Autism Acceptance Month: Everything We've Written About Autism (And Why It Matters)
- Toby Overstreet
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
⚠️ Disclaimer: OUL is not composed of medical or educational professionals. This article is for informational and educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified professional for advice specific to your situation.
April is Autism Acceptance Month — and while the calendar has turned, the conversation doesn't stop here. It never really should.
Over the past few years, the CCCBlog has been quietly building something. Article by article, we've put together a library of writing about autism: what it looks like, what it feels like, how it intersects with Deafness, what science says, what policy does, and what the community deserves. We didn't plan it as a series. It grew the way real understanding grows — one question at a time, one conversation at a time.
Now felt like the right moment to gather it all in one place. Not as a retrospective, but as a resource — something you can return to, share with someone who needs it, or start with if you're new here.
Whether you're newly diagnosed, supporting someone you love, trying to make sense of a recent news cycle, or just beginning to ask questions you didn't have words for before — there's something here for you. Take what's useful. Share what resonates. And know that everything we've written comes from the same place: a genuine belief that this community deserves honest, accessible information that treats them as the experts on their own lives.
Here is everything we've written about autism, from the most recent to the very first.
Autism: Masking is Survival, Not Social Skill
January 2026
This is one of the most important pieces we've published, and it starts with a truth that too many people have never been told: masking — the act of hiding or suppressing autistic traits in order to fit in — is not a social skill. It is not a sign of progress. It is a survival response to a world that has made clear, repeatedly and often harshly, that autistic behavior is unwelcome.
Autistic advocate Morgaan Foley put it plainly: autistic people don't mask because they're autistic. They mask because they've been taught, through criticism and correction and exclusion, that who they are is not acceptable. This piece unpacks what masking actually involves — suppressing stimming, forcing eye contact, scripting conversations, performing emotions that don't come naturally — and why the long-term cost of that performance is so high. It also asks the harder question underneath all of it: what would it look like if autistic people didn't have to mask in the first place?
Rebuilding Confidence After Educational Trauma: A Resource Guide for Students with LD, ADHD, and Autism
February 2026
Most articles about neurodivergent students are written for the adults in their lives — parents, teachers, administrators. This one is different. It's written directly for students: for the person who has sat through years of being told they weren't trying hard enough, weren't paying attention, weren't living up to their potential. For the person who internalized those messages and is still carrying them.
If school left marks on you — and for many autistic students, it does — this resource guide is a starting point for understanding what happened, naming it accurately, and finding your way back to yourself. It won't undo anything. But it might help you see your history differently, and give you some tools for what comes next.
When Education Becomes Trauma: Why Our Schools Are Failing Neurodivergent Students
January 2026
This is the advocacy piece. The one that looks directly at a system that was not designed with autistic students in mind and asks — out loud, with evidence — why not, and what it costs.
The numbers in this piece are hard to sit with. Autistic children are 46 times more likely to experience severe school distress than their neurotypical peers. That's not a rounding error. That's a systemic failure. This article examines the structural reasons behind that failure: how schools are built around neurotypical norms, how autistic students are more likely to be disciplined than supported, and what real change would actually require. It's uncomfortable reading. It's also necessary.
Breaking Down the HHS Autism Announcements: What This Means for Families
September 2025
When federal health agencies make announcements about autism — new research initiatives, policy shifts, changes in how data is collected or interpreted — it can be genuinely hard to know what to make of it. The language is often technical, the framing is often shaped by political context, and the gap between a press release and something that actually affects your family's life can be enormous.
This piece was our attempt to cut through some of that. We looked at what the HHS announcements actually said, what the evidence behind them looked like, and what families navigating autism support systems should realistically expect. We wrote it because our community deserves information that's been thought through, not just passed along.
Scientific Evidence vs. Public Policy: Analyzing the Acetaminophen-Autism Link
October 2025
One of our more research-heavy pieces, and deliberately so. The debate over whether acetaminophen use during pregnancy is linked to autism has been circulating in scientific and policy circles for years — generating headlines, lawsuits, and a lot of anxiety for parents. We wanted to look at what the research actually shows, where the evidence is strong, where it's weak, and where public conversation has outpaced the science.
