Can you be asked to not tell people at work your autistic?
If you do desire to take on the "activist" role, make sure your job is SECURE, and make sure you're indispensable to the company.
Because of the stigma, I agree with this. If you do your job well, there is no reason to tell you are autistic. If the there is no stigma at all, there is no harm instead to tell. But there is.
I never plan on disclosing my Asperger diagnosis to my job. People think of me as weird and call me names anyway. They already know I'm "different". There is a lot of stigma attached to having Aspergers or being mentally or intellectually different. I know Aspergers isn't a mental illness but people at jobs may view and treat you as crazy, slow, incompetent, etc. if they knew the diagnosis. It's better to be thought of as just a bit eccentric.
Ok so I started by saying I didn't want to be an activist, seems that might not be wholly accurate, maybe I need to give this some more thought. I think I just want to be accepted for who I am, it can be really hard work hiding it. Not that, that would change if I told people. It makes me sad to think that people I've known for years would see me differently, after all I haven't changed.
You work with children, too. Be careful. Parents tend to be over protective of their children. They may not want you working with their children if they find out you're autistic. A lot of people think that autistic people, mentally ill people, or anyone that doesn't seem "stable" shouldn't work with children. I wouldn't tell them about you Asoergers. I agree with your job.
I'm a nurse. Many people suspect that something is wrong with me but I've never told any job about my diagnoses. Many would doubt my competency and ability to handle stressful nursing situations if I were to tell them my diagnoses.
Thank you all for your thoughts, I do wish sometimes that my employer didn't know but we are where we are now. Hopefully a time will come when their isn't a stigma but I don't think I get to see that day. The saddest thing is the children I look after need role models they can identify with, but more often than not they don't even know they autistic. It's like if we don't say it, it will go away.
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“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” Virginia Woolf
PennyFri
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Joined: 22 Apr 2016
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Posts: 53
Location: Australia
I've been having similar thoughts to this. Future generations will probably view today's stigma around autism as primitive and ignorant. Doesn't help much today though...
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