Media - SEMA.Scot

Press Releases and External Mentions

Closure of Autism Assessment Pathways

We cannot emphasis enough how hard we need to fight to protect our basic human rights.

Read the letter to understand why it is important we protect adult autism assessment pathways. The impact of denying us a means to gain support- whether that is education, empowerment, justice, or much needed financial benefits.

We already hear how Black, Brown or Asian Autistics or ADHDers are denied even the consideration of a referral by bias, uninformed GPs/ psychiatrists. The stories are shocking but not surprising. Instead of fixing this, Scottish healthcare is going in the opposite direction!

Read the letter that we sent to Minister Maree Todd requesting a meeting to addressed this.

The Scottish Government

Commissions and commissioners: final report

The Commissions and Commissioners: Final Report explores the proposal for a Learning Disability, Autism, and Neurodiversity Commissioner. Scottish Ethnic Minority Autistics (SEMA), alongside Autism Understanding Scotland, expressed concerns about creating a new commissioner. SEMA emphasized the need for further understanding of autistic people’s needs and advocated for utilizing existing mechanisms and resources to address rights, rather than duplicating efforts with new structures.

The Scottish Government

Learning Disability, Autism and Neurodiversity Bill: scoping analysis 2022

This report summarises the findings of the Learning Disability, Autism and Neurodiversity Bill pre-consultation exercise. It is an analysis of 30 workshops carried by the Scottish Government and its partners including SEMA with people with learning disabilities and autistic people.

Engagement details:

Autism Understanding Scotland (AUS) and Scottish Ethnic Minority Autistics (SEMA) – 14/06/22, 16/06/22, and 30/06/22

Healthandcare.scot

Healthandcare.scot

Charity: Protect learning disability rights now

Autism Understanding Scotland, along with regional groups, Scottish Ethnic Minority Autistics (SEMA) and Diversified Scotland’s Autistic Youth Led Charity, say funding should instead be focused on improving access to assessment and post-diagnostic support and raising awareness of existing commissioners.

Healthandcare.scot

Autism groups lead call to scrap Commissioner plans

Sofia Akbar from SEMA tells healthandcare.scot that more siloed working from commissioners will make things especially harder for autistic people who face discrimination in multiple ways:

SEMA is concerned that another Commissioner could undermine intersectionality: “What I hear most from parents and carers of autistic children is that their additional support needs are ignored because they’re not white and it’s instead interpreted as a cultural deficit. Would they complain about the racism or the ableism?”

“We’re putting too many things in compartments and that just ruins it all. We have the Children’s Commissioner and the Human Rights and Equality Commissioner which takes into account intersectionality. We need to just fix those.”