The only thing… it is very difficult applying for support when you have got a child without a physical difference, without a physical disability. All the mechanisms are geared towards the physical. You have to almost, it is okay to say yes I am sane, I am coping and I am exhausted, but you won’t get any help unless you have broken down and I think that, the loss of dignity in breaking down is so excruciating. The loss of dignity of saying I just can’t cope with this any more is soul destroying, because you want to cope and you, the symptoms you have are secondary to exhaustion. They are not depression because of an inherent disorder. They are secondary to the fights you have just to get heard.

 

The times you are told, “Well that is a social problem. We are education.” “Oh that is education, we are social.” And because you have got a child, because you use all your energy in keeping your child balanced and you spend all your money and give all your life to keeping this child in balance and being the best that you can and you follow all the government strategies and guidelines and philosophies, but you ruin yourself in the meantime. How much would it cost a professional to do that? And we get nothing. 

 

If I was to give up work to do this then all I would get as a carer is £40 a week and that is just not enough to keep everything going. If I was to give up as a parent and rely on the state, you would have a depressed parent with chronic depression. You would have a sibling, who would probably because of the traits, deteriorate to receive a full diagnosis and you would have a 14 year old who probably would be expelled from school and I think that all the parents who do so much and give so much, that needs to be considered in a much more careful light than it is now. And that the scrutiny for investigating what a parent does to make sure that a child is reaching their potential as the rhetoric says, needs to be much more fair. It needs to be more rigorous and the line between acceptable and not acceptable needs to be much, much higher for children on the autistic spectrum because if your child is not causing trouble there is no need. You won’t get help until your child is completely and utterly deviant in every sense of the word, and that is against all the government policies.