Girls and Women and Autism: What’s the difference? - Sarah Hendrickx

[Music] I work as an independent trainer speaker consultant assessor workplace Assessor I've done coaching I ran a mentoring project autism mentoring project about seven years I've written six six books on autism including one on women and girls I'm also autistic myself I have two autistic children an autistic partner many in denial family members who are very likely to be on the autistic spectrum so a whole bunch of experience in personal and professional kind of bits and bits and pieces really so what we're going to talk about today is is females and I like to kind of I'm sure most of you are kind of aware that there's been this fairly new ish idea about females and autism but I think it's important to note that that it's not a definitive gender split we what we're going to talk about today is not it's not really female autism it's just a different way that autism might present itself and that can present itself in any gender at all and equally we can see females who are much more typically traditional in terms of their autism profile so I think that's important because I think sometimes you know we kind of go this is women this is men and it's not really like that it's it's a little bit more kind of spread and different different than that so that's that's the first thing to kind of get out of the way what i want to do today is first of all i want to tell you a little bit about my experience I'm a late diagnosed autistic person and then we're going to talk about what happened why the girls got missed for decades and decades what autism looks like in girls some of the particular things that are seem to be very particular in in this type of profile that comes up as a particular issue why the girls are getting missed through diagnosis still and what we can do about that what we need to be flagging up to clinicians and teachers and schools and everybody about what what this autism really looks like and then we'll think about some kind of ideas of how we support people and then we'll have some time for questions at the end if that's okay so I think first of all let me tell you about my myself this is me I'm the one on the right if you're not sure I was diagnosed in in my in my 40s I know I don't look that old but thank you by the time I had my diagnosis it sounds a bit weird I I had all of these things I had a master's degree in autism I'd already written six books I'd delivered more than a thousand training sessions seven years managing his mentoring project everybody else in my family was suspected or diagnosed and actually I my I rip my partner in I key through starts at the front here and we wrote a book together about our relationship a long long time ago where I definitively said I am NOT autistic I'm a bit odd I'm very clearly a bit neurodiverse I have lots of anxiety I have lots of odd things but I'm definitely not autistic because like many professional people all of my learning about autism had told me that autism looks like Keith and Sheldon and Raymond and they all kind of looked the same to me and I didn't look like that I had far too many experiences was far too proactive was it used to getting too far too much trouble to be autistic because what we always learned was that autistic people said no to everything so their lives are quite small they were quite shelter they're just avoided change like the plague were loners they hid themselves away and that wasn't me so I couldn't possibly be or autistic as the years have gone by and actually it's been meeting more and more autistic women professionally that I started to think hang on a minute that is absolutely exactly my life story and over many many years and with this general kind of knowledge that's come forward I realized actually that I was autistic too and went and got a diagnosis so the reason it took me so long despite working in this field for so long is because I'm female because I'm intelligent and because I'm a people watcher and a studier of people and I'm a damn good mascar so this person you see in front of you today is having a nice time and it's all going to be good the person that will be sitting in the car on the way home might be crying will likely be completely nonverbal and will be incapable of doing anything else for the rest of the day so that it's a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde kind of life this sort of stuff we go out we do our thing and then we go away and everything kind of crumbs crashing down it can be hard to believe but I'm sure many of you in here that's the picture you see with some of your girls is that they are super cheerful on the face of it nobody's gonna see that we're struggling and working really hard behind closed doors boof shutdown meltdown everything kind of changes so so that's why I've kind of got so far and the ability to logically systemize people is a huge benefit in it and a huge skill what what I see a lot is that there are huge numbers of older autistic women coming for diagnosis now because we're knackered you get to this age in your 40s and you just go you know what I can't be doing this anymore I try and I try to some recognition in the room I think most 40 year old women in a kurd but autistic ones particularly knackered you're trying to fit in you're trying to be liked you're trying to get it right and whatever you do it just doesn't quite work and in the end you just go sorry I'm just going to be me and there's a huge liberation in that diagnosis the amount of people that come for assessment and they say I am so relieved to be autistic and we have this idea in the past that was an autism diagnosis is a terrible tragedy but we have this generation of older women that are just going please tell me I'm autistic it explains everything in my life and introduces them to a whole kind of other community of other people one of the even bigger numbers of people coming forward are mothers of autistic children because again in the past we knew this stuff was genetic and we used to say oh who else in the family's a bit peculiar must be dad and mum got off the hook and now we're starting to go maybe it's mum as well you know who knows where we are we know that autistic people have a tendency to be in relationships with other autistic people so if you always thought it was just dad sorry love it might well be you as well it's definitely one of you or potentially kind of kind of both of you because they're everybody's kind of looking for this this this male is male presentation so I was apparently a gifted child very high IQ I could speak full sentences and nine months old which sounds like some kind of weird horror film of some baby kind of spouting stuff out of out of its mouth or like Stewie from Family Guy I was considered to be shy and neurotic I had a lot of tics I was quite yeah quite a show I quite odd little child in a world of my own obviously we're talking here 1970s so no-nos burger syndrome no version of autism that covered women no version of autism that covered people with no learning disability that it just wasn't there there was no way anybody was going to think there was anything wrong with me I was not a particularly numbers person and again traditionally we always think that autism is about numbers I was a words person and still AM I write books I write poetry I write novels I love words I read signposts I learn languages words are absolutely the thing that I notice in the world I'm fascinated and interested by all of those I was a mimic I can do impressions of all farm animals bad impressions of virtually every accent in the world I take off people and I always did and it made me a clown and being a clown is a very effective way to get away with being not very great socially if you can make people laugh at least for a short time you have some superficial buy-in and some superficial status you don't get much beyond that and that's always certainly been a problem for me that I can come in and make people laugh but then I don't really have much else to say I don't know what to do with myself I become very awkward and kind of have to leave so the depths of friendships aren't really there but it buys you in a little bit when you're at school you're funny you can come along you're out you're okay and if you're funny you get away with quite a lot of stuff your verbal ability with words masks a huge amount and this is something that we see in the girls their ability to speak be articulate be vocal fools everybody into thinking that underneath that there is a really strong developed sophisticated social network and often it's not it's just a whole series of scripts or learned behaviors or mimicking and those sorts of things so we we need to watch out for the chatty girls into thinking that they're they're perfectly perfectly fine Here I am sitting with my friend Amanda who's gently touching me on the arm Amanda and I lost touch for about 30 odd years also found each other on Facebook found out that we lived 200 meters away from each other and anybody like to guess what Amanda does for a living she is head of an autism unit so Amanda found her vocation looking after me at brownie camp in very very early life she doesn't seem to be very grateful she doesn't actually know that