Autism Resource Centre - Regina

Excellent service

Great people.

A great service in our community.

Awesome staff and resources for young adults learning to manage autism.

Excellent group of people!

I had a fun evening painting a winter scene. It was very relaxing.

I'm an autistic adult with PTSD who sought help from this center to build my employment skills. At first, they seemed mediocre. Most of the activities they had me doing were too easy for me and not really targeting the areas I really needed help with. It kind of felt like their program was more designed for people who have comorbid cognitive disability as well as being autistic. Things got really bad when I found out that the cooking program I was looking forward to was inaccessible to me because it was not designed to actually accommodate autistic sensory processing issues. Specifically, the combination of them choosing the recipes and requiring all participants to eat the meals they prepare is not accessible for people who have sensory or other issues limiting their diets, which is very common among autistic people. (It also strikes me as infantilizing to insist on dictating what foods adults choose to eat.) I started crying because I'd been really looking forward to this program, and was met with absolutely no empathy, just a cold encouragement to keep working at my assigned task. I tried to do so, but was too distraught, and decided to stop and try to discuss the issue further. I ended up getting more and more upset and had what I believe to be a combination of an autistic meltdown combined with PTSD flashback, during which I started self-harming. At this point, they decided to flat-out pretend I was invisible, likely some misguided attempt at "extinction". Even when I expressed suicidal ideation, they ignored me. I am honestly unsure if they'd have continued ignoring me if I'd actually made a suicide attempt. I ended up calling my parents to come pick me up and then calling a suicide hotline, and stayed on the line to the suicide hotline until my parents arrived. A few days later, my parents and I had a meeting with them to discuss the event, in the hopes that they might be willing to make some changes to avoid causing a similar crisis in the future. However, the changes they proposed were entirely in the wrong direction - they wanted permission to kick me out and put me on the city bus if I had another meltdown, and they wanted me to start wearing a bra. (My father found it ironic, incidentally, that the woman telling me to wear a bra was dressed in far more revealing clothing than I was.) Again, this demand reflects a lack of consideration for autistic accessibility needs, as I attempted to explain to them that I can't wear a bra due to sensory processing issues. Overall, I got the impression that they saw autism as a behavioral problem rather than a neurodevelopmental condition, and moreover, that they didn't really see me as a human being deserving of empathy and compassion.