I thought the recent documentary on Channel 4 "Am I Autistic" was much better in terms of its attitude to autism  than previous generalist programmes on the subject. The main presenters where “out” autistic women (I think many people working in the autism field are unaware or closeted autistics) and the general attitude to autism although still regarding it as a somewhat unusual and exotic condition acknowledged the positives as well as the challenges. However, my default tends to be to notice flaws, so I'll focus on some of the interesting contradictions that surfaced for me when watching it.

The programme showcased Jo and JP, who had been aware that they were different all their lives (a sure pointer towards autism in my book) and who were wondering if they were autistic.  There were two autistic women presenters, Georgia and Sam, and a non-autistic narrator, Anna.

I found it paradoxical that Anna, who explained her interest in autism as due to  having an autistic nephew, could say categorically after hearing about Jo's difficulty with small talk "I have trouble with small talk and I'm not autistic" while at the same time claiming that for Jo, the only way to know for sure if she was autistic was to get a diagnosis.

Surely, if the only person who can tell if you are autistic is a clinician, it would also require  a clinician to tell if you're not autistic. If self-identification as autistic is not regarded as definitive until confirmed by a clinician, then the same should apply to being non-autistic (especially perhaps if you have autistic family members since we know that autism runs in families).

We also know all autistic traits are human traits and there is no currently measurable biological marker for autism so essentially a diagnosis is the opinion of  a clinician based on behaviour, self-reporting and family reporting. This makes it very susceptible to bias.

This programme, while supporting the diagnosis by Simon Baron Cohen (the originator of the discredited male brain theory of autism) as the arbiter of whether Jo and JP were autistic, also argued that more males were diagnosed because "females camouflage" their autism.  Thus, whilst they acknowledged that autistic females are under-diagnosed, this was attributed not to the lack of expertise of diagnosticians, but rather blamed on autistic women, because we don’t present like autistic men.

For people who have always felt different in some way, identifying as autistic can be the gateway to self-understanding and finding the courage to be authentic rather than constantly trying to fit a mould of “normality”.   Failing to get a diagnosis because you have managed to hide your differences or because you are female, can be a devastating blow*.  

My concern is that people who "fail" the diagnostic test feel that they are “frauds” living in a no-man’s land; unable to function typically, but denied the possibility to claim and explore a condition which explains their difficulties.

Autism awareness is not evenly distributed throughout society and therefore many autistic people are without access to information that could transform their lives. In this situation formal diagnosis can be helpful - the artist Sonia Boue told me that her autism diagnosis was a positive turning point because it helped her leverage her strengths and recognise some of her challenges were due to her brain wiring rather than personal weaknesses.  However just because something can be helpful does not make it optimal.

The idea that someone is only autistic if they are certified as such by a clinician is equivalent to saying you are only gay if a psychiatrist says so, that your own desires are not what determine your sexuality. In common with many other autistic people I believe that autism needs to be de-medicalised. Like homo-sexuality autism is a natural part of human diversity and needs to be recognised as such and identified by individuals, society and the medical profession rather listed in a psychiatric manual and diagnosed.

Of course autism can be identified by clinicians, in fact they need to be trained to recognise it because it affects the the way treatments for mental and physical conditions are best administered.  This doesn’t mean they are appropriate gatekeepers to autistic identity.   There is an autistic community, and like other communities we need to control our boundaries rather than have them defined by people with agendas and sensibilities that we might not feel aligned with.

* See “Adults’ Experience of an Asperger Syndrome Diagnosis Analysis of Its Emotional Meaning and Effect on Participants’ Lives”  Trevor Powell DClinPsych, Louise Acker, BSc 2015 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088357615588516

I love this cartoon by the brilliant Langdon Bryce (there are lots more on his FB page the Autcast).  It deftly illustrates the way for many autistic adults one of the biggest barriers we face is a culture that regards autism solely as a disability. I think it is more accurate to regard it as a neurology that brings differences, some of which are positive and some of which can be (but are not necessarily) disabling.  In this context I often repeat the quote attributed to Einstein “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”   

The stereotypes about autism result both in autism often being unidentified because the autistic person doesn’t fit them, and also in people not daring to suggest to others that they or a family member might be autistic as this is likely to be regarded as a negative label.  It is often said that there are four times as many autistic men as autistic women, although it is finally being generally recognised that in fact women are underdiagnosed.  