I've been showing this picture around the world for the last 10 years either so it's probably very happy about that either so as a child I was a very organized kind of kid I was definitely a tomboy again this is something that we will see in the girls like models I like cars I like making things out of wood I liked organizing stuff very frustrated that I could never work out a perfect system for Lego do you do it by colored you do it by sized you do it by function that kind of stuff made my head hurt as a child how do you organize Lego efficiently I still organize the quality Street at Christmas they all had to have an equal number of every color and if everyone - anyone took one I would have to eat one of all of the others to equal them all up that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it was clearly clever had no concept of how to learn always considered lazy if you get C's and B's when people think you're you're capable of getting A's nobody would ever consider that that might be some kind of learning difficulty you're just lazy that's all that happens you clearly are capable but but you're just not doing the work whereas for me I didn't know what else to do I could get a B or a C with no effort whatsoever what was the point of an a didn't really understand why or what the purpose of learning was I organized all of my family's finances I did all of the family shopping I had a box set of campsite toilets rated by how long you got for your Tempe in the shower that was my idea of fun my birthday parties were spent with ten very elderly people all playing cards and cribbage when everybody else was going to McDonald's again that was my choice and my idea of fun so just a slightly odd child nobody would have thought there was anything problematic about me I was I was doing alright I was just a slightly lazy ordered child and then the teenagers kick in and again we shall hear that this is a major problem for a loss of our young women that's me at the age of 19 looking terrified as a baby probably realizing that it's my baby and I've now got to look after it that baby is now 31 and taller than me so I can't beat her in a fight anymore which is which is difficult she also has grandchildren who are clearly a little neurodiverse although not yet diagnosed so teenager is highly vulnerable very much wanted to fit in obsessed my obsessions were with boys and with being liked and with fit with with with fitting in I was a self Harmer I used to cut the names of boys names into my arms very poor judgment and and if you're quite bright academically this really confuses people what is the matter with you you are so smart and yet you're so stupid I would put myself into dangerous situations believed took everything at face value couldn't read hidden agendas and rather than into our traditional understanding this idea of not being able to read hidden agendas kind of ends up making you not get involved in things for a lot of girls it means that you end up saying yes to things because you can't work out that you shouldn't so so there's that there's a kind of proactiveness that we often see in females that you tend not quite so much to see in males more problems more difficulties more more issues there was a woman a piece of research that I read which really made massive sense it's a woman she's called Vinh garden cleaners a Dutch woman who works in a substance misuse clinic in Holland and she seeing all these people coming through with substance misuse issues and then realizing that actually these people were likely to be on the autistic spectrum so she started screening them fought for autism and she noticed this really clear difference between the males and the females and what she concluded was that the women were having more life events so whereas the men would have one job one house one relationship still be living at home whatever the women were having multiple jobs multiple relationships multiple crises because this inability to predict consequences this inability to read hidden agendas rather than stopping you do things it was actually making you go I could do that I could do that and because the judgments that you were making weren't contextually great those judgments weren't panning out so they were bad job choices bad relationship choices bad but you know life choices and they kept failing so it ended up with this huge list of women having all these experiences and the men having very short experiences because that same cognitive process was actually making them resist kind of having those those experiences that's really borne out in my my experience in relationship I've had probably 35 to 40 jobs I've had multiple relationships multiple house modes multiple crises and chaos in my life My partner Keith with virtually the same age he's had two jobs in the whole of his life a very small number of relationships his first relationship was very late in his 30s completely different experience and yet cognitively our diagnosis is identical so interestingly there's something about this female type profile that kind of often just wants to go and do stuff but doesn't necessarily have the judgment to go actually is that the best thing for me I do I have the ability is this gonna pan out so often and this is something that I've met so many women that's exactly the same our lives are way too chaotic for any ones who initially believed that that could be autistic behavior but it's absolutely fit absolutely is so copying people mimicking people watching people again we'll learn a bit more about this as we go along my dad used to say I was all oh levels and no common sense and that's it it's it's this academic ability which is about being linear it's about being retaining knowledge having memory but then the social world is abstract you're guessing all of the time you've got to read people read situations work stuff out and that kind of very clear cut I think is it's very very definitive in autism being really good at making sense of things but really not so great just winging it and trying to kind of work out what's going on and on a much more general sort of level so I didn't do terribly well academically got a got a few fewer levels went to live in a squat was drinking large amounts of alcohol by the time I was 16 17 very vulnerable got into some very unpleasant difficult situations with people that I thought were okay but I couldn't read them at all and that's continued pretty much all my life everything was exhausting going to the shops is exhausting being out in town by myself makes me dizzy just this weird sense of all these years thinking why can't I just get on with life in the same way that other people do because I'm bright enough what on earth is wrong with me but there was nothing kind of definitively kind of you know obvious so the conclusion that I made as many people make is I'm just crap at life that's it that's the only conclusion I can have is I'm just lazy I just can't can't kind of get this stuff together can't make friends we know the light hurts me the aircon hurts me everything hurts me no make no sense of that whatsoever and then the diagnosis just explains everything as I said a lot of these middle-aged kind of women are coming forward now and going that's it that absolutely explains my existence and the autistic life and the diagnosis and sometimes people say well why bother diagnosing when somebody's 40 or 50 or 80 or 90 and my experience of meeting and working with people who are having that diagnosis is just this weight that is lifted off someone that says none of this is your fault you process things differently than the majority of people that live in the world that you live in it's not your fault you're doing really well actually given the tools that you've been given this very this very social changeable sensory world that you live in that's autism people change sensory that's it and that's the world we live in is a world that a lot of autistic people just find a constant battle because cognitively were kind of struggling to make sense of all of those kind of things and what the diagnosis allows people to do and what it allowed me to do was to construct a kind of framework for a more autistic life and that is about thinking about what am I good at what's my capacity not comparing myself to other people and saying well they do that therefore I should be able to one of the big things I think that's a real struggle to get over is genuinely saying I can't do that in the same way that other people do if I do a full day of work I need a day off afterwards I cannot get back in and do that all over again despite being bright despite being able I just don't have the capacity to do that and that's a hugely valuable thing to be able to say that you managed all of your life by looking after your well-being and finding ways to meet the obligations which we all have whether it's jobs or kids or families or whatever but by trying to manage your own well-being at the same time so having a good person in my life my keith is is is absolutely it he's these the one person that I can be entirely myself with and that's extraordinary important when you're constantly being something else forever it for everyone else I live in the middle of nowhere in in Wales there's an awful lot