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Showing posts from August, 2018

The Mask (but not the awful sequel)

This month, there is a #TakeTheMaskOff social media campaign, about the role of masking in autistic lives (and the harm it can cause), so I thought I'd write a quick post about my own personal experience. A quick definition, in case anyone needs: masking, or camouflaging, is affecting learned social behaviours in order to not appear autistic. Its importance as a social and medical issue has been significantly raised recently, following an extensive and thorough study by Sarah Cassidy, Louise Bradley, Rebecca Shaw and Simon Baron-Cohen that assessed risk factors leading to suicide amongst autistic adults ( https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0226-4 ). As I've said in previous posts, I was diagnosed aged 36. Like, I'm sure, many other late-diagnosed autistic adults, the diagnosis didn't come as a shock, didn't sneak up out of the blue after decades of thinking I was 'normal'. I had never been terribly good at fitting in, w