This isn't a piece that tells you what to think. It's a piece that walks you through how to think about a complicated, contested question — which, in a world full of confident claims about autism's causes, is something worth practicing.
Empowering Parents of Autistic Children: A Guide to Nurturing and Understanding
April 2025
Parenting an autistic child comes with a particular kind of pressure: the pressure to fix, to intervene, to optimize, to do everything right before some invisible window closes. This piece pushes back on that pressure — gently but clearly.
What autistic children need most from their parents isn't a perfectly executed therapy plan. It's to feel known. To feel that the person who loves them most is genuinely curious about their experience, not just working to change it. This guide focuses on what that actually looks like in practice: how to listen differently, how to follow your child's lead, how to build a relationship rooted in understanding rather than correction. It's one of the warmest things we've published, and we think it holds up.
Unraveling the Intersection: A Comprehensive Look at Autism and Deafness
June 2024
This one sits at the center of what OUL is about. Autism and Deafness are not separate conversations — not for many of the families and individuals in this community. Research suggests autistic traits appear at higher rates among Deaf individuals than in the general population, and yet the intersection of these two identities is still deeply understudied and widely misunderstood, even among professionals who work with both communities.
This piece looks at what we know about the overlap, why diagnostic overshadowing — where one identity masks or explains away the other — is such a persistent problem, and what it means to navigate both Deaf and autistic identity at the same time. If you've ever felt like you fall between the cracks of systems that only know how to see one thing at a time, this one is for you.
Late Diagnosis of Autism: How to Support an Adult Friend
October 2023
Getting an autism diagnosis as an adult changes things. For many people, it reframes decades of experiences that never quite made sense — the exhaustion, the social difficulty, the sense of always working harder than everyone else for the same results. It can bring enormous relief. It can also bring grief, confusion, and a whole new set of questions about identity and what comes next.
If someone in your life has recently received a late diagnosis, this piece is a practical, warm guide to what actually helps. Not what feels supportive from the outside, but what the person going through it actually needs: to be believed, to not have their experience minimized, and to be given space to work out what the diagnosis means on their own terms.
UNMASKING AUTISM: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
July 2023
A review of Dr. Devon Price's landmark book Unmasking Autism — and an entry point into one of the most important ideas in contemporary autism understanding: that the diagnostic criteria we've long relied on were built primarily around one narrow profile, and that millions of people — particularly women, people of color, and gender-nonconforming individuals — have spent their lives being autistic without ever being recognized as such.
Dr. Price's book is part research, part memoir, part call to action. Our review tries to capture what makes it so resonant for people who've spent years wondering why the world felt so much harder to navigate than it seemed to be for everyone else. If you've ever felt like you don't fit the stereotype but something still feels familiar, this book — and this review — is a place to start.
From Autism to Anxiety: The Story of a Neurodiverse Writer
July 2023
Sarah Kurchak's memoir I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder has one of the best titles in recent memory — and the book lives up to it. Sharp, funny, and ruthlessly honest, it's an account of growing up autistic without knowing it: learning to perform neurotypicality so well that it looked like success from the outside, while quietly falling apart on the inside.
Our review focuses on what makes Kurchak's voice so valuable: she doesn't write about autism from a place of tragedy or inspiration, but from a place of hard-won clarity. This is what it actually felt like. This is what it cost. This is what I know now that I didn't know then. For autistic readers, it's validating. For everyone else, it's illuminating.
Remembering Donald Triplett: The First Person Diagnosed with Autism
June 2023
Donald Triplett was Case 1. When psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his landmark 1943 paper describing a new condition he called "autistic disturbances of affective contact," Donald was the first child in the study. He was 89 years old when he passed away in June of 2023, in the small Mississippi town where he had spent most of his life — known, loved, and woven into his community in ways that complicated every assumption the world had made about what autism meant.
This piece is a tribute to his life, and also a reflection on what his story tells us about the distance between early clinical framings of autism and the fuller, more human understanding that advocates and autistic people themselves have spent decades building. He was more than a case number. He always was.
More to come this April. If there's a topic we haven't covered that you'd like to see, reach out. This is your community, and these conversations belong to all of us.
OUL is not composed of medical, psychological, or educational professionals. The content on this site is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Always consult a qualified professional for guidance specific to your situation.
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