of people in the southeast of England there's not many in Wales and I look out of my window at a mountain and everything is just very very empty and very very quiet and that's that's that's wonderful I managed to I'm very lucky I can work kind of when I want to and how I want to and to be able to do the things that I am relatively good at to minimize the things that I'm less good at so I don't answer emails I don't answer the phone I don't answer the door anything kind of hassle e then then Keith is like my aunt Beyonce of the autism world I have people that do things for me because I'm too precious to do them myself but it's just understanding that how do I give all my all to do the stuff I can do but then I need to find other people to kind of manage the stuff that genuinely absolutely just destroys me in entirely I have loads of routines I have loads of schedules there's a huge bunch of scaffolding that makes me look a lot more flexible than I actually am a huge amount of time spent staring at schedules and rewriting lists planning exactly how long things are going to take I always bring my food with me wherever I go and very very I don't like because it means I don't have to go into a canteen I don't have to choose I don't have to go to a shop I don't have to lose my break so I ate the same food over and over again for days and days and weeks on end sometimes so there's a whole bunch of stuff that nobody sees and then you come out into the world and people go well you don't look very autistic do you and you think if only you knew that actually and that's very much the case for a lot of the girls and women we try very hard not to lock artistic and unfortunately sometimes that's our biggest problem is that nobody really takes us seriously because we're too good at it rather than saying kind of well done you've hidden that really well people therefore assume that it's kind of less a problem than then perhaps perhaps it might be so gonna talk a little bit about why the girls didn't get missed and didn't get picked up in the first place I'm sorry this is so tiny for some of you are not particularly kind of nearer near a screen when I wrote my book about women I did a literature review of every piece of gender focused research in autism to see whether there were any how much there was there and I think at the time there's probably a few more now but at the time there was probably about 12 research papers I couldn't tell you how many research papers there are in autism generally but I think it's probably in the millions and there were about 12 that actually said our autistic males different than autistic females that was pretty much it really so it kind of appears that once you so what people were comparing was autistic people versus non autistic people nobody ever kind of thought does gender make any difference in this whatsoever not not at all which is kind of weird because in lots of areas of life we do think that gender changes things in the way that people you know process things or behave or whatever so what what seems to be the case is that in the very early understanding of modern autism can Asperger they only found boys and therefore the diagnostic profiles and criteria for autism were written around male behavior and therefore nobody found any girls because they weren't looking for any girls and if the girls didn't quite fit the male behavior then they didn't get the diagnosis and therefore when you tried to do research and you looked for a sample all you could find was boys but you hadn't diagnosed any girls because the criteria didn't pick up girls and so we've ended up with this weird self-fulfilling prophecy that every clinician and professional myself included when you go to autism training they tell you there are four times five times ten times as many males in with autism than there are women and that's what you learn and so when people come into your clinic and it's a girl autism is not on the radar you're not looking for autism because you're told that autism isn't in girls so then when you come to do your research you still haven't got any girls to study so nothing ever changes and this is what's been going on for the last sort of 5060 years or so this this kind of ridiculous kind of perpetual thing so these are some of the bits that came out of the the research that the literature review that ideas just took a few kind of bits bits and pieces we now think it says there two to five male to female ratio some people think it's closer to one to one but actually there could be as many autistic females as there are autistic males that's hugely shrunk within the last ten years so and if you're in a setting where you have far far more boys than you do girls on the autistic spectrum then you need to be looking for the girls because they are in your setting it's just that you haven't found them yet and you may well be labeling them as slightly kind of different things the papers suggested that girls look less autistic because they focus quite often on social learning they are copying they're mimicking they are trying to hide and therefore you are not necessarily seeing the obvious signs of what we anticipate to be it to be a sign of autism the girls are diagnosed later than the boys in this particular study the boys were diagnosed at five and the girls are diagnosed at eight and this is something that I see across the board that there is a tendency to assume that girls have psychiatric and psychological illnesses rather than neurological illnesses so the girls before they get diagnosed with autism are quite often diagnosed with social anxiety OCD borderline personality bipolar social phobia you name it anorexia when actually it might be autism and that's so so common nearly all of the women I meet and the girls that I may have had anxiety did diagnosis or some other mental health diagnosis first and people do not consider autism at all it's it's definitely that they are they they have a mental or psychiatric kind of illness often in girls that are not don't have learning disabilities don't have verbal speech delays of any sorts you're often seeing very early speech and very precocious speech they do not shut up they talk and they talk and they talk all of the time and as I said that can mask social and communication difficulties because it sounds like you're social it sounds like you want to interact if you listen to some of those conversations you realize they're a bit monologue II they're a bit scripted they're a bit one-sided it's not quite what we might kind of expect from a child of that age there's some work that suggests that the profile of all autistic people in terms of their hormone profile androgens and testosterone is more and judging us so rather than being more match Gillian or more feminine there's a sense that possibly autistic people are just somewhere in the middle in terms of their kind of gender identity in terms of their presentation in terms of the clothing they choose the way they kind of kind of think about the world and certainly we've talked about tomboy girls for a really long time and a kind of more masculine feature a male male called extreme male brain theory of Simon baron-cohen which upsets a lot of people but the reality seems to be just sort of neither male nor female in in very traditional terms but maybe just a kind of androgynous profile also quite and we'll be talking more about this this afternoon around gender identity that they appear to be more people who are recognized as non-binary in terms of their gender on the autistic spectrum than in the general population so people who recognize this gender fluid and a neutral their sexuality is not necessarily heterosexual so higher numbers of gay population asexual polyamorous pansexual you name it autistic people seem to have a much kind of broader sense of what it means to be themselves and also to be with other people it doesn't seem to be quite so defined and so clear as we would generally expect in the general in the general population some jolly stuff about polycystic ovary syndrome menstruation infertility migraines hormones excess facial hair that comes with female autism so if autism isn't bad enough you know got a beard to go with it as well which is really joyful they also have suggested another paper that the girls have more social difficulties and are less rigid than than the boys although I don't know if that's strictly true and we'll talk about some of the kind of intense interest in girls and in a minute or two there's also a suggestion that the girls are better when they are younger at social socialising but they the boys kind of overtake in teenage years and it's not that the boys get better or the girls get worse it's that the female social world changes so much in teenage years where is the social world of males perhaps doesn't change quite so much it's still around objects activities stuff whereas female interaction in teenagers becomes much more nuanced it's all about do I like you or your eyebrows right have you looked at me funny did you like my picture of my shoes that I put on Facebook quickly enough it's just like woah highly highly complex stuff and our autistic young woman just still wants to play with her rabbit and Pokemon and kind of do her thing whereas