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Ailsa Russell

Ailsa Russell

Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Bath and Director of the Centre for Applied Autism Research, specializing in adapting CBT for autistic people.

Sep 29, 2026

3:39
Brilliant and there's lots more for us to come back to and dive into there but before we get any deeper into that it'd be lovely to hear a little bit about you and how you came to working in autism and CBT Elsa.
3:53
Well we've got to go way back into the eons of time.
3:57
Really people just were walking through the clinic door.
4:00
I started as a clinical psychologist in services for people with Mild intellectual disability, actually, and sort of quite significant mental health or behavioural problems.
4:12
And in those services, because some autistic people do have intellectual disability, I got to know and was working with autistic people with that set of problems.
4:21
But more and more, and this is really dating me, so let's not ask what year this was, but more and more we were asked to see people who didn't have intellectual disability, but who were autistic and were experiencing disability.
4:34
mental health difficulties or other problems and their local services, just the local mainstream mental health services weren't quite sure what to do.

20 MINS LATER

24:35
Okay.

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