It seems to me that autistic people often choose, or find themselves with, autistic partners and this can happen even if neither party is aware of autism.   Sometimes the realisation of autism comes once their child has been identified or diagnosed as autistic and the parent recognises that they are very similar to the child.  Due to the negative views  of autism that Langdon Bryce encapsulates in his cartoon, coming to this conclusion can be slow and painful.  Sometimes people are willing to accept that a family member might be autistic but are much slower to recognise the autism in themselves. (It’s interesting that it’s acceptable to state categorically “I’m not autistic” without any diagnostic process, whilst some people think that only an accredited diagnostitian can tell if someone is autistic.)

Some time ago (before I was working in the autism field)  I was talking to a neighbour,  Martin, about his thirteen year old daughter  Emma, whom I’d known since she was two.  I knew that Emma was depressed and had been seeing the school counsellor.  Martin told me how worried he and his wife were as things seemed to be getting worse, Emma was no longer seeing her friends and becoming increasingly isolated. She was feeling completely hopeless and indeed appeared suicidal. I wondered if in fact Emma had become depressed because she was isolated rather than the other way round.  Autistic people often develop intellectually more quickly than we develop emotionally and socially.  The social landscape changes rapidly for teenagers,  and autistic young people often feel alientated and no longer able to connect  with others in their age group in this new social environment.

I mentioned that Emma’s developmental trajectory - being intellectually precocious but then in adolecence starting to struggle socially-was something I’d seen in many autistic women and asked if it had occurred to Martin that this might be part of the picture.  It hadn’t. Martin thanked me for my concern and asked me to email him some information about autism in girls and women.  When I next saw him three weeks later I asked him if he’d got the information I’d sent.  He told me he’d received it but hadn’t had time to look at it.  If my child was suicidal I would be desperate to access any information that could be relevant and helpful. I was suprised and saddened that autism must have felt so aversive to Martin that he couldn’t consider it might apply to his daughter . (Later on his wife came  to a training session about autism and appeared to accept that there was autism in the family. She took her daughter to a psychologist with a good understanding of autism and  Emma recovered.)

Recently, I  spent some time talking with a self-identified neurotypical woman about her autistic partner.  She seemed concerned to understand his behaviour better and seemed happy with my responses to her situation and my suggested explanations for her husband’s behaviour.  However  when the possibility that she too may be autistic was raised,  she told me how impossible that was as she was very emotional and that’s why she struggles so much  to understand how her husband  couldn’t get what came so easily to her.  The suggestion that she might also be autistic was unacceptable to her and our conversations came to an end.   I was sad about this for both of us; for her because I didn't see how her narrative could improve her relationship with her autistic husband and children, and for me because I worried that I'd unintentionally colluded with the idea that the problem in the relationship was located in her husbands neurology.

Over time,  I’ve come across many couples where one partner is diagnosed or identified as autistic and the other partner also seems to be autistic but is not aware of this.  Even (or perhaps especially) people who work in the field are vulnerable to this misreading.  A case in point is the author, speaker and consultant Sarah Hendrickx of Hendrickx Associates who  wrote a book about being a neurotypical person in a relationship with a man with Asperger's Syndrome before realising that she is herself autistic.  Despite working in the autism field Sarah was totally unaware for years of her own autism. Ten years on from writing as a neurotypical partner, Sarah is now a proud out autistic woman. When I asked her if she minded being mentioned in this post as someone who feels her relationship is successful and endures because both she and Keith are autistic, she responded  that she was happy to be quoted  “it is entirely the case that we remain deliriously happy and deeply in love after 13+ years because we are both autistic in combination with our knowledge and tolerance of what we both need. Having a good autistic partner for me is like being able to breathe out in a world where I often feel like I'm holding my breath and know that someone can see all of who I am and will not judge or disapprove.”

A recent women’s hour piece on “Late Diagnosis Autism” began with the statement that “of course there are more men and boys with the conditions”.  To me there is no “of-course” about this, it’s a non-fact; what we know is that more men and boys are diagnosed with autism. However we also know that most autistic adults are undiagnosed and many are misdiagnosed. This mismatch between popular belief and reality reminds me of the account that lesbianism was never made illegal, unlike gay male sex, because Queen Victoria didn’t believe it existed.

My guess (and at the moment we don’t have the data to know the truth of this, we can only make informed guesses) is that there are probably as many autistic women as autistic men. It’s just that, as is often the case, the men have got all the attention.  

In the groups I run for autistic people there are generally more women than men (I suspect this is because autistic women, just like non-autistic women, tend to be more social than men). Autscape (an annual conference/retreat for autistic people) seems to attract equal numbers of men and women, and a quite a few non-binary and trans people as well.  

