PDA Awareness Day 2017

It’s nearly PDA Awareness Day 15th May 2017.

This year the PDA Society has been hard at work creating new ways to get awareness of PDA into society. Lots of groups, blogs, websites and PDA people and their families have been hard at work spreading as much information about PDA around in the hopes of getting PDA into society’s mind as much as possible. Sadly there hasn’t been much improvement in getting professionals to recognise PDA and most places now refuse to diagnose PDA, preferring to offer an ASD diagnosis instead (or worse, attachment disorder where it’s not warranted). However this doesn’t mean we’ll stop trying, the more we spread the PDA word then the more professionals will have to listen to us, they can’t ignore the masses forever.

So what can we as individuals do?

The PDA Society has created a new mascot, the PDA Panda

We can help spread awareness by adopting the Panda for our Facebook profile pictures. We can print off and give out information about PDA from the PDA Society’s website: PDA Society – what is PDA. Even leaving a few bits of information lying around cafes, libraries, schools, doctors, dentists and children’s centres can help, though please ask for permission before leaving anything as we don’t want to be labelled as litter louts 😉

I have also created a leaflet which I will be handing out and you can print off and use too if you wish: PDA Leaflet

You can also share information about PDA on social media, there is plenty of information available to share; check out Sally Cat’s memes:  Sally Cat’s PDA page

There is also information on the PDA Society website about holding events and groups to help raise awareness of PDA, check the link for more information on how to hold one in your area: http://www.pdasociety.org.uk/blog/2017/05/pda-action-day-15th-may

There is lots of information on campaigning for PDA awareness on the PDA Guidance blog created by Jane Sherwin.

There are lots of ways to spread awareness of PDA and every little helps, even if you only increase awareness in one person then that’s one more person who knows about PDA and maybe they will spread that information along too.

Lets make this year a great year for PDA awareness and hopefully by next year’s awareness day the world will be a little more informed and a little less ignorant.

Good luck.