Breakthrough on adult diagnosis in Aberdeen

Aberdeen has been suffering for years a local unjust failure of service re such an important basic as adult access to diagnosis. Doctors have not been available for it, folks have needed to seek access to service from other regions unless they had the means for privately. This affecting such an essential life fairness as employment support.

NAS holding a conference there in 2015 budged nothing, nor even prevented the OSS there (which they ran) closing down! But now the local paper has budged the local NHS, as a follow-on benefit from a campaigning victory on ADHD. It reports this breakthrough in NHS acknowledgement of service duty: NHS Grampian commits to adult autism diagnosis.

Why does it say it is important that folks cease to need to present to mental health service? Of course it's important that autistics are not mental, but that service is long established one of the commonest sources for diagnoses. GP referral to it. If Aberdeen folks have been referrable to mental health, and have been diagnosable by it, then there is no form of words that makes sense, that they could use to reject diagnosing the folks who were not going to stay on the mental health service for something else. Yet that is what the article reads like saying they used to do.

The principle of accessing adult diagnosis is importantly universal everywhere, Aberdeen's experience this far into the autism aware era has been staggering. This is the turning point of their acknowledging this principle for a maltreated place.

lose a small object = sent away from your friends.

In the latest tabloid racist crackdown on our European friends, anounced today, for other EU citizens begging is going to become a deporting offence.

I see an autism discrimination in this, related to travel documents and their losability. The danger we are all in from having to carry travel documents, tickets or passports, which are capable of getting lost by human error, and the sudden enormous effects if they do get lost far from home. Still not yet taken up publicly by the big charities, I have long made a case that all travel documents' losability and stealability is a discriminatory extra endangerment of everyone with autism related conditions, and this makes a disability discrimination case against their existence.

This is because of "fine motor clumsiness", having an impaired physical skill at handling objects, especially small objects and small details. Arises in dyspraxia, attention deficit, Irlen's syndrome, and simply in autistic sensory overload.

So it occurs to me, for aspies who are other EU citizens. What if you lose your ticket because of autistic issues with motor skills, you are stranded in trouble up against transport systems being totally noncommittal and unhelpful to you, you are not going to get out of trouble quickly unless you can raise money for a new fare, so you beg? Sometimes I have been begged to in Edinburgh by folks with a story of needing to finance a journey home, and can't be sure they are making it up. In a desperate situation not your fault and whose capability to happen is utterly unjust, suddenly you can be sent back to your other EU country for it and not allowed back here for a year.

Exactly the type of serious emergency possibility that is why ordinary aspies need our direct voice, like through ANS, to force the big charities' and professionals' hands to take a position on it.

Maurice Frank

Rare piece of insurance common sense

Travel Guard, answering a travel insurance enquiry for a company their claims line serves, said something worth hearing concerning a topic that no travel insurance policy is satisfactory on: lost or stolen travel documents including passports. To my enquiry as to what happens if you can't get a written police report, they say you can now give them a note explaining the circumstances that you could not get one.

The rule they always have in travel insurance, that you must obtain a written report to base your claim on, conflicts with the whole nature of travel risk. How can they possibly know that the police or other officials will be willing to provide the written report? What if they won't, and in a foreign country, how are you supposed to make them? Even in a European democracy, let alone in totally corrupt countries?

To a common sense enquiry as a buyer, for once I have got a better answer than I expected to get. It is some progress on the issue that concerns me so intensely, of losable travel documents and your safety when having to use them: particularly for spectrumites because of dexterity issues dyspraxia and attention deficit that make small objects easier to lose. Of course, given the complex trickiness of insurance and all the unpredictable details of a loss situation that you can not know what they will be until it happens, the value of this consumer victory remains small compared to the safety need that folks' safety when travelling should not depend on carried physical documents at all, and the safety victory if this 200 year old practice that big business interests have habituated our culture to accept was actually stopped.

Maurice Frank

Bus pass danger

If you have a concessionary bus pass, be alarmed and logically outraged at the danger involved in finding that the words printed on it may not be honoured.

A pass bears a date that it is "valid until." That means it is valid on the day concerned, that is the common usage of valid - valid until the day which is the last day of validity.

The scanners that read the passes when you get on the bus may not agree, and worst, they are not all following the same line everywhere. On the pass's last day, you can use it on First Bus, totally normally, travel miles from home, then find that Lothian Buses' scanners reject it and deem it as expired already.

What is most dangerous about this illegal mess, is that you are miles from home when this happens, as it did to me today on the way to work. You have begun your travel on a basis that the pass is okay. What if this happened at the other end of the country? What if you were coming home from holiday on the pass's last day?

Folks who are not getting a new pass will thus find themselves conned as to the oast day of the facility's availability. This will happen to folks who have a pass on grounds of DLA and whose level of DLA changes.

Most passholders, me included, are getting a new pass, and I was relieved to get my application accepted at the library 3 weeks ago after, when I tried at 6 weeks, getting told I had to wait until only 2 weeks, which would have been a kife-edge discomfort. But I have written here already about my strong view on the dangerous unworkability of needing to carry any physcial identfiier at all to entitle you to travel, because of what can happen, how massively your day can go wrong, if it gets lost or stolen which is not your fault. This is made a disability discrimination issue by our spectrum, in particular by ADHD and dyspraxia, which carry an increased risk of losing things. This as far as I am concerned already makes all need for physical tickets and passes an illegal medical discrimination. But obviously, the political world has not yet chosen to buy a message that makes such a radical change, never mind the danger that all public transport passengers are in at all times.

That is why I would have felt completely stupid and humiliated if I lost my new pass while still having the old one valid, it was wrong to choose to take that risk. Hence I chose instead to keep on using my old pass right up to its last day.

The scanners have never been necessary either. They are only there to count passengers for the company to claim back their fares. When bus passes began there were no scanners, it just worked by show Most pass users know how the scanners have periodic phases of unreliability, especially on Stagecoach. They cause frustrations and practical delaya at stops, and concerned baffled oldies find their scanners not resistering until several atempts.

Now, who is going to take responsibility for putting the system right urgently? Transport ministry, council office that issues passes, or Lothian Buses for having its scanners set wrong? Meanwhile this can happen to anyone any day, which is misleading hence illegal. We have written to the council office first. Intowork had been put to extra inconvenience to drive me to work.

The position now, is that the authorities can no longer answer, without by it acknowledging the safety case that passes and tickets must be totally abolished. All we need to effect a massive reform overdue by 2 centuries, is for you to take an interest in their answer and not run away from the issue's originality. Remember, these safety issues can happen to you, in any travel.

When you have a bus pass in recognition with special needs that is actually in recognition that coping with transport operators' self-interested demands on passengers and relating successfully to their staff can be difficult. Hence, the powers that be now stand asked directly: should folks with an acknowldged extra need and a communication diffculty look after our own safety when we travel. They can't answer no. See, that would be an open statement of englect of us and our safety. Don't take care of your own safety? The whole health and safety system and the whole law of negligence would collapse. Hence they have to answer yes, no alternative.

But in answering yes, to my reason for caring for my safety by continuing to use my old pass up to the last day - they acknowledge the fact that reliance on physical losable passes and tickets is unsafe. That makes it illegal and invalid, an acknowledged violation of safety, for them to allow tickets and passes and passports and any system at all of carried physical documents verifying your status, to continue to exist.

Maurice Frank