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After dedicating her earliest years of motherhood to the noble pursuit of adding to the stigmatising surrounding autism, Lennox Head mum Delilah Clementè (44) has now done a complete turn around on the condition.
Originally from suburban Brisbane, Delilah found herself in the Northern Rivers after an insurance pay out for a whiplash injury she received during a three-car pile-up on Corro drive in the early 2010s.
Since then, she’s immersed herself with the medical freedom community, claiming that she’s cured her recurring neck pain with a mix of CBD, THC and other essential oils.
Gradually, she began to question modern medicine. Namely childhood vaccine – because she read somewhere that they can cause autism – which she thought was the worst thing in the world, at the time.
After shacking up with a succesful local hospitality operator and having a few kids, Delilah made a point of telling everybody that would listen that her kids were much less likely to suffer from neurodivergence because she had done her research.
Then the pandemic happened, and the rest of society gave up trying to argue with anti-vaxxers. Her raw and honest opinions about the most succesful medical achievements in human history were no longer a novelty. In fact, they were quite boring.
Delilah then turned her attention to ‘the education system’ – who she believes feeds our kids just as many lies as ‘big pharma’.
It soon became clear that this war against underfunded public schools was never going to be as easy as putting her children at risk of whooping cough and measles.
Now, after eventually giving up on bold plans to homeschool her kids, and the lack of any form of ‘authoritative tones’ in her household – she’s starting to think that maybe her 9-year-old free-range son Hendrix could ‘be on the spectrum’.
This conclusion has forced her to make contact with her lifelong arch-nemesis. The local GP.
Unfortunately, the local quack, who has diagnosed countless young patients with autism over the course of her career, seems to think that Hendrix might just lack any form of discipline – and maybe that’s an issue that the NDIS probably can’t fix.
“Do you know how undiagnosed autism is amongst young boys?” says Delilah, who spent the best part of the last decade throwing around stats about how autism had actually been spiking in young boys.
In an ironic turn of events, Delilah will now have to engage with even more medical professionals, as she begins around GPs until someone affirms her current set of beliefs.
