Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And there was no support systems. And imagine how differently those young people's lives could have gone if people had realized they just learned differently.
And does he put himself in it now?
This is the difficulty. So let's say someone realized that some children were not being properly supported and they changed the diagnostic criteria so that slightly subtler signs are sufficient to make the diagnosis. The problem we have now is that has continued since into, I would say, to a certain degree, going to be a little bit harsh, the realms of the ridiculous.
Because you've got to the point now where you're not only... are looking for signs that are so subtle that they are barely perceptible. We are also including something which people are calling masking. And masking is you don't appear in any way autistic, but you feel autistic on the inside. This concept of masking or camouflaging made complete sense for people with severe autism.
There's a program on TV. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Love on the Spectrum.
And I was resistant to watching it at first because I thought it would be kind of mocking or something.
There's really lovely examples of masking in that where you kind of see that the people are being taught when you go on this date, have back and forth conversations. You can see them masking in the sense that they're learning the social rules and applying them. But it doesn't really look completely natural ever. The masking is obvious.
That's sort of masking or camouflaging.
Yes, that's learning the social rules and applying them. But often it's hard to sustain. It can be exhausting for people who have autism and it often is very difficult. But these concepts like masking have been taken to the point now where someone can be masked all the time so that they never look like they have social communication problems. And that still qualifies as a diagnosis.
So we're being asked to make diagnosis in people who don't show the typical features of autism, but the self-reporting of it. Yes, more people needed to be diagnosed for sure. And there were children who needed help who were not getting help and who benefited from the relaxing of the diagnostic criteria.
But now the diagnostic criteria are relaxed to a point that it's not fair to the very, very mild people who are being labeled. I'm not worried about Bill Gates at all. He seems to be doing fine for himself.
I'm worried about children. So you got a 16 year old child who perhaps has some social communication problems, but they're quite mild and they're able to compensate and they're able to mask to the degree that they can function normally, albeit maybe they're nervous and they don't enjoy things and they're exhausted afterwards, but they can function.
What happens to a person like that when you tell them that they have autism? You're essentially telling them that they're neurodevelopmentally abnormal. that there are things they can't do because their brain's not normal. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy for a child. We've all gone through those difficult periods and we've had to learn to overcome our shortcomings.
But if you tell a child that they have a neurodevelopmentally abnormal brain, you're really running the risk that you have this labeling effect where you concentrate on the things you can't do. You become the thing that you've been labeled as.
And it also isn't as straightforward as to say you can't help that. Part of maturing is learning to adapt. You know, I was a very shy child. You would never imagine that I would be sitting here in the future. What if my shyness had been pathologized? Yeah. It disincentivizes people from trying to overcome their difficulties.
It reinforces symptoms instead of helping people to kind of get over their problems. And I know that you're saying if someone tells you that they're autistic, you think, OK, well, I understand you a little better now. But I don't think that's everybody's attitude. I think there's also people who...
If they hear that someone's autistic in the mild range, I should say that when I'm talking about this, I'm really talking about people who are in that borderline zone. There's always value to being diagnosed if you have significant problems. I'm talking about the value of being diagnosed if you're in that borderline zone.
Some people might be understanding, but other people will be quite judgmental of that. It's also very worrying that the milder and milder the diagnosis get, the more we're trivializing this disorder for people who are really disabled by it. People with mild autism, again, this very borderline area of autism, have very loud voices now.
Because we see there's a lot of people in the public eye who have these diagnoses and it gives people the idea that they know what these things are. I doubt they've seen many people who have what I would call significant moderate to severe autism because they don't get to be on telly and they don't get to be on podcasts.
That's what it meant. And the sort of tone of conversation sometimes can be quite difficult for people in that severe category because there is a sort of conversation that says it's okay to have these mild autistic traits. You shouldn't overcome them. You should embrace them. Be your most authentic autistic self. But I've talked to the families of people with severe autism.
Showing 181–200 of 271 · page 10 of 14
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