Jane Garvey presenting the women’s hour piece wondered if women are not being identified because “we are more adept at managing or masking the symptoms”. I am not sure that this is the case; I think that, just as non-autistic women have different behaviour profiles to non-autistic men, so autistic women have different behaviour profiles to autistic men.  
I conceptualise it like paint.  Say you have yellow paint (autism), if you add it to blue paint (men) you get green paint, however if you add it to red paint (women) you get orange paint.  Of course, if you assume that autism looks like green paint you won’t identify that orange paint is autism too.  However, if you are able to split colours and see what is really going on you might notice that there is as much yellow in the orange as there is in the green.

A way to address this imbalance would be to have as many autistic people as possible talk openly about autism. We need enough of us out there so that the experiences and attitudes of specific individuals are not taken to define autism more generally. This is particularly important because autism is so heterogeneous -  autistic people are outliers in all directions – and both autistic individuals and the medical practitioners currently invested with the power to grant diagnoses are susceptible to catching on to a particular trait of autism and thinking a person can’t be autistic without it.  I’ve lost count of the number of autistic women who were initially told by professionals that they could not be autistic for invalid reasons, such as “you looked me in the eye” or “we’re having a coherent conversation”.

I think that we need to be challenging all the stereotypes about autism including that there are more autistic men than autistic women.  If you are interested in learning more about how autism affects both women and men you might like to come to one of my training sessions or indeed if you are autistic yourself or wondering if you could be, you might like to listen to comments about Exploring Identifying as Autistic and get in touch if you're interested in coming along.  As ever I welcome comments and responses to this post.

Autism and women seems to be one of the bright new shiny things (that actually if you were looking were always there) currently being picked up by the media.  The plus side of this is that we (autistic women) are becoming more visible in our various guises.  This enables more women to recognise their autism, and parents of autistic girls to consider the possibility that perhaps their daughter might be autistic rather than deliberately difficult and awkward.  
It is sometimes suggested there should be special criteria for diagnosing women.  I disagree with this as I would argue that the underlying traits of autism are the same they just manifest differently in different people (and sex is a major difference between people).  Think about colour mixing, if you add yellow to blue you get green, which is very different to the purple you get if you add yellow to red.  However the yellow is still yellow, you just have to be aware that it looks different depending on how much is present and what colour it is being mixed with.

I don’t think medical practitioners should be the gatekeepers for autism any more than they should be the gatekeepers of sexuality. (I believe autism like homosexuality should be removed from diagnostic manuals and re categorised as a naturally occurring part of human diversity.)  Like homosexuality autism can only now be identified by observing behaviour, and this is necessarily contextual and dependant on the knowledge and sensitivity of the observer. Diagnostians have been known to refuse a diagnosis of autism on various spurious grounds my own list includes “he/she looked me in the eye”  (this to me is like telling someone they are not gay because they have flirted with someone of the opposite sex – it demonstrates a very restrictive and stereotyped understanding of the condition as well as ignoring the fact that people are able to behave in ways that do not reflect their inner feelings). My colleague at AutAngel, David Mery found a more extensive list gathered on the Everyday Aspie blog.  

However we are where we are, and currently medical practitioners are the people authorised to diagnose autism, and however much self-diagnosis with peer confirmation might be accepted within the autistic community many people only feel they are “really” have a right to claim their autistic identity after the benedictionof an official diagnosis.
So while autistic women are getting some airing in the media the idea (I would say myth) that there are more autistic men than women does not seem to be challenged, the posited ratio just seems to move a little.  I believe that there are as many autistic women as men, I base this belief in observing the world around me and the people I come across both those identifying and/or diagnosed as autistic and others.  I realise that people can brandish statistics at me that demonstrate I am wrong, but this begs the question of the validity of these statistics (just like you can find a quote in the bible supporting most views, you can gather statistics to show most anything) as they won’t include undiagnosed women and therefore could just be showing up the bias of diagnosticians. Not to mention the fact that due to the low profile of autistic women until recently women were very unlikely to even present for diagnosis.

Interestingly if you are a woman wondering if you might be autistic I think there are better books available to support you in examining this than there are for men in this position.  I have always recommended Women from Another Planet, as it is written by autistic women and unlike individual autobiographies, offers many different perspectives on what autistic lives can look like. This was published in 2003 so these women featured in it are real ground breakers in terms of being aware of their autism and willing and able to share their stories.   It is idiosyncratically organised (as befits something the product of a group of early autistic adaptors working together) and densely packed with a rich variety of experiences and viewpoints.

