I want to talk about missed diagnosis, and autism.
A number of teams first diagnose a particular child in a family. A child whose behaviour is very noticeable in some way, and who perhaps also have multiple other conditions and situations in their life/

Often, it'll be a boy who gets the diagnosis. Not always.
Many years later, another of the children gets an autism diagnosis. But they weren't noticed. Their *behaviour* or IQ didn't match that of the other child, so they were missed.
It happens a lot with girls/young women/

...and it comes as a huge shock to the families concerned, a lot of the time.
They'd been so used to thinking of autism in that typical 'high support needs, male' way that some are actually offended that someone has diagnosed the other child.
"That can't be right!"/

"That isn't what autism looks like. That's not Real Autism. Real Autism looks like really high support needs. That's not my other child!"
Some families are of course fab about it all.
I'm not a diagnostic professional. I just train them/

...and one of the first things we try to mention in our training team is how very different autism 'looks', compared to how some thought it looks.
We're not a look.
For so many, our internal world is radically different to that of others/

We might spend years barely communicating, and be thought of as 'quiet'.
Years struggling in class, but cope by swotting up at home somehow.
Years of loneliness because non-autistic peers isolate or bully us, but thought of as 'a loner'/

...and later in life, we collapse from the internal strain of coping in an utterly baffling world.
One filled with people who don't speak our social language, and never explain theirs.
A world filled with sensory hell, which others seem to cope with, effortlessly/

And we fall into eating disorders, perhaps, or self harm, or depression, or anxiety.
Or we get misdiagnosed with personality disorders that we never had, or schizophrenia that we never had ("Do you hear voices?" [us...ultra literal....'yes'!, etc ]
Only then/

...after a host of other medical notes we collect, might someone think, 'wait, could this person be autistic?'
Or maybe we read something and think, 'heck, that's me!', only to be told that we don't have the Real Sort with High Support Needs and we're Not Male and we Smiled/

It really has been quite a situation for so many hundreds of thousands of autistic adults, that struggle to be recognised.
And those myths about what autism 'looks like' are behind so much of it.
Worse still for those in BAME communities, where again autism dx is so hard to get/

We think we 'know' that autism can't possibly equal competence in a specialist job.
We think we 'know' that autism can't possibly be missed for years.
We think we'd 'know' if our colleague was autistic, but so many mask. To their detriment, exhausted, year after year/

A great gift anyone can give an autistic person is simple acknowledgement that all sorts of people can be autistic. That autism doesn't have to look like a white male in a care home. That smiling and pretending to make eye contact is very common in autistic life
We know better/

We know that 1 in 30 people is autistic.
We know that it can be any IQ.
We know that it can be any gender.
We know that it can be someone in any job, any role.

And we know that autistic people are every bit as fabulous as everyone else.
Let's make life work for all of us.