all of a sudden there's this very kind of personality based sense of very complex rules that come on that she can't kind of keep up with it's also considered that the boys have a tendency to want to be alone and that the girls are quite clingy so the girls often talk about wanting or needing someone whether it's their mom whether it's a friend whether it's someone else in their life they don't like to be alone because if somebody's with them then that person can look after them whereas often it was been seen that the boys were kind of a bit more loners quite happy doing their own thing a bit more self-contained the girls are frightened of being on their own because they don't have anyone to speak for them to do something for them and and manage life for them and as I said a large number of adult women seeking diagnosis and a lot of those women are having quite negative experiences going to their GP who may not understand they're just saying you can't possibly be autistic you you have children you have a job you're making eye contact you're having a reciprocal conversation that's it so a lot of people having to go private to get those diagnoses and one of the highest some pretty nasty stuff around suicide and autism and the highest group for suicide are autistic women they're higher than men higher than autistic men which is which is kind of scary stuff and it's something we we don't know a huge amount about but butts are kind of kind of getting there a little bit so why do these girls get missed the criteria replies some people say well we need a new set of diagnostic criteria to diagnose girls but we don't we just need to diagnose better and broaden our understanding of what these criteria mean and how they might present selves that there's a some of you might be familiar with the a DOS which is a kind of standard clinical tool for diagnosis the the big expert in this field is a lady whom dr. Judith Gould and she recommends that the a dose should not really be used for girls and definitely should not be used as a sole tool for picking up girls because it very much relies on the behaviors being seen in the room and being given a point for and as we are learning these girls will often perform very beautifully in front of somebody and will get 0 and will not get the diagnosis at all and I've seen this time and time and time again and there are certain things in the ADA so the other day I read a clinical report from a girl who who had scored I think you have to score 7 in the a dose possibly and she scored 6 and didn't get the diagnosis she was an absolutely definitively obvious autistic girl but by no means and the reason that she didn't get that the last point to get the diagnosis was because no sensory no sensory features were noted within the appointment interview so that kind of suggests that you have to be experiencing whatever sensory thing are your thing at that particular time so when I spoke to her she was wearing a pair of fluffy earmuffs this kind of big which she never takes off unless she's in the bath or asleep and she was wearing a long dress she can't wear jeans she can't wear trousers she wears leggings she was she wears this long long dress there's some huge amounts of stuff around food around texture and all of that kind of stuff but the ADA doesn't ask that so unless you as a clinician are actually asking those very specific questions where was the opportunity for this sensory stuff to come up it wouldn't have come up you don't just talk about this stuff unless somebody asks you and she wasn't eating anything or bothered by anything so why would you talk about it so it's really important that we give as much information as we can to make sure that if people are using tools which are not entirely adequate that the whole picture is is kind of kind of obviously there because obviously without diagnosis there's a whole load of support that she's never not going to be able to have so these is the kind of criteria for diagnosis and and how does it apply to girls why are the girls missed the girls are missed because they copy they talk they mimic they mask some people talk about watching they always tend to copy the most popular girls in the school because there's no good copying the weirdo because you're already one of them let's aim really high let's find the most glamorous feminine social hair flicking made-up kind of girl we can find supermodel status and let's aspire to be her because we're black and white and we're perfectionists and that's where we're aiming at it's like the rest of us you know trying to be marathon runners and supermodels and Olympians or something or other likely to fail to be fair some people say you know I would watch this girl I would watch the way that she picked up her cup I would watch the way that she laughed I would watch the way that she moved her hair and I would go home and I would practice sounds a little bit weird kind of stalky kind of stuff but it was almost this sense of I know that I am not acceptable as I am therefore if I take pieces of people who are socially acceptable then maybe I will be better and I will be liked more than if I if I do that sometimes this comes from mothers I met a mother a very glamorous lady who had a daughter who was very kind of hair down the middle and just hoodie jeans hands in pockets and the mother was clearly very disappointed by the child that she had produced and she she said well if only she could put some makeup on and wear some heels then she could make the right sort of friends and I was like really do you really think that's gonna last five minutes there is nothing that she has in common with these girls she's not interested in makeup and hair and fashion we need to find her her own friends of people that actually appreciate who she is we could all stick a dress on and high heels and totter about for a bit it's not going to make us more social or more easily integrated into into these very popular kind of social groups so there's a huge amount of that some people don't know they do it some people are very conscious that they do it they're picking up accents picking up voices but usually if the the hi hi very social popular kind of girls often considered shy if it was a boy we might call that withdrawn and we might worry about it if it's a girl we might just call it shy and not really worry about it she's quiet she's pleasant enough she's helpful we don't need to worry about her what we know is that sometimes the picture at school in the picture at home are a very very different picture and that schools sometimes struggle to believe the family that at home there's an aggressive or violent a distressed child and at school there's this absolute picture of calmness and picture of helpfulness we must believe each other the schools and the parents you have to believe that this is what's going on I remember a teacher saying well it's obviously nothing we're doing because she's fine at school I said it's probably everything that you're doing and that's why she's taking it home because it's safe there to just kind of fling it around you can't just sit there and say that she's fine here so therefore it's not a Naughton not an issue here often the girls watch everything they sometimes have quite a still little face quite serious little people may not be big social smilers they are watching and they observing all sorts of things and taking it in and learning and working out kind of what to do next sometimes seem rather rather intense rather rather mature and serious kind of little people trying to systematically apply quite often phi2 children and they you know quite young children you talk to them about making friends and they will say I've been round everyone in the class to see if they will be my friend so there's a sense of just walking up to someone and going which likes to be my friend no okay and then moving on so there's nothing organic about it there's nothing kind of natural about it it's just a process I need to have a friend you will do and off you go and again we'll talk more about that this afternoon in terms of kind of relationships often the girls seek exclusivity the friend is the special interest the purse and just one I just want one person in this world who is my friend if that friend wants to play with somebody else then she's devastated by that because she just doesn't get it why would you need anyone else we have each other it's a very intense kind of desire for a relationship often mothered by other kids so if anyone's looking in from the outside she's not on her own in the playground she's with someone else so with a little boy who might be wandering around looking at drainpipes we might worry about him being isolated with the girl she's not alone she has friends it's fine actually the nature of that relationship might be a little bit unusual either one is older one is younger one is much more passive one is much more controlling we need to kind of just look a bit deeper and see what actually is happening in this relationship is there anything that we need to kind of worry about one woman that I met she um she tried to make friends she picked the most popular girl she could find in her secondary school and she said I'm gonna make friends with those people and she plotted she