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Latest News

Featured

Autistic Pride: Be Unashamedly You ~ Barb Cook

June 18, 2021 Barb Cook

I believe in myself… finally. It hasn’t always been this way. Life was this strange existence that I could never quite figure a way to get through. Well, that was to the outside world around me. Life in my own world made perfect sense — especially as a young girl — but that changed as the years went by, and self-doubt began to creep in. I have blundered my way through most of my life until I learnt about autism back in 2008, leading to my diagnosis in 2009. That day, March 3rd, was the best day of my life. […]

Featured

Seeing the Unseen Premiere Thursday June 6, 2019

June 6, 2019 Spectrum Women

By Christine Jenkins, Spectrum Women Magazine international correspondent. I talked recently with Kristín Vilhjálmsdóttir about this new documentary. She is a translator based in Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the 17 voices in the 90-minute film, Seeing the Unseen.  When you consider the whole population of her country is 340,000, about one third of my urban municipality of Ottawa, Seeing the Unseen is a major achievement. It looks at the lives of 17 teen girls and women on the autistic spectrum and is presented by the Icelandic Autistic Society.   The narration is based on a large portion of the poem […]

Autism April

VIDEO: NIMH Special Event – A Woman’s Voice: Understanding Autistic Needs

May 7, 2019 Spectrum Women

browser does not support iframe Run Time Approx 1 hour 40 minutes Event source page https://iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/autism-events/2019/april23/spectrum-women.shtml The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Office of Autism Research Coordination (OARC) is pleased to invite you to attend our annual special event to recognize National Autism Awareness Month, A Woman’s Voice: Understanding Autistic Needs. We will be hosting a Panel Presentation featuring three authors of the book Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism, Barb Cook, Liane Holliday-Willey, Ed.D., and Dena Gassner, M.S.W. The panel will also include Jennifer O’Toole, author of Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on […]

Featured

Jessica Kingsley Wins International Excellence Award

March 18, 2019 Spectrum Women

Jessica Kingsley, who founded Jessica Kingsley Publishers in 1987, has been awarded The London Book Fair’s Simon Master Chairman’s Award for her work in publishing books about autism. The London Book Fair International Excellence Awards, held in partnership with the UK Publishers Association, celebrate publishing success in seventeen categories, representing the best publishing ambassadors, innovative publishing, and ground-breaking initiatives in the industry. Jessica Kingsley Publishers have long been known for their pioneering publishing in non-fiction and are market-leaders in the field of autism, with more than seven hundred autism-specific titles to date. Best-selling books include Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide […]

Book Releases

‘KNOW YOUR SPECTRUM!’ – BOOK REVIEW AND INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR FINN MONAGHAN

February 9, 2019 Spectrum Women

Interview by Maura Campbell, Spectrum Women Senior Editor and Features Writer Finn Monaghan is a Northern Ireland based specific learning difficulties teacher working as a freelance Autism and Dyslexia Tutor and Disability Needs Assessor at Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University. She received a late diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, aged 38, and the impact of growing up without a diagnosis inspired her to write a book to help autistic teenagers recognise their own individual spectrum of autism. Maura: Why did you think a book like this was needed? Finn: I found it difficult to grow up with undiagnosed autism and […]

Advocacy

Stranger in a Strange Land: The Autistic Expatriate – Yenn Purkis

September 3, 2018 Spectrum Women

I was at a conference this week and it generated some interesting thoughts in my mind. The light bulb moment was when a speaker talked about their child being ‘resistant to using the telephone’. I would have said that the child didn’t like using the telephone and I think the speaker would have too if the child were not autistic. Autistic people are frequently pathologised and our experiences seen in terms of being somehow deficient and in need of fixing. I do not want to detract from the conference, which was great, but that comment really set me thinking. I […]

Featured

Family Dynamics – Yenn Purkis

January 22, 2018 Spectrum Women

Next week I m going to visit my parents. Despite having a difficult relationship in the past between us, I now love seeing them. I’m thinking how my mum will have a mango ready for my breakfast that she has specially bought and that Jalna yoghurt I like too. She has been telling me all about the shops in Beechworth that she wants to show me and the weekend will be spent just with family and friends I grew up with. Everyone will be happy to see me and ask me about what I am doing and it will be […]

Latest News

Why We Are Not Puzzle Pieces – Renata Jurkevythz

July 26, 2017 Spectrum Women

So, let’s talk about the dreaded puzzle piece. The community of autistic adults is hurt by it because we perceive it as offensive. On the other hand, non-autistics who have autistic people in their lives, be it a family member, friend, colleague or client, consider it not harmful because it just represents their wish to “figure autistics out”. My goal here is to address both sides and explain why in the end it does hurt people on the spectrum and why, in my humble opinion, it doesn’t actually make sense. Starting from the beginning: non-autistics live in a world that […]

Insights

Autistic and Damn Proud of It! ~ Jen Elcheson

June 19, 2017 Spectrum Women

It wasn’t too long ago that I could admit to myself that I am truly damn proud to be autistic. It was a serious lesson in self-acceptance. Learning to accept being autistic meant learning to accept myself. As I have mentioned in some of my other writings, my diagnosis story differs from the narratives of the later and recently diagnosed autistic people featured nowadays. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in late 1998 right after I turned 17, as my school, counsellor, and mom were concerned about how I was getting on socially and wanted me assessed. This was back […]

Featured

Proud of being myself ~ Renata Jurkevythz

June 18, 2017 Spectrum Women

Autistic Pride Day. When I sat at my computer thinking about the best way to address this subject, I realized I just couldn’t think of autism on its own, but of all of my traits as a person. When we talk about being proud of our neurology it is not a lot different to being proud of our physical traits, our nationality or belief systems. Talking about pride is usually very controversial for the simple reason that people see themselves very differently. I might like something about myself, but someone else who is like me might not like that part […]

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