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’.
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.