A more recent book on the subject is Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder by Sarah Hendrickx. This is organised in a more immediately accessible and convenient manner as well as giving diverse women the opportunity to speak to us. Sarah’s own voice comes through with engaging honesty and succeeds in addressing difficult topics with the consideration they deserve while maintaining her light humorous touch.  With the small caveat that Sarah uses the term “women with autism” where I would prefer “autistic women”  I would unreservedly recommend this book and hope that it will help increase the awareness that women are just as likely to be autistic as men. 

In fact it seems to me that there are many couples where both partners are autistic but only the man is diagnosed - because autism is so stigmatised it can be hard to address this but I think that decreasing stigma, and increasing awareness of autistic women will be helpful to these couples and society generally.

I recently offered autism awareness training to the residents and staff of a therapeutic community.   As usual I began with an overview of autism and how it is seen in the community at large.  When I expressed my support of the current National Autistic Society campaign to speed up the diagnostic process one of the staff commented “ It is interesting that just as we in mental health, and especially here in this community, are moving away from diagnosis and labelling – because we think it’s important to treat people as individuals – you are advocating more diagnosis.”

At this point I need to clarify that what I think is important is the identification rather than diagnosis of autism.  However lack of a diagnosis can lead to the identification of autism not being accepted.   The neurological landscape is such that some neurological atypicalities (including autism) are regarded as diagnosable medical conditions rather than a natural part of human diversity.  This means that identification of autism is often only accepted if it is confirmed by an official diagnosis. I hope this will change but currently for many people the only way to be accepted as autistic, even within their own family and community, is to get validation from health professionals in the form of a diagnosis.

So I think it is useful for others in a therapeutic community to know if a resident is autistic.  This is for the same reason that others need to know what language individual residents speak; this seems so obvious it does not need stating. However spoken language is only one mode of communication. It is believed that up to 90% of communication is non-verbal, and one of the traits of autism is a difference in non-verbal communication. Without awareness of that difference, understanding is difficult.  Similarly various assumptions are made about “normal” development and what health would look like, but “normal development” for an autistic person is atypical and does not follow the usual trajectory.

If you consider life to be a journey, people who get lost on that journey might find themselves in a therapeutic community.  The ultimate aim of the therapeutic community is to enable people to continue their life journey in the larger community.
We use maps to plot our paths on journeys. We find our starting point and our destination and establish the best path from here to there. However it is impossible to do this if you don’t know where you’re starting from,  even if you know where you want to go.  You need to know where you are to start travelling in the right direction. You need to know where someone else is if you are to accompany them. If you don’t know someone is autistic it is hard to help them progress on their life journey as you won’t have a realistic idea of their starting point or their mode of travel.

I was talking to an occupational therapist about our respective work.  She asked me how I got into autism training and I explained that I became interested in autism and indeed passionate about spreading information about autism  due to discovering I was autistic five years ago. Her head jerked up, she looked straight at me and asked, well almost snapped, “How do you know you are autistic?  Who diagnosed you?”   I got the impression that if I was not able to answer these questions to her satisfaction, my autism would be considered invalid.  In that moment I was glad that I had an official diagnosis, so I could be believed and also bothered that it was needed for me to be believed.

The question that I asked myself is who should be believed about autism – people identifying as autistic or the disparate professionals empowered by the establishment to deliver diagnosis (which even their own peers or other groups of professionals often dispute)?

While it seems that there are people who are clearly autistic and others who are clearly not, there will always be some whose neurology is more difficult to call.  This does not negate the concept of autism, or the fact that autism can be an important part of a person’s identity. I would however argue that the definition of autism is cultural rather than scientific.
 
The fact that there is bi-sexuality and that some people are initially attracted to the members of one sex but then spend the lives with someone of the other sex does not invalidate the gay movement or the fact that homosexuality is a condition.  Homosexuality was removed from the DSM (the US psychiatric bible) as a result of pressure from the gay movement, society not the condition itself changed.   

In the brilliantly engaging book about maths for non-mathematicians “How not to be wrong - the Hidden Maths of Everyday Life” Jordan Ellenberg mentions how useful it was to think about how things should be defined rather than what they were.   If we look at autism from this point of view the issue is not what specific neurological differences underpin autism (nobody claims to have discovered this yet anyway) but who should define autism.  Should it be people who have studied psychology or medicine and looked at autism through that lens  or should it be people whose life experience resonates with the  current  view of autism and the autistic people they connect with? 

