My 11 year old hates everyone - how do I help her?

I hope it works out a little better for your daughter. 

Thank you also, Iain. Apart from a break of a month when things were very awful we have managed to keep her swimming a few times a week and she has become friendly with a couple of the girls there which has been great. Unless the coaches give her a hard time she comes back happier. 
The bullying is psychological (excluding, gas lighting, name calling) and she doesn’t know where to start to cope with it. From what she tells me I don’t think there is any reasonable way to respond to the things the girls say. So mostly she sits in the classroom in breaks and makes paper chains.

I will have a think about whether there is anyone who could be an older supportive friend… Thank you.

Dear Fibonacci Squid. Thank you. It is so good to hear from people who have been through this and come out the other side. I didn’t know about the forums (and probably would have been worried about them) so will look into these. No such thing as too much information at the moment! Thank you.

Thank you, Nexus, for your great advice. Her organisational skills have really struggled this year and I’ll look at what we can do to work on these as this must be making her feel worse too. We have chosen a smaller school which is less pushy academically and hope they will be able to cope with autism. It does feel a lot gentler and there is a dedicated safe space / person as well as a nice librarian (her current safe space / person). Thank you.

Thank you, bees, that is really useful, especially your advice on letting her decompress before trying to address the MH stuff. Thank you!

What are her interests? These can help us offer suggestions that may be paletable in her current state of mind.

For the bullying issues, do you know how these present? Is it excluding/ / talking behind her back, taunting or something more physical?

If it is physical then I would recommend getting some self defence classes that can teach how to negate any acts agains her and to build her confidence on that front.

It may also lead to a fitness interest that can have long term benefits.

While I'm not female, I did have similar issues at this age and found physical activities to be a good release and way to connect to those with similar interests.

I also found an older relative (not too much older - an uncle in my case) was also a useful mentor for me and helped me understand the kind of rules of the world in a way I could process. This is an education that many of us cannot find as most NTs don't know it is needed.

So long as they can use the same sort of comminication tools and are similar enough to have a connection then having a non-judgemental and an "ask anything" approach could be the godsend that I had.

As for your question about how long does it last - it was about 18 months for me until I had stopped taking shot from the bullies and faced them down a few times. The self defence knowledge is so useful when you know how to be able to stop the situation from escalating into violence while whispering a suitably fear inducing threat into their ear - no need to follow though, but just plant the seed that you are crazy enough to actually do it.

A bit of a random bag of advice there - I hope some is of use.

Yeah this sounds quite a lot of my childhood, particularly year seven. Children are cruel. The good news is it does get better.

The secret for me when it came to managing the bullying was to find safe spaces for breaks and lunch times so they could be avoided. For me this was a school greenhouse. Libraries or classrooms or some schools have spaces specifically for students with additional needs (my younger brother uses this a lot). The key fact is that it is supervised by an adult, one who has some understanding of autism and/or preferably one she gets on with.

Maintaining that contact with the outside of school friend is absolutely the right thing to do and when she starts to feel better I'd also recommend looking into an extra-curricular group completely disconnected from school that she'd enjoy. I always did much better at socializing in a structured task based environment.

Moving to a new school in this case I agree is the right move, but there are always some issues with coming in in year 8. Again, extra-curriculars was the secret for me, and the vast majority of my few but close friends weren't actually in my year group.

I also didn't find counselling terribly helpful, mostly because I always felt like I had to be 'better' before I got to the end of the fixed time frame. I had more success with trying to avoid the people.

The autism thing, it takes time to get your head around it. I was diagnosed when I was 20, so for me it wasn't specifically autism it was being 'nerdy' and trying hard in school that I was having a crisis around. It took me several years of active bullying from year 3 to year 8 before I felt able to fully own my quirks, and that was once they started cooling off anyway. It takes everyone different amounts of time to come to terms with it and I'd agree with the others that it's not necessarily something that can be forced.

As she's under 16, this forum is not the place for her. But there are some of online forums that are heavily monitored (your post or message doesn't become visible until approved by a trained adult moderator) which are quite good for finding other people in the same situation and who are dealing with similar stuff. 

You may already be aware of them but I strongly recommend:

Kooth - https://www.kooth.com/ This has articles, a forum where you can discuss things with other youth, and an online counselling and support system with medical professionals should she choose to use it. It is entirely anonymous which she may find supportive and make it easier to open up, and entirely text based, sometimes it's easier to write things down than say them.

Tellmi - https://www.tellmi.help/ This is an app, also anonymous, also heavily monitored. It is just a forum for kids, but there is a large autistic community on there. They also have some articles, and some links to specific charities supporting various specific issues and you can filter for just the things you want to see and block certain topics. 

There are some other resources too, if you look back on my post history you will see I love providing people links, but I don't want to overwhelm you. All I will say for now is it looks dark but it does get better, so much better. Some people choose to say 'school is the best time of your life' but for many autistic people it is the worst, but it does also have a definitive end.

Hope this helped and wasn't too much info and that the new school works better.

She has a good few years of schooling yet, alas. Moving to a school away from her old bullies is good, but how autism aware will the new school be? Is it a smaller school, where these things can be monitored more? What kimd of help has been prescribed already, and how receptive does the new school seem to be in helping to provide that?

Secondary school can present a lot of stressful new rules, so maybe finding systems to help with with her organisational skills might help?

At least with the  summer there will be a break away from it all. Are there any activities she really enjoys? 

Sounds a bit like me in my school days tbh, unfortunately in a world that tells you "there is something wrong with you" because you are autistic, like me back in the day probably the last thing she wants to do is acknowledge it, "autism" (the being different and the bullying) is just this huge curse that feels like it won't ever go away and speaking it's name is anathema because that low self esteem is also the seeds of internalised ableism that have already taken root.

I think maybe if you can just drop it for now and let her come around in her own time and treat the summer holidays as a reset button (at least as much as it can be, even if it's just a break away from the other kids and room to breathe and mentally decompress).
You can unpack and deal with the mental health side after she has a good rest first. (In fact that's best, because doing anything complicated when feeling constantly overwhelmed is just a recipe for disaster.)

The New school is a new chapter, and the most immediately helpful thing is to make sure they don't put her in classes with any kids that bullied her from before. Secondary is not going to be a magical fix, in fact the social rules get more complicted and petty so more difficult to navigate, but if you can get her into an afterschool club based on her interests she might make more meaningful friendships and expand her friend support out from just the friend she is still in contact with currently.

Hope some of that is useful to you and your daughter.