had a notebook she was like a ninja a notebook and had this kind of plan of how she was going to do it and her her cunning plan was involving stationery because she figured that no one could resist particularly fine stationery so she invited this whole gang of girls to come around her house using stationery little notes and envelopes and things delivered it all to them and then none of them came no we're not one at all okay any of you with any empathy will now be going and she she later realized that the reason that none of them had come was wasn't because they didn't like her it's because they didn't actually know who she was at all that she had completely misread the idea that in order to make friends with somebody they kind of need to be vaguely within your remit within your general social circle whereas these people they didn't know her there were hundreds of kids in this school she was just a random other other child and that she completely kind of missed this idea that why would someone come to your house if they don't know who you are so there's this kind of logical systematic effort to do something that most people do intuitively just by organics just by osmosis just by kind of being around people that you end up kind of just hanging out with them and doing stuff so often for the autistic kids it's how do I make friends what do I need to do and it's a very serious mission and it invariably fails because it doesn't have that organic nature it doesn't have that sense of well why do I like you why are you my friend it's not there and then they're very unhappy it failed nobody likes me everybody's bullying me or maybe they're not maybe you're just kind of going about this in a slightly unusual way and people are kind of reacting to that in some way so that's that's kind of a hard thing to think about so the interest of the girls again this is something in terms of diagnosis that people often miss because if you say to a little autistic girl what do you like and she says cats you think all that's fairly normal and fairly typical and it's only when you asked the right questions that you find that she can list every breed of cat in the universe that she has 423 cats sitting on her windowsill all in color-coordinated order they all have histories names personalities entire backstories relating to each one of them it's not the topic it's the intensity that is define something from just being something you like to something that potentially with a whole bunch of other stuff of course fits into this potential autistic criteria the girls often like animate things so animals horses people celebrities relatives people down the road TV shows programs those kind of things and again often have this enormous knowledge base in traditional autism it was all about objects trains dinosaurs space history in female autism it's not always about objects it's often about people or animals of some description where we use the call the boys little professors we call the girls little psychologists because they study people they watch people there are surprising given the nature of empathic understanding and support there are a surprising number of adult women who are count and psychologists and vets because their interest has taken them into those kind of fields we never would have thought that autistic women would become counselors we would have thought that that just wasn't their kind of thing it's it's too it's too much about empathy it's too much about you know putting yourself in someone else's shoes it's too much about kind of understanding somebody else's emotional perspective what a lot of the women say that they've got these professions is that they don't do that they listen to the problem and they find solutions so they're actually kind of studying this person as though they were an object almost rather than emotionally becoming involved in the situation they're looking at it slightly detached and saying right what needs to happen here and often very effective at doing those sorts of jobs the interests of adult women are things like crafts there are huge numbers of crafts women I think that craft is female engineering for autistic women Asperger syndrome used to be called engineers disease we've always had this sense that people on the autistic spectrum are good at the precision the accuracy the systemising of objects of materials of data and it seems to me obviously a lot of women also go into data and mathematics and science but some of them also go into crafts which again looks pretty normal you sit in there knitting that's pretty normal kind of thing what we don't know is that at home you've got 2321 balls of wall that are all monitored log to data processed and on a spreadsheet and that you know exactly how heavy each one of them is and how many stitches you need to perform your next task again it's about intensity it's about experimentation it's about precision and the stuff often that women come up with is really astonishing I worked with a woman who made purses and wallets and things but out of Taunton she was Scottish she knew every single thing about every single tartan that exists so there's a depth of interest and knowledge there rather than just that superficial oh I like knitting no no it's something bigger and more precise and more special within there but something about creating a tangible thing at the end of it is so common to hear girls and women talk about making stuff baking jewelry card-making you name it they love just making stuff that looks kind of normal so it's just the intensity that we we have to kind of worry about in terms of this kind of restricted behavior again on the diagnostic criteria some of the things that we might kind of consider to be problematic in males we actually see as positives in girls she's helpful she's particular she's a perfectionist she stays in a break time and she tidies up all of the boxes and organizes them all into color order how is that a problem actually she's quite cleverly getting out of going into the playground at break time by appearing helpful because probably the playground is a nightmarish experience for her and we see that shutdowns are much more common than meltdowns in girls so whereas the boys go out the girls go down and in and so you're not really seeing any any of that kind of stuff the psychology stuff also carries on into adulthood so quite a number of women that I meet are really into murderers and crime because it's psychology how do people work there's this lifelong study of trying to work out how two people work I need to know how this is and I'm going to study it for a very very long time sensory stuff again we miss because all little girls like stroking softy toys or cuddling Teddy's stroking your teachers hair or you know fiddling around with things it looks kind of normal again we have to ask the right questions we have to really think about whether whether this is something that that's categoric to autism but it's all about our expectations of gender and and how we think that this person might might typically typically behave the big one that's quite different is this sense of imagination that in traditional autism we said that nobody read fiction nobody played pretend games nobody had any imagination whatsoever sometimes what we see in the girls is that they will develop their own very very complex fantasy worlds as a reason to escape from the real world and in that fantasy world there will be friends and characters who play the game exactly as they're supposed to they don't break the rules they're not rude that nobody rejects you in any kind of way so you can generate a whole really satisfying social world where nothing goes wrong whereas in the real world you may typically find that lots of things go wrong and you just feel devastated by that so why not just make make your own I met a young girl the other day and her and she she was extraordinarily black-and-white in her thinking there was no way that anything could be argued that wasn't wasn't going to come back to her being right and she was very assertive about this very very clear about this and if she couldn't get an answer in the real world she would just invent a new world in which it did make sense so for example we were talking about jokes and I said you liked jokes and she said well sometimes sometimes jokes are just not funny she said this is a joke why did the cow cross the road because he wanted to go to the movies that is a joke she said I said yes I said well that's not really true is it cows don't go to the movies do they yes they do she said I said really have you seen a cow go to the cinema yes they do in moon land and that was it and her mother said that's what she does all of the time so she just and you can't argue with that I can't argue with moon land can I and this is her way forward her desire for things to remain safe and certain and clear in that very kind of it almost kind of felt that it was absolutely necessary for her to quickly be right because the idea of not being right was was so kind of unsettling and we know that about autistic people that this the world needs to be sir and it needs to be within my understanding if you start shaking that by going we'll actually know that that isn't really right is it then there's this