I find the insistence on the need for an “objective scientific” diagnosis when we have yet to identify biological markers somewhat bizarre (maybe it is my autistic literalism that says if you are saying it is more reliable and scientific, you need to evidence to support this).  It looks to me like a power grab by a group of people who have made careers in a field they see shifting away from their control.

Uta Frith, for example, previously suggested that Asperger’s Syndrome might better be regarded, not as “a very mild form of deficit” but as “compensatory learning in the presence of a severe deficit”.  This statement appears to acknowledge that it is not possible to calibrate the level of difference or difficulty experienced by an individual from the outside.  However last year she claimed in a radio debate  “Rethinking what is normal”  that many people are inappropriately claiming they “have autism” when actually they ‘just’ have social difficulties.  I fail to see how Uta Frith can legitiately claim for herself and other similar professionals the ability to know what is inside another person.  In the October 2014 issue of the Psychologist she says  “If the voices of people with autism are also heard they will give an important counterbalance to researchers’ and professionals’ pronouncements”   but apparently only if the professionals get to validate which voices count as truly autistic.

My belief is that if we start to think of autism as a way of describing a natural part of the human neuro-diverse constellation rather than a definition of a medical  disorder that needs to be diagnosed by a professional, we’ll be moving forwards.

There is an ongoing controversy about whether autism is a difference or disability, an ordinary condition or an extraordinary one.  This debate sometimes seems to cause downright hostility between different camps.  Why, you might wonder, does this question matter?  It matters because our assumptions and thoughts about autism affect how we treat autistic people and how we might respond to the suggestion that we, or a family member or friend, is autistic (and yes, this can happen to anyone!)

Unsurprisingly, this issue is especially hotly contested amongst autistic people, their families and autism professionals and researchers.  Assuming that difference and disability are irreconcilable ways of regarding autism strikes me as a false dichotomy, rather like the nature/nurture debate, in the last century.  That seems to have been resolved by the realisation that nature and nurture interact in complex ways to form an individual character.  I would contend that the same is true for difference and disability in relation to autism.

One reason why autism is so contested is that it is so difficult to define.  We know that most autistic adults are undiagnosed and diagnosis is made subjectively by behaviour rather than by indisputable biological features.  The invisibility and variability of autism allow extreme stereotypes and dubious statistics to flourish.  Indeed it can be difficult to be sure what we are talking about when we discuss autism. However the existence of autism as a unique condition, despite its varied expressions, has been recognised at an official level with the passing of the 2009 Autism Act which also recognises that appropriate support and accommodation can help autistic people succeed. 

To enable the accommodations to be made for it,  autism has to be recognised, and there’s the rub – autism is a highly stigmatised condition that presents challenges, so people would rather not have it.  Also many people working in health, social services or education have had minimal or no autism training and so are unable to identify autism. Even if they can, they are often reluctant to label their patients or students with a condition frequently seen as entirely negative.  Parents can resist the idea that their children are autistic and adults seeking help can be shocked to hear the suggestion that they have a lifelong neurological difference rather than a temporary difficulty.

It is frequently stated that only 15% of adult autistics are in full time employment; I think this figure is misleading  because many working autistics, often found in high-level and well paid jobs, are undiagnosed. Or they might have been refused a diagnosis by a professional who, like Baron Cohen, would “withhold the diagnosis” If someone with the traits of autism appeared to be managing their life.  An article in the Guardian last year began with a photo with the caption “In the UK, 77% of those with autism are still, as adults, relying on their parents for support.”  Clearly this sort of (mis) information would be frightening to any parent whose child just received an autism diagnosis.  

I believe this fear around identifying or diagnosing autism does real damage by preventing the personal growth and understanding that could be enabled by appropriate diagnosis.  As a parent says of her son’s diagnosis in Andrew Solomon’s book “Far from the Tree”  “We could make sense of things that had previously been inexplicable to us; we felt validated…..A Cray supercomputer is used for really complex intense computing…It runs so hot it has to be kept in a liquid cooling bath.  It requires a very specific kind of TLC.  And is the Cray defective because it requires this kind of nurturing environment for its functioning? No! It kicks ass! That’s what my kid is like.  He needs support, needs attention, and is amazing”

Some people seem to fear that if we accept that autism is a common condition and that most autistics are fairly ordinary, this would detract from acknowledging that autism is also a serious condition  – a  major neurological difference that can cause severe difficulties that are not always obvious to observers.  I think autism is best viewed as a difference that is also a potential disability.  I think we need to recognise and celebrate the diversity within the human race and within autism.

