. This can be a great use of social media in general: to help educate our fellow peers about important topics we deeply care about, so that they can make more informed, thoughtful, or compassionate decisions in the future and help make the world a better place for all who live there.
Unfortunately, these “awareness” campaigns tend to be short-lived, coming and going in waves on social media, during the designated month(s) for their campaigns. Admittedly, I, too, am writing an article about autism awareness and acceptance during the “appropriate” month, and I can understand how grouping these things into months can be helpful in reminding us to think about awareness. But for individuals on the autism spectrum and their families, “autism awareness day” is every day. Autism doesn’t go away after April 2, and neither does the need for autism acceptance.
So far, I have uses the words “awareness” and “acceptance”. Recently, I have been thinking about the significance and connotations of these words, especially the first one. “Awareness” is the most word heard spoken after the word “autism”, and I realized that might be because many regard it as a disease in need of curing. “Awareness” is often linked to the discussion of life-threatening illnesses such as cancer that indisputably need to be cured to prevent future suffering and death of loved ones.
However, autism is not a life-threatening illness! Autism is simply a different way of being and thinking; there is nothing inherently malignant about autism or people who have autism. Ignorance and fear of anyone who is different can lead to hurtful assumptions and treatment of those people, and sometimes it seems easier to make the difference go away. This is the fear-motivated decision.
This is why we need autism acceptance, the love-motivated decision, and not simply awareness. Preaching awareness alone leads to the misconstrued notion that autism is a problem in itself that needs to be eliminated. Awareness should prevent ignorance about autism and autistic individuals with the overarching goal of autism acceptance. Autistic individuals are incredibly smart, talented, inspiring, loving and empathetic people who want to be accepted by others as they are. Autism doesn’t need to be cured; it needs to be understood and accepted with open arms.
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