huge anxiety that comes up and for her the way that she dealt with it was to just shut it down with a very assertive way of arguing my boss came came into the room I bosses a clinical psychologist and I introduced my boss and said this is this is dr. dr. Bakken and this girl said she can't be a doctor because she's not a man my boss said no I I am I am I am a doctor you can be a man no you are nurse you're a nurse that's what you are no I'm not a nurse okay you're married to your brother the Egyptians because she loves Horrible Histories and she established that apparently the Egyptians buried their relatives so this was a beautiful conversation of logic where you just tried to introduce somebody and that didn't fit with her worldview and she just went try try try try and then she came back I am attitude rather like an Egyptian fine I'm good with that and we were able to move on at that point and I just find being in the presence of people's logic just astonishing if you've got the patience for it you just go wow this is just somebody just going make it fit make it fit make it fit and in the end I thought I just had to kind of argue you just give up at some point I think if it doesn't really matter a bit because if you could just see how important it is for her for that to make sense and didn't and she had to just keep keep trying and she just advancing better stuff so didn't you take on characters of animals if they read a book if they watch a movie they can always kind of take on that characteristic through Y I'll get completely lost in the movie and lost in the book I've become that person sometimes struggling a little bit to separate the facts and fantasy it's just a glorious place to be where everything is it's just exciting and you know in that that kind of fantasy world don't see it so much in the boys it's very much seems to be a female thing finding a place to go that feels really really safe and really great and I'm not wanting to grow up I met a young woman about 17 I want to be a cat and she wore ears at a table for a cat and she would behavior the cat has very very low body wage is very young for her age it's a slight person and I said why didn't want to be a cat and she said it doesn't matter how old you get if you're a cat people always look after you when you're an act when you're a human you have to grow up and you have to look after yourself and she was so terrified of being an adult being alone and not having the support of people around her she was almost physically and mentally just trying to remain in childlike you felt like in order to protect herself from that and I find it interesting the inevitably insight that some people have that they know what they're doing to try and avoid something that feels absolutely terrifying to have to go out there and it's not psychosis it's not delusion for me know that I can't avoid this but I just try and be a cat maybe maybe something will happen other activities with the girls like again they look pretty normal and Rodriguez mad mad readers of just books of books often fiction loving loving reading fiction not make over connection or sorting lots of tidying lots of drawing bugs nature playing with things often solo pursuits parallel play coloring alongside somebody not necessarily joining in with with different sorts of sorts of games again we've got to look at depth of this stuff rather than just the surface things otherwise it often doesn't look like autism and there it's gets missed further in the 1940s he wondered why he didn't see any girls in the group that he was studying studying boys over there about eight or nine years of age and he just briefly postured that maybe autism didn't present in girls until their teenage years and actually he's potentially right to some degree for those are now learning disabilities for those of our international disabilities this is really the time their autism wallops the girls really really hard and all the bill go interview for my book throwing on women on my books just said it was just awful suddenly you're kind of okay or you're playing with your toys and you've got your mates and your mum or carers are organising your social life all of a sudden you've got to do that by yourself all of a sudden it's all about fashion is all about how you look it's all about your personality female relationships just moving backwards and forwards all the time you're my friend you're not my friend she's my friend that's not my friend way weights are complicated and the girls just get absolutely blown by all of this trying to copy but just feeling we're not knowing what the rules of fashion are just don't really get it wanna wear these clothes there are come all that stupid no value or points about any of these sorts of things a large number of the girls think to very much dress their own way their own style quite independently quite uniquely might be around particular patterns particular colors particular fabrics a lot of women seem artistic women seem very much value dressing for comfort the sensory starts really really important not necessarily like their their their peers the other stuff is about puberty how do I know when it's time to wear a bra how do I know if it's time to wear deodorant how do I know that I need to shower every day brush my hair and wash my hair they're all quite abstract things if you don't have a big social network it's not obvious a lot of these things of Tor if you think about your own experiences the talking your peers if you don't have many peers how do you know and the sensory stuff kind of kicks in I don't like wearing a bra because it's uncomfortable I don't want to do that like brushing my hair because it's painful I can't smell myself so therefore I don't need to have a shower I'm too busy playing the game when we're doing my bike thing it's another reason to get bullied you stick it out like a sore thumb you look weird wearing the wrong clothes you smell your hair's not quite right you don't know you're supposed to clean teeth and it's a whole bunch of stuff that I think needs to be taught incredibly explicitly to some of these girls nothing to do with intellect just oblivious to the social context of these things if you are a young woman and you're walking around without the bra people will make negative comments towards you people will perceive you to be a certain type of person for a young autistic woman that's just bizarre why can't we just wear what I want to wear and be comfortable why do I have to change how I behave because certain members of society presume that I'm a sir swipers person it just doesn't make any sense it's hard to explain but we need to explain some of this stuff if it's a fact because actually this makes this person very vulnerable if they're walking around in loose clothing and could see them we have to explain things that you can't imagine that you'd have to explain sometimes to somebody really clever they just not gonna get it you need rules you need schedules you need a shower every day to clean your teeth every day this is why you need to do these things with context with evidence with with consequences and outcomes and otherwise the fear is that actually this is going to be something very even more excluded even more bullied because they're not picking up on the necessary social stuff fairly recently biological Robbins Stewart is an autistic woman about periods there's another book by a woman called shown on Nicholls which is about bringing up teenage girls which talks all about puberty and shaving and washing and all of those things that's Robin Stewart and he calls in terms of relationships of friendships she's kind of blunt she's kind of straightforward to kind of expects people to just say it like it is and be like it is if she wants to go and have sex with somebody she I just wander up to them and ask them openly which obviously makes you quite vulnerable and slightly surprises people Mira typical females non-autistic females are probably not her natural peers she's probably more comfortable with males gender neutral people probably more comfortable with other audibles typically it's my experience that odd words find each other in the world at all ages primary school little the little strange children are always there together and that's good the worst thing we can do is think what this socially awkward young woman needs is a really popular fashionable friend because there's nothing worse than standing next to that person to make you feel like the biggest useless front in the entire world find her an autobot to hang out with and it might not be female we shouldn't assume that women are our other girls are all the obvious choice it could easily be avoid much more likely to be around interests do they like the same subjects they like the same computer games they like playing football together rather than a more kind of nuanced personality based based friendship but as I said before there is a fun tendency for some of the girls to kind of aim their harpoon gun at people and go you will be my friend when this they haven't ever considered what the friends might be thinking about this idea they've never considered whether the friend likes them or not they've not picked up any signals it's just the decision you look nice you have lots of My Little Ponies I want to be your friend actually the other person has an opinion too and that might not necessarily be entirely entirely considered social interaction seems to be better when it's short when it's focused when it's activity-based any do things afternoon we'll talk a bit more about that the girls particularly seem to set up these kind of personas and again quite often girls will say I have a different person in each setting that I go to and they can describe that really clearly as to how they are with their friends how they are at school how they are home these cannot be kept up indefinitely there's definitely a limit to the capacity and after that you've got to be on your own to kind of reset before you can go back out and do it again I think sometimes I've seen parents with good intention feeling that you've been to school all day you're not really great at making friends let's go to a club let's go out let's socialize more if we keep putting you in places where there are lots of people eventually you're going to make friends and it often doesn't really work like that certainly six hours a day at school with people is probably as much as a lot of these kids want or need or can cope with and the bigger home in your room in your sanctuary on a on your own for a while is absolutely necessary I know as parents we worry about that stuff having two autistic kids myself but I think it's recognizing that part of that not 100% of the time is absolutely necessary six hours a day in school all that change all that sensory all those people is way beyond the limit of most autistic people to be able to focus got to have that space to keep somewhere also in terms of relationships and friendships there's a whole bunch of sensory stuff whether you could tolerate holding somebody's hand whether you can tolerate kissing somebody whether you can tolerate intimacy with somebody all of those kind of things have to be have to be taken into account some people it's good and some people it's not so good we also know that you know particularly it's very rare that they are offenders but if they are offenders fenders around people and their offenses they commit tend to be where somebody has wronged you so their kind of revenge or either obsessive about somebody or where somebody has behaved in a way that you have felt that that person has behaved very badly and you feel it necessary to get payback in some way so I think arson is a is a favorite autistic female crime just so that you know don't piss off an autistic woman if you value your stuff it's really rare but it's that kind of thing and that kind of makes sense this is a very to some degree socially motivated person but perhaps not with the neurotypical social skills to be able to make that work very easily and therefore if it goes wrong we're back into autistic black and white world maybe struggling for alternative perspectives maybe struggling for alternative strategies I just need to make this feel better this is this is kind of my solution so that there may be a carnival autistic sort of reasoning somewhere in there certainly from my perspective it never occurs to me to invite someone to do something so some people say oh I'm going shopping at the weekend I'm gonna go with my friend I would never invite anyone to go shopping I find that really bizarre never even occurred to me to do so I'm just going shopping I go on my own why would I ask someone to do it so a lot of this kind of social stuff it's not it's not avoidance of it it's just not on the radar it never occurs to me to tell people things you know I've got a small number of friends they're all autistic none of us knew we were autistic when we met I've known my friends for 20 25 plus years and one by one we've all got diagnoses so we found each other kind of before before all of this this kind of stuff we never randomly talk together ever we never send each other pictures of our dinner we never send it to other pictures of our shoes we never just go hello how are you if anyone did that to me I'd be going what do they want what do they want Martha talk to me I don't know I want something and they will so the only reason that we contact each other is to arrange something and then we do the arrangement and then we go out for about a couple of hours film then I've talked to anybody food goods usually the same restaurant usually the same food and then we go by sometimes we do a hard Brits bit awkward and then we don't see each other for another two months and then one of us will go I haven't seen you've too much don't do something oh yeah go on them and that's it so there's nothing some of you are thinking that sounds great your inboxes are not full of and your whatsapp and Facebook are not full of people going you didn't like my post you must hate me we don't do any of that not since it's fine the only good stuff so when somebody cancels on you it's not disappointing because it means you don't have to go out the house I'm sure there are people though you don't like change change which results in something really good and less stressful is better than no change like what I would have liked to seen you but it's quite fine that you're not coming that's okay I can deal with that so yeah no no disappointment at all so the adult version psychologist still try to make all of this sense work still trying to work to work this stuff out there is a huge autistic community online of all genders but specifically water istic women on twitter particularly there are Facebook groups for autistic women and they're brilliant or just sick women are just brilliant well I would say that but certainly what there is is you know we talk about empathy and autism and this nonsense about autistic people not having empathy but autistic people have is phenomenal empathy for other autistic people in the same way that non-autistic people have phenomenal empathy for non-autistic people because you just share a worldview if you say something stupid or you fall over or you spill something during yourself or you do a massive faux pas or you can't cope with something because the lighting was wrong and it hurt your head an autistic person even if they don't share that specific experience they will absolutely get it they will get that discomfort they will get the effort that it takes to do stuff that other people don't don't get so there's something hugely valuable and I think I think the autistic community is valuable for everybody but I think there's a different value often for autistic women it's just a sense of oh my god thank God for that I'm not alone the ability to laugh at yourself it's huge in autistic women we're really really good at just going oh my god you won't believe what I did today because it happens all the time it's not paranoia it's absolute fact and reality you will up you will offend somebody you will say something that's completely misconstrued even they didn't mean to and be seen as a really awful person that is going to happen most of the time that you leave the house and if you can take that on the chin then life's kind of okay it's only if it bothers you that things become kind of kind of scary but this constantly trying to understand people why do they do that I don't understand why do people do that on Facebook and this in the town that we've moved to I love running there's a there's a running or a ladies running group and I'm thinking wow ladies running group running with some ladies why would I want to talk to anybody when I'm running if you can talk while you're running you know bloody running our dinner hi oh and you know I see all these posts on Facebook and they're all like smiling and selfies and having a great time I just don't understand why you need to run with another person I just don't get it at all so I'm generally baffled by it I'm tempted to kind of go along but I know that the effort that it would take me to try and socialise appropriately with these women would be more exhausting than the running so I think I'm not gonna go you don't only go wrong it only go wrong I'd run too fast or I'd run too slow or I'd insult somebody or something would happen it's it's probably not a good not a good idea you generally kind of forgive me any-any non-autistic women in the audience you are the worst people in the world for me way too complicated a whole different sense of genders and things that are that I'm expected to respond to handbags people at works if people come and say I got a new handbag that's nice how many pockets does it have I've got a rucksack I'm not sure do you think women they love handbags and they love fluffy stuff and all that kind of thing but it's just that kind of I don't know what I'm supposed to say once when I was at work there was a massive crisis I work mainly with women in one of the jobs I do it was a massive crisis because somebody came in and they weren't sure whether they put navy blue tights or black ones on that morning and everybody had to look under different lighting to reassure her that she hadn't made the tragic faux pas of wearing navy blue instead of black tights that morning and you know you can barely tell the difference and I just kind of sat back going and they call me disabled I can't contribute to this there is nothing I can