during self-representation tasks: ‘Autistic women may engage substantial insight about their own behaviours in interpersonal and social contexts – specifically, how their behaviours impact others, gauging and managing the impressions they make on others, updating the differences between their natural and camouflaged behaviours, and how such

And given the links between camouflaging and poor mental health, it is also important that ways of spotting it can be added to the autism clinicians’ inventory.

Lawson suggests that the shape-shifting behaviour of autistic individuals is actually an instinctive, protective response to the perceived or actual harm that comes from being socially rejected or excluded.

Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism website called ‘30 Sensory Icks: A Checklist for Autistic and Neurodivergent People’, which illustrates these sorts of issues.2

females who are driven into hiding. So, as well as exploring the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of camouflaging, we should look to the role of gender in explaining the ‘why’. And that should include why it is more common in females – is camouflaging linked to some sex-based mechanism that prioritizes ‘belongingness’?

Deep compensation is an attempt to overcome such difficulties by trying to extract the ‘principles’ of social understanding, such as finding out how to interpret emotional expressions, how to pay attention to social cues, how to ‘read the room’.

The NSSI/autism overlap appears to be linked more to the apparent choice of distress signal. Why should self-harm be more common in adolescent autistic females?

Imagine what your world might be like if your senses were tuned in an exquisitely different way. If your daily life was filled with sounds that were too loud, or lights that were too bright, smells too overpowering, clothes too scratchy, or tastes too powerful.

Their data showed increased DMN connectivity in autistic females, as opposed to the underconnectivity showed by the mainly male cohorts in the 2017 survey, and greater connectivity to other frontal control systems. So, firm assertions with respect to characteristic underconnectivity in the autistic brain are not supported if you look at all