The existence of successful high profile people like Stephen Fry admitting they have bipolar disorder   has not subtracted from the recognition the bipolar disorder is a serious condition needing treatment, but it has offered hope and an alternative outlook to those affected by the condition. Importantly it also enables people to “come out” and find community with others in a similar situation. It would be great if more autistic people “came out” although Wikipedia already presents an interesting list of potential autistic roles models.

More awareness of positive role models would help normalise autism and make it easier for people to admit to having the condition. Accepting it as a difference that can be disabling would encourage people to be open to the understanding offered by the diagnosis and help them to get any support they might need to live fulfilling lives and be in a position to contribute fully to society. 

We need a culture change about autism similar to what has evolved in relation to homosexuality;  whereas before 1967 homosexuality was illegal, and even for decades after that there were no out gay MPs, now there are several and it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexuality.  This culture change is a virtuous circle we can all contribute to.

I was at a conference recently when one of the other speakers ( psychologist )  referred to autism as a “Gucci diagnosis” he said that he had become quite protective of the diagnosis as he found inappropriate people wanting it. He felt it needed to be guarded so it kept its meaning for those who really warranted it.

I guess this idea fits with another current orthodoxy which is that to qualify for an autism diagnosis you have to be significantly disabled by the condition.  In other words if you have worked hard and overcome the barriers that autism, or attitudes to autism, place in your path, you are not autistic – however if you experience the same barriers but don’t overcome them you are autistic.  Seems to me that is tantamount to making a diagnosis a prognosis.  Autism is a lifelong condition, so if you have it, it is not going to go away, although if you are lucky you may find ways of mitigating the negative effects on your life – but if you do that it seems some people will dispute the validity of your diagnosis.  As Landon Bryce says in his cartoon “one way to make sure autistic people never succeed is to make failure part of your definition of autism” (https://www.facebook.com/thautcast/posts/118261778354172 )

My own take is that there is significant stigma attached to Autism. I experience this on a daily level when people saying to me  “you don’t look Autistic”  think they are  complimenting me.  However the stigma and misinformation  that suggests anyone can “look autistic” and autistic is a dreadful way to be is being slowly dissolved at the edges.  There is more appearing in the media about the entire autistic spectrum and some celebrities are coming out as autistic and talking about their experiences of the condition Darryl Hannah http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/daryl-hannah-autism-terrified-fame_n_4002697.html and Paddy Consendine  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8440399/Paddy-Considine-Knowing-I-have-Aspergers-is-a-relief.html  spring to mind in this respect.  So yes things are improving vis-à-vis the cultural baggage associated with an autism diagnosis, but I’m not sure we’ve reached Primark, let alone Gucci.

Sometimes participants in an autism awareness session query the whole concept of autism because they or someone they know exhibits behaviour flagged up as an autistic trait during the training session.

I can find this hard to respond to, because as Lorna Wing said “nature never draws a line without smudging it” .   I tend to use analogies to explore my contention that although the category of autism cannot be set in stone it is still useful.  If someone has felt sad and despondent, or even fleetingly suicidal, it does not necessarily mean either that they have experienced depression or that depression does not exist. If someone has felt attracted to a person of the same sex, it does not necessarily mean that they are gay or that homosexuality does not exist, if someone has failed to hear something it does not mean that they are deaf or that deafness does not exist……………

You get my drift.  Human traits all exist in a complex and constantly changing context.  Just as behaviours that might be considered to denote homosexuality in one culture are usual amongst heterosexuals  in another culture  (when I went on a trip to Florence as an art student we were all surprised by the public affection men showed each other) so behaviours considered “autistic” in one time and place might not be considered “autistic” in another.

However I sometimes feel that individuals at trainings are seeking my assurance that they personally are not autistic.  This is not something that I feel able to offer as it is well known that most adult autistics are currently undiagnosed[1]and so it is not impossible that someone attending one of my sessions and recognising the autistic traits I describe in themselves could be autistic.  Of-course more exploration and research would be required before coming to that conclusion, but if I assured participants that because they are functioning well in life they could not be autistic I would be buying into the myth that autistics can’t be well functioning flourishing individuals.  I would helping to shore up the concept of autism as a negative prognosis rather than a helpful diagnosis.


[1] http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2011/may/2018most-adults-with-autism-go-undiagnosed2019-new-findings