say apart from get a life and I'm sure it's really important to you some of these things but I'm just baffled I'll be just grateful to have got your tights around the right way color that's an that's a luxury I can't kind of afford so the whole gender thing again I thought for a bit more rights this afternoon is I don't really get gender I don't really identify with gender I don't feel female particularly I choose clothes or I shop in the men's department as my partly because I'm tall I've got massive feet but I shop in the men's department all the women's department it doesn't really make any difference to me it's much more about whether I like it whether it's comfortable whether it fits it again it's one of those things that's just not on the radar I don't reject gender I just don't notice it I notice how I'm treated differently as a women by some people and interesting enough I keep tonight you once you know autistic people you spot them everywhere yeah am i right yeah yeah and people always kind of go you can't do that but you can you absolutely can and what I know about men is that I quite like lifting heavy objects I'm quite a strong person if there's something heavy to lift I will lift it by myself I don't need assistance I'm tall I'm big I'm strong there is no need for anyone to helpme neurotypical men on the whole will help me they will go oh give that your love I'll take it always they can't resist it's either being kind which are absolutely accept or it's oh I can't stand here and do nothing while this this feeble creature is is lifting everything I don't know what it is it's good stuff I'm not being critical at all the other day we in our new town there's a there's a chap that we've come across and I think he's quite strange and he was very kind and he took us in his van to go and pick up some wood that he was giving us for our garden and this wood was very heavy of huge food massive big long Timbers and he didn't help me he just stood there and didn't assist at all and that for me is a stupid thing but it's really interesting that an autistic person will go you are capable of picking that up you've picked it up why would I why would I offer to help there's no necessary for that so there's something about gender autistic men just don't get it all and I was so pleased he didn't help me so generally in terms of other people often women autistic women often say they and I have this all the time people think I'm stuck-up people think I'm aloof people think I'm standoffish that I am not friendly because I'm not an overly smiley person if I walk into a new situation into a meeting or a party I will stand on the edge and I will watch I will watch where I need to sit because the lighting will upset me or whether the chair is going to be okay for me because I've got problems with my kidneys I'm sussing it all out who do I need to be with where can I go can I get to the back where's the door how is this going to be and so I end up looking very serious and women say this all the time that people are always saying smile it might never happen that they're intense that they're serious and what they say is that inside they're just talking about thinking about unicorns and skipping up escalators and running around and doing really stupidly childish stuff but on the outside is this really unapproachable looking woman and that that very much seems to be a seems to be a thing one of the things that I haven't mentioned that seems to be very much a case with the girls and he's consequence of all of this masking this camouflaging this mimicking this copying is that on the whole I think we see a lot more mental health stuff in the girls than we do in the boys who don't do it so if you're able to just say nope I'm gonna be me I'm gonna do my thing I'm not gonna try I'm not gonna attempt to fit in everything's fine I'm just doing being myself you can protect yourself to some degree from some of this stuff whereas a lot of the girls seem to end up with lots and lots of bad mental health stuff and often from quite an early age because the effort of pending so far to be someone that you're not takes its toll on your mind and then takes its toll on your body so what we see in autistic people definitely from my experience more so than the girls are a whole bunch of aches and pains often considered to be hypochondriacs your eyes hurt your head hurts your your limbs hurt your art your blinking that you're you're uncomfortable in some kind of way and you know I've had parents who have just dismissed this stuff they've taken the kid to the doctor and no calls has been found and they've just said all goodness sake just just get on with it and then just felt terrible years later when it's become apparent that this was all some kind of stress-related stuff so things like tinnitus vertigo migraines chronic fatigue fibromyalgia Emme colitis irritable bowel syndrome all sorts of kind of physical conditions which have a large stress component or really anecdotally it's not been any research on this anecdotally common in in girls chemical sensitivities perfumes air-conditioning just this cut sensory discomfort with with lots and lots of things so we need to kind of watch out for this they're not part of the diagnostic criteria but if you're seeing girls that are picking up some of this stuff and then there's this other impact going on we really kind of need to not ignore that and think about that it's not just the physical stuff we need to deal with it's looking at the root of that so where's the stress how do we look after her better in order that some of these things will go away because if you just made Kait for this physical stuff it's not going to go away if it's if it's cause that causes is a stress-related kind of a kind of a thing so finally our general kind of support looking beyond the surface presentation she might need a lot more support than you think she does because she's doing such an amazing job too to hide it definitely considering autism as a possibility in diagnosis even if everybody else around you is going no don't be silly there's some really good resources Scottish autism have a program called the right-click program for women and girls which has loads of really good videos the nationalistic society has a clinicians module for women and girls which open till recently has been free I'm not sure if that's still the case but it was curly hair project here with resources books and comic strips and things quite a lot of information lots of people blogging autistic women blogging lots of people talking about their experiences on YouTube limps field Grange some of you might be aware of the school in Surrey which is all for autistic girls they've written a couple of fiction books with an autistic female main character they've also got lots of their on the TV show they're on YouTube and the teenage girls they're just brilliant they're their acceptance of themselves as autistic young women is just amazing it's it's something that I've I mean off not having had that coming to this all kind of much much much later in life really important to teach these girls not to compare themselves to their neurotypical non-autistic female peers because what they're comparing is social skills they're not comparing how good they are at making staff or building staff or learning staff or reading staff or knowing stuff they are comparing themselves to somebody who is on a completely different planet socially and that is only going to make you feel worse about yourself you need autistic peers there's lots of young women like Alice from their curly hair project who are good role models people who get it who are sharing the world in their in the same way that you are the finding of your tribe is really important another thing that the girls often really struggle with is not asking for help because asking for help means you failed because you can't do it so we really got to keep an eye on these girls Pitney in school particular with their mental health to make sure that the help is given even if they just go no I'm fine no I'm fine I don't need it because in autism world that potentially looks it looks like failure they become so proficient at being invisible that nobody believes that they they need the kind of support that they need the big message I guess is that what we need to do for these girls at a really young age is just tell them you'll find as you are and that's it really that you're you're not inadequate you're not anything less than you need to be you are absolutely fine as you are [Music]

Channel: NAS South Hampshire

Views: 298,945

Keywords: sarah hendrickx, autism, national autistic society, hampshire, lexica films, autistic, autism spectrum, autistic spectrum, asc, nas, alex carter, nate kiley, chandler's ford, south hampshire, girls, women, autistic girls, autistic women

Id: yKzWbDPisNk

Length: 76min 51sec (4611 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ja-mama-llama]

Thanks for posting this. She was very informative and entertaining too.

[u/FlatchULancelot]

Thank you for sharing! I was originally going to watch the first ten minutes before bed, but I was captivated by what she was saying, and ended up watching the whole thing lol.

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