Source: BBC News, May 2023.

Date received:  May 2023.

Details:

This story is typical of the treatment autistic people are subjected to. Health services that are supposed to provide care and protection to vulnerable people seem to be horribly unprepared to understand or deal with the needs of autistic people.

Summary from the BBC article:

An autistic girl aged 16 spent nearly seven months in a busy general hospital due to a lack of suitable children’s mental health services in England.

Her local health and care system said it was “very sorry” for how she was treated “when she was most vulnerable”.

Campaigners describe the shortage of appropriate support for people with autism as a human rights crisis.

Directors of council care services are calling for an urgent government review of children’s mental health services.

The teenager, Molly, spent about 200 days living in a side room of a children’s ward at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth. It is not a mental health unit.

Experts say a general hospital was not the right place for her, but she had nowhere else to go because of a lack of help in the community.

Some examples of the mistreatment experienced by the patient:

“It feels like they’re torturing you,” she said. “It’s almost like the hospital room is like a small box, and you’re not allowed to leave it. There are phones going off, alarms, children screaming.”

Subjecting an autistic person to sudden and loud noises for an extended period of time will not only make them uncomfortable but can cause serious distress and even provoke physical reactions which, given the poor understanding and practices of many British health services, result in physical abuse of the patient.

From the BBC article:

Her family says she was traumatised by the hospital environment, being frequently restrained and largely isolated from other young people.

End of text from the BBC article.

The solution to an autistic person having a physical reaction to environmental stimuli that can cause them harm is not physical abuse from poorly trained and intolerant healthcare staff. The people responsible for the autistic person being in such an environment to begin with are firmly to blame and it’s disgusting, that in 2023, the victim in this situation was subject to physical abuse as a result of the shortcomings of the health care system.