
Struggles of Women Who Mask Their Autism - ardit33
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/women-camouflaging-autism/553901/?single_page=true
======
sudosteph
This makes sense. I became a much happier person when I exited high school and
realized that I actually could get positive outcomes from being weird. The
"Mask" is more like a script imo, and it's good to be able to drop it when
needed.

The examples of girls with autism trying to fit in with other girls was sad. I
remember in middle school how my nerdy coed friend group got bullied for
sitting together at lunch. The guys got called gay and the girls were shunned
by other girls. There was a lot of explicit peer group pressure to only
associate by gender. Fortunately most people grew out of this by high school.

Personally, I think I tended towards associating with males more often because
I enjoyed competitive games (yugioh, magic, etc) and they were more likely to
play. I always preferred hobbies with explicit rules to the comparative
anarchy of navigating social circles. It's a shame that so many other girls
get pressured by family and peers to avoid predominantly male social hobbies.
I think they actually help improve self-confidence and create meaningful
friendships far more easily for autistic folks than typical sleepovers or
gossiping or whatever.

~~~
ikeyany
> Fortunately most people grew out of this by high school.

But did they?

~~~
sudosteph
Well, they started sitting at tables with people of the opposite sex at least.
By that measurement at least, I presumed so.

~~~
ikeyany
That's true. Originally I had the " men and women can't be good friends unless
there's an ulterior motive" line you see in adulthood.

~~~
badosu
Well, is there friendship without an ulterior motive at all?

~~~
reitanqild
Of course. That's one of the main points of real friends.

~~~
badosu
What you call 'real' friends maybe are friends to which you assign a high
value due to cooperative behaviour that's sustainable long term.

As soon as this behaviour expectation is broken, you'd probably not consider
them 'real' friends.

------
tinyegg
This is hard to do but, are any other women on the spectrum looking for a
friend? I'm 34, a SAHM and I live in Mountain View.

~~~
nothrabannosir
I think this is the first time I’ve ever gotten angry about a downvote.

tinyegg, I think it was an exemplary and inspirational action, and I hope your
seed of courage bears fruit. Although it might be practical to add contact
info to your profile :)

~~~
tinyegg
Thanks, will do.

~~~
rhapsodic
And be careful when communicating with and/or meeting the strangers who
contact you. They might not be who they purport to be.

~~~
tinyegg
Thank you, I'll make sure to meet them in a public place.

------
tinyegg
As a child I rocked back and forth for hours finally stopping at nineteen with
a huge amount of effort. I always did it behind closed doors. I was sexual
abused and abandoned in my early teens. I came to California to help an AI
researcher but ended up as a bio engineer and now a SAHM. The library was my
refuge as a kid, no academic parents, no inspiring teachers. Fitting in was
and is a huge challenge.

~~~
tyingq
That's a pretty _" out there share"_. Appreciate it. If you're ever in a
position looking for a DFW (DALLAS/ Forth Worth) position, let me know).

------
kraig911
I guess stories of people with autism who are merely socially scared and shy
are easier to approach. Meanwhile there are parents who live every day in fear
of how the hell can their son or daughter endure when they die.

My daughter was diagnosed severe/non-verbale at age 3. If this woman is able
to live a life such as this and able to use the bathroom, have a job, etc I'm
hopeful of at least that for my daughter. It gives me hope. But I've met
parents of children who are much much worse.

Something must be done to change this narrative that Autism isn't curable. The
stigma certainly doesn't help either.

~~~
kraig911
I wonder if it's because we're afraid of what 'cured' means. I know to some
people who are mild on the spectrum their autism could be a source of strength
and wonder. I would be remiss to say that if my daughter can tend to herself
and lead an enriched life that to me is 'cured' she could still be autistic
but she could talk and if someone touched her inappropriately or if she was in
pain she'd be able to tell me... that to me be is at least in a step in the
right direction.

Visit a group home and it's one of the hardest areas to see. Young autistic
adults incessantly masterbating, covered in bruises, unable to use a bathroom
etc. Yet they are still intelligent and are self-aware. That to me is the
hardest pill to swallow.

Right now treatments are being tested with umbilical cord tissue originated
stem cells that are extremely promising. My daughter participated at one study
at Duke and went from 0 words to a little over 100. Her ATEC score dropped
from 120+ to around 70. However I fear this valuable research will die if we
start normalizing autism or other mental illness as something we just 'deal
with'

I've read Neurotribes and I can understand the argument but there's
rehabilitation and I think the metaphor around a prosthesis is very accurate.

~~~
sudosteph
Strength and wonder? That's a very odd description. More like, it's the only
way we know how to interpret ourselves, our world, our relationships. It's not
the easiest, but for those of us that have been able to find meaning and value
through this interpretation... why would we give that up just to make other
people feel more comfortable around us? We're not hurting anyone. That's why
many adults who function decently don't want to be cured.

Of course we support medical research and treatment to improve functioning,
especially for severe cases. That's not what a cure is though. A cure is
becoming a fundamentally a different person. Or if some folks get their wish,
it's pre-natal detection of autism so parents can prevent autistics from being
born at all. We don't want to normalize autism to prevent treatment, we want
to normalize it enough so that we don't get written off as valueless people
not worthy of being born.

------
krylon
I am male, but I can totally relate. I was diagnosed with (relatively mild)
autism spectrum disorder last year at the age of 37. I kind of suspected for a
long time, but somehow several psychiatrists and psychologists managed to miss
it.

I wish I had gotten that diagnosis earlier, because it makes it a lot easier
to explain to people how I am different.

I am not sure if I would call it covering it up, but a lot of my social skills
are the result of a very conscious cognitive learning process. By now it is
fairly automatic, but on a not-so-good day I tend to avoid eye contact and
communication in general. Writing, strangely is much, much easier. On the
upside, I managed to - partly - turn this to my advantage by making a point of
being explicitly polite to people.

~~~
Aaargh20318
I'm very similar to you, got diagnosed early 30's, now 38. Still haven't
gotten the hang of the eye-contact thing, I know I basically avoid eye-
contact, it's not a conscious thing. I have to force myself to make eye
contact and always feels weird to do. As far as I understand the lack of eye
contact is an issue for allistic people so I try to remember, but I usually
fail.

~~~
krylon
It might seem somewhat ironic for a borderline-autist, but I find it kind of
comforting that I am not the only one with this condition.

To me, eye contact gets harder if I have to focus. Greeting people or
answering simple tech-support questions is not a big deal, but when I have to
explain - or listen to! - something moderately complex, eye contact becomes
difficult.

I suspect the phenomenon is related to the Clippy-disaster with MS Office;
recognizing faces takes a lot of brain power, and the human brain allocates a
significant chunk to that specific task (at least that is what a neurologist
once told me). Somebody wrote a Master's thesis or Ph.D. thesis in psychology
about why Clippy was hated so much, and it was basically because face-like
things at the margin of our field of vision take up a lot of "bandwidth" in
the brain and thus distract from other things.

------
anotherevan
Both my kids are aspie. My son was diagnosed when he was seven because of some
speech delay when he was younger and social awkwardness.

My daughter was diagnosed at sixteen after two years of missed school and
barely leaving the house due to incredibly high anxiety. Oh, and the first
time she was assessed eighteen months prior she was only "borderline" aspie
even though in retrospect she has been effected much more profoundly. (She
also had a similar speech delay when she was younger too, btw.)

We need to get a lot better at recognising the condition in girls, as we have
with boys.

§

If you are wanting to know more about autism in all its flavours, google for
just about anything by Tony Attwood. In more recent years he has been
concentrating more on autism in women, so adding "women" to your search terms
will surface specific material in that regard.

------
rrauenza
I’ve found
[https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com](https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com)
to be an amazing resource for improving interpersonal skills. Folks in the
spectrum may also appreciate reading the content there. And asking for help
when a situation just seems unfathomable.

------
truculation
Anybody know any stories or resources about autistic motherhood? It strikes me
that being a mother with autism could be a challenge, for example when it
comes to 'bonding' with the baby. Yet I haven't seen it discussed anywhere.

~~~
grzm
The internet does appear to have some resources