Dr Becky Quicke
speaker
100 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr Becky Quicke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Definitely with babies, it's distress, it's crying. It's distress. And for parents, it's tricky to help to regulate a baby that becomes that overstimulated. So it's about kind of...
Managing that and letting there to be a little bit of stimulation, but actually making sure that's not very much and creating an environment where then you drop the stimulation so that the body doesn't become totally dysregulated. Because an autistic and ADHD body and ADHD to a certain extent as well is a very permeable in terms of sensory, the sensory stimulation process.
just kind of comes in from the outside world. And like I say, the body's very permeable and it feels it really intensely. And so obviously until a baby child is able to develop their own ways of regulating, then they become, yeah.
very dysregulated and then it can be um expressed similarly you know toddlers this is really is i think this is really interesting thing about toddler tantrums versus meltdowns and you know overwhelm um and they are different they really are different i think that's and it's really i guess it's tricky for parents to know and a lot of parents feel like oh this is
you know, toddler tantrums, it's a terrible twos and things like that. But actually what parents have described to me is it's different. It's really quite, it's quite extreme. And it's really, really distressing for some parents. And obviously for the child themselves to be feeling such extreme kind of overwhelm.
Yeah, they can kind of, I mean, that happens, we get women who come in for screening call and assessment and absolutely that's been their experiences. They kind of, oh, I'm not one and I'm not the other, but actually quite often they're both.
But there is quite a lot of talk of them kind of almost cancelling each other out and it not being shown, but also I think it's really important to say that they intensify each other as well.
So I always think that like ADHD almost like can really intensify the autistic experience and it can be, you know, it can really kind of almost put a rocket underneath things and intensify the emotional experiences or, and it can make it very, very difficult, or they can, it can actually, they can work beautifully together. I mean, some people have said that, that it works really well.
And actually it's meant that they're able, you know, they are able to develop strategies to organise themselves, but actually it doesn't come, it's not easy or intuitive to be organised. And actually the attention does get pulled and it's hard to regulate the attention, but... Actually, they really want to have that sense of kind of feeling organised and things being predictable.
And so some people talk about them working beautifully together. And I think that's really important to talk about. It can be experienced differently.
There can be difficulties, but actually we do get some women who come through and have an assessment and they're not experiencing a lot of distress because they've created a life that really works for them and actually they've kind of worked the two together.
Someone like that historically would not receive a diagnosis, even though we can see, you know, we've done the assessment, we can see actually having that collaborative assessment with them that that's how their brain works, that's how they experience the world, and actually they do reach criteria for autism and ADHD.
What comes to mind for me is the kind of overwhelming thing is shame. With shame being, I am wrong, rather than, you know, guilt is I have done something wrong. Shame is I am wrong because there are so many, um, like you say, messages from, from people, from school, from family members. And so, yeah, it has a massive impact.
Um, I've worked with a lot of children and obviously adults who are children who've experienced that. And the shame is very, very toxic when, when a child, um, comes to understand themselves and actually even just giving the diagnosis, it can actually change things really significantly.
You know, if our parents say that we haven't had any meltdowns after that diagnosis, doesn't mean I'm not saying like you get a diagnosis and everything's absolutely perfect. But to know that there's a reason and you can understand and explain these experiences, there's nothing wrong. You're not wrong. You are absolutely right. Because that's the message we give to these girls.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with them. It just almost, the shame dissipates and kind of goes, you know, really subsides. And that has, and that obviously is a hugely positive thing. So if that doesn't happen and the shame continues, then you start to get towards people, people understandably not being able to tolerate those high levels of shame.
And so having to develop what we'd call psychological defences is, So defence mechanisms to not feel that shame, either massive doing things to avoid those feelings or projecting those feelings into other people. Projection is a defence mechanism. But doing... things as they grow older into teenagers, adolescents, young adulthood to not feel that shame.
And that's when that becomes potentially problematic.
Yeah, and there's, I mean, I've talked about shame there and the kind of emotional development, but there's lots of other ways actually that an early diagnosis can really, can be extremely helpful. So without it, and like you say, living in a life that's not aligned with who you really are, you can't really understand your needs and therefore, you know,
create a life and be in relationships that align with your needs. And we know that, especially with girls, there's a lot of social vulnerability with autistic girls in particular. But I think that one, and it's a complex thing, there are lots of reasons why that is. But without that awareness,
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