01/09/2025
Bravo!!
Is Inklings *really* Neuroaffirming – or is that just spin?
We’re being told that the Inklings program is “neuroaffirming now.” To most of us, that means respecting Autistic identity, keeping people safe, and treating us with dignity. But is that what’s really happening?
At the very same time that we are being told this, Telethon Kids Institute and Professor Andrew Whitehouse are standing beside a very different kind of, very recent, research:
- A large trial, run just last year, using TMS – a form of magnetic brain stimulation – on Autistic teenagers and adults (14–40 years old).
The research trial is led by Professor Peter Enticott (Deakin/Monash), but Whitehouse was the principal investigator for the WA site, in his role with The Kids Institute.
In that role, he found and recruited Autistic young people into the study and oversaw how it was run at Telethon Kids Institute (now rebranded "The Kids").
Participants were given 20 sessions of brain stimulation aimed at changing how they communicate socially, by targeting a part of the brain the researchers called “abnormal” in Autism.
🟢 This raises some really big concerns around...
- Identity: Calling Autistic differences “abnormal” and trying to change them is not respect, it is pathologising.
- Safety: No one knows the long-term effects of this kind of brain stimulation on Autistic young people.
- Consent: Can consent ever be fully free when young people are already pressured to “fit in”? And when their parents and carers engage them with this kind of research?
- Trust: If the same team is running brain experiments to physically make Autistic people seem “less Autistic,” how can families trust that Inklings is really about affirmation and not assimilation?
If you were *truly* neuroaffirming, wouldn’t you stay as far away as possible from research that treats Autistic identity as a problem to be corrected - and tries to correct it?
Anything else looks to us like just...spin. Using the word “affirming” while still supporting research that risks harm, and ignores DPROs and the express wishes of the Autistic Community.
Read the study for yourself. We advise taking care of yourself and doing so with support, or skipping it if you think it may impact you negatively.
We know reading and hearing about this stuff is retraumatising; and traumatic in and of itself. So take care with reading on.
The trial is registered under ACTRN12620000890932 and the full protocol is published in journal BMJ.
🟢 Yet! Here is our message of hope and solidarity:
On Monday, 27 October, we will gather on the lawns of Parliament House, Canberra to say:
✊ ️NO to the NDIS Cuts and the harm being done to our community by this government.
✊️ No to Inklings. No to PACT. No to ABA, NDBIs, and the medical model. No to Thriving Kids. No to the mass reassessments; the devaluing of our lives. No to the brutalisation of our Disabled kin; across all Disability types. All for one, and one for all.
We will say YES to the human rights model of Disability, YES to the UNCRPD, and YES to our community as empowered rights-holders — who are never going back to the time where clinicians ruled over us, and who do not need to be fixed.
Disabled people are PEOPLE with human rights. We will stand together and declare that in our nation's capital. It will be a wonderful and historic day. 🥰
We will be joined by the wonderful Senator Jordon Steele-John at 1.40pm on the day, alongside a line-up of other amazing speakers (to be announced).
Come gather as a community — proud, loud, and refusing to be silenced or sent back to the 1950s.
We are with you. Always.
The future remains unwritten.
We can write it - if we stand and hold the pen, together.
✊️🔥❤️
[Image Description: Senator Jordon Steele-John is sitting outdoors in a wheelchair, smiling broadly. He has short curly dark hair, a beard, and is wearing rectangular glasses. He is dressed in a dark suit jacket over a light blue button-up shirt, with the top button undone. His hands are resting together in his lap. The background is filled with lush green foliage, softly blurred, giving the portrait a warm and natural atmosphere.]
