BREAKTHROUGH: A New Assessment Tool for Autistic Women Created From Their Real-Life Stories

So your PhD is in cognitive linguistics.

Yes.

And you've discovered that it illuminates why autistic women are so often misread, misdiagnosed, or completely missed.

Mm-hmm.

So first, let's start with this.

What is cognitive linguistics?

It is basically the connection between thought, that is cognition, and language, linguistics.

Ah.

Wow.

So the power of language to carry and shape and influence our thinking, and vice versa.

How does it explain why women struggle to get an accurate diagnosis?

Well, I think that, um, you know, I did a little, uh, linguistic experiment a couple of months ago, and I think that really illustrates things.

You know, the, um, the Millon, uh, Clinical Multi-axel, M- Multi-Axial Inven- Inventory, the MCMI-4, that's a personality assessment that is often used in psych evaluations from time to time.

I use it, um, when I'm looking for certain traits and patterns that I have recognized as, uh, quote, "autistic." The MCMI was not designed to look for autism, but I happened upon a client who shared with me an MCMI she had had done, and she gave me permission to de-identify it and analyze it.

And I looked at all of the language that was used in that report to describe her, and then I did a re-analysis of the report, articulating the concepts in a way that was more in line with an autistic presentation, and the results were extremely different.

So in her report, we would see words like morose, bizarreness, peculiar, idle, meaningless, sluggish.

It, it described the client's perceptions as erroneous, distorted, and compromised.

You know, and that mirrors a, a core premise of therapies like ABA therapy.

Uh, where the autistic person's perception is treated as an error to correct rather than their lived truth.

And so all of these words used to describe this client created an internal pathology that was really deficient, really defective, and the likely diagnoses that came out of that, that analysis was a schizoid, schizotypal avoidant or dependent personality pathology.

But, you know, when you look at it through a neurodivergent affirming lens, you look at the language and the words and the weight those words carry, and you change the words into a more accurate conception from an autistic perspective, you can see that things like the concept of wariness is presented as paranoia, but reassessed through a neurodivergent lens, it can be recalibrated as accurate pattern recognition.

The woman has gone through a lifetime of being rejected, ostracized, and not treated well, and so she's developed these coping mechanisms to be very, very cautious about people and their intention.

And, you know, non-autistic people don't tend to say what they feel, so you've gotta try and read it and interpret it.

And so this, quote, "wariness" that's pathologized in the MCMI, reinscribed through a neurodivergent affirming lens becomes acknowledgement of her systematic masking-

Wow