Dr. Rachel Moseley

We can be mentally healthy autistic people.

And that's a really hopeful message.

But it means that when...

clinicians see an autistic person with depression or with anxiety they need to treat that they need to make you know autistic people can be free of mental illnesses and we should be aiming for that

I think we have to keep talking about it, keep talking, keep talking.

And I think that with masking, it's really important to emphasize that it's not such a simple issue as, you know, we need

to make autistic people stop masking or we need to encourage autistic people to stop masking because the reality is it's not a safe world for autistic people to not mask.

And so I think society has to take responsibility for the fact that autistic people mask because

It's not safe in this society to be openly autistic.

So there needs to be a kind of a realization that it's not, the responsibility isn't with the autistic person.

If the world was safe to be autistic in, then we wouldn't see them asking.

I think a key part is diagnosing autistic people as soon as possible.

really importantly when you're an autistic person whether you're female or not you often don't know you're masking especially if you don't know you're autistic you just know that I can really resonate with this you just know that if you behave in a certain way you're less likely to be bullied or you're less likely to be rejected and so it's really it's really impossible to know as an adolescent

That, you know, what you're doing is called masking and it has all these long-term outcomes because right there and then it keeps you safe.

So again, it is something we have to challenge the environment that drives masking behaviours.

But if we diagnose autistic people early on and we can help them to be self-aware that they are masking, then we can also start to put in place some kind of countermeasures.

So even if, as I mentioned, you know, we live in a world where sadly masking is sometimes necessary for

self-protection but if we know we're autistic and we know we're masking we can plan in things like extra self-care we can learn how to unmask and we can just be more aware of the cost of it i have a gentleman i was talking with he was diagnosed autistic later in life and that's another subject i want to get into right after this

That's such a sad story.

And again, it's difficult because it shouldn't be the responsibility of the autistic person to educate the other person.