Sarah O'Brien

Dan is always so generous with his praise of others, an exceptional person whether he’s uplifting my work or others!

SMK is hiring? Could it be you?

📣Head of Programmes (£50-55K full time)

📣Grant Programme Manager (£33-35K part time)

Deadline for applications is Tuesday 22 April by 11pm
Find out more here 👉 smk.org.uk/get-involved...

Simply having one of those days where things are hard and I'm repeatedly told that I'm rubbish at inclusive practice, which is a hard one to sit with when I know all the effort I put in to try to make things inclusive and accessible despite exclusionary, often immovable systems.

Monty, a pale cream golden retriever sits amongst daffodils and smiles up at the camera with his mouth open.

🐣

Accidentally forgot to take my POTS meds yesterday so I ended up accidentally fainting today, which serves as a useful barometer of 48 hours between meds means a complete return to business as (unmedicated) usual.

My life revolves around silly heart-shaped tablets.

Whether it is an out of work benefit, a health related payment, social care support or support to be employed and stay in employment, it’s never a handout.

Language shapes perspectives and it’s being used to urge harm rather than community.

The rhetoric around welfare benefits and social security being handouts was and will always be incredibly dangerous and downright insidious.

Supporting all members of society is never a handout, it’s a safety net, a social contract of support for all.

Diagnostic overshadowing in PTSD & autism: what do we know about trauma in ASD? buff.ly/0c0Hz5V

Sofiia Karnatska blogs a systematic review of PTSD in autistic individuals, which provides some useful insights about effective assessment & treatment of #PTSD in #Autism.

🧵 THREAD

Watching someone pick their nose, look at their find and then wrap their hand around the train’s grab rail on this morning’s commute pretty much sums it up.

It’s the lesson that just keeps giving, don’t trust other peoples hygiene 🥲

Unexpected barrier to accessible and inclusive recruitment?

Application and recruitment platforms simply do not allocate enough storage space for Easy Read job information, and NHS cloud storage is restrictive, so we have to find a workaround.

Reader, I’m simply autistic and wear glasses.

Monty, a pale golden retriever lays on pavement and smiling up at Sarah while wearing an orange harness and double ended lead.

Either I look like I’m visually impaired or need emotional support today because I’ve had so many people remark on “that dog is working”

The dog in question

The industrial complex around neurodiversity, never clearer than exploring the 'autism industry', is a beast that must be fed with more people making money off of neurodiversity than necessarily always helping neurodivergent people.

imo NCW was initially conceived as a way to uplift and shine a light on neurodiversity, with Siena at the heart of that, but it didn't stay that way, instead becoming a corporate and capitalist celebration around neurodiversity.

What use is neurodiversity if not to make money from it 🫠🤑

Celebrating Neurodiversity Celebration week with not just one but two migraines from working less accessible than ideal work environments certainly feels like some sort of message to be decoded.

LinkedIn is such an odd place, a role I was rejected from (applied in Aug '24) is now recruiting again, so either it was a lucky escape/bad role and it's a terrible place to work or whomever they hired instead of me wasn't a good fit.

Either way, a great escape.

Celebrating st paddy’s day just as my ancestors would have wanted, withering the evening away with a migraine.

I am in fact not the craic after a day of cracking people up 🥲

Reflecting on this, I’m so aware that I’m not like xyz autistic child a person knows of, it would be unrealistic to be compared to them.

I’m not a child and for the most part I’m in employment because of the skills I have in masking (and my career knowledge), there’s no mirror image there.

It’s always “you’re not like my five year old child (who I secretly resent for needing me as a parent)” and never thinking about what harm teaching a child that they’re a burden does and how long it takes to unlearn.

I might not always figure out in time due to wonky interoception and alexithymia that I’m a bit too close to overwhelm but my nose turning into a tap is hard to ignore.

One of my ‘auras’ of an incoming shutdown is a drip that starts from my nose, almost as if my body thinks I need to cry with the impending level of overwhelm but it’s so confused that instead of tears it’s just a drip elsewhere in the ENT cavity.

I got woken up in the night recently by something/someone breathing on my neck, which was a worry as my husband was working in central Europe at the time.

Turn around, and it turned out Monty, my not very petite golden retriever, had snuggled his way onto my pillow and we were now sharing.

With all of the news of changing the structures around health and care, I'm sure the team at @thekingsfund.bsky.social will be there to guide us through with animations of how everything works once the dust settles down.

Their animation team are always kept on their toes.

Used to it at this point, it's more been a reinforcer that some spaces really do embed EDI far better than others and sometimes assumptions do need to be challenged and worked through to build that culture.

Totally agree, if we look at the action (absentee) or consequence (inequity) we’re completely missing the drivers.

The cynic in me might think that’s by choice because if we don’t identify drivers we don’t have to act to counter them.

One thing I’d overlooked about delivering autism and learning disability training across health and social care was just how much I’d be defending my right to define and view myself in ways that don’t make me want to kill myself or see myself as a burden or packed with deficits!

Fun really! 🫠

Apparently being autistic and viewing yourself through the social model of disability, neurodiversity paradigm and undoing the work of others who have bullied and belittled you is incompatible with some people’s views of autism.

There are programmes of work that wouldn’t exist outside of DHSC, reducing health inequalities for trans people for example, which has the potential to be politically buried.

This is short sighted cost saving and “fat trimming”, we’re down to the bone already, there’s not much less for wastage.

For many who are less involved in health and care they may not fully grasp the difference between the local NHS services and NHSE, which means of course there is a bit more fear, misunderstanding and trying to piece this all together.

I’ve been delivering face to face training all day and I’ve still been consoling friends and former colleagues who feel like they’ve absolutely had the rug ripped out from underneath them after just about finishing up a restructure a year ago.