Yesterday when I was looking up resources for my friend who believes she's #actuallyautistic herself, the search-engine results were sobering: Autism Speaks. The WHO. Various and sundry medical schools. Various and sundry orgs that promote and/or administer ABA.

And I thought...

....this is a problem. This is a BIG problem. Because when people, whether #autistic themselves or parents of autistic children, want to search for information about #autism, nine chances out of ten, they'll just Google it. And these are the results that are going to come up.

And they're going to think to themselves, "huh, okay, well, this is the World Health Organization, the foremost authority on medical conditions, so they MUST know what they're talking about. And Autism Speaks has all the top results, so they MUST have all the answers I need."

Um....how about....NO.

How about....NOT IN A HUNDRED TRILLION YEARS.

Parents, teachers, self-diagnosed auties, individuals on the suspectrum: Just because these are the top search results DOES NOT mean that you need look no further.

As a matter of fact, the WHO and A$....

....have repeatedly demonstrated that they are the unequivocal WORST #autism resources you can possibly find in a Google search or a real-life venue. Why? Because the WHO, A$, the medical schools, and especially the ABA schools are not even led by #autistic people. They're led...

....by neurotypicals who think they've got #autism all figured out.

If you want to be aware of one thing about autism during this #AutismAwarenessMonth, be aware of this: When it comes to learning about autism, non- #autistic organisations like these are NOT the place to go.

You've got to learn about #autism from real experts: the people who have lived experience, who know firsthand what being #autistic is like, who have just barely survived day after day trying to make sense of a world that can't be arsed to listen to, let alone understand them.

You are reading correctly, ladies, gentlemen and gender-non-conformists:

If you want to learn about #autism, you have to turn to #ACTUALLYAUTISTIC PEOPLE.

Not Autism Speaks.

Not the World Health Organization.

Definitely not the Judge Rotenberg Center and other torture camps.

Take a few extra minutes to go further down the search-engine results till you've separated the wheat from the chaff, actually read what #AllAutistics have to say for themselves. You'll be the better for having found true, accurate information about #autism from reliable sources.