These words of UF's are reassuring I think for those already diagnosed:
"It would be a terrible thing to take away a diagnosis retrospectively. It's the future I'm concerned with, making diagnostic process more precise - targeting very different individual needs rather than a label."
But then she said in that Telegraph interview that it was absurd to call Chris Packham autistic because he could communicate so well! In my view, publicly questioning someone’s diagnosis is also ‘a terrible thing’.
In my case, it took someone I know and trust to gently and bravely suggest I might want to consider that I might be autistic and to think about getting formally assessed. (I'd never even used the word when we'd ever spoken). She even took the time to reach out via email out of the blue to do so, having been thinking about it and she could see I needed answers. Somehow that suggestion allowed my long-standing inkling (while feeling I must be wrong) to find a tipping point into finally allowing myself to tentatively articulate my suspicion -initially to a GP, then claim (after proper diagnosis) my full identity, and make sense of my life for the first time. Bookends of external validation (her suggestion, then my seeking and getting answers) so to speak - I wonder if I'd have struggled on, suffering more and more, had that first kindness now been done (how can I ever thank her enough for that?), I dread to think.
It saddens me to think of someone maybe needing that same encouragement, then hearing Uta's take on the situation and struggling on in silence, denied the missing puzzle piece they so desperately need because they felt shamed to have even raised the question inside their own mind never mind speak it aloud and seek the beginnings of help, support, understanding.
These stereotypes are so easily sown. I always dismissed the possibility that I could be in anyway autistic because I had heard at some point that people with autism did not understand humour and could not feel empathy. I am embarrassed now that I didn't question that but that's how these things start. Some "expert" making a comment like that and anybody who doesn't know any better stores that as fact
I used to run communication teams and had a reputation as a gifted communicator. What wasn't evident to those kind enough to say that was the huge investment of energy (spoons) necessary for an autistic person like me to achieve and maintain that in my field. All the masking, self-editing, frustration, rehearsing, performance anxiety, replaying, ruminating, self-doubt, etc. Uta Frith's comments about Chris Packham made me very cross on his behalf as I sense he has to work really hard, and he is in the public eye as a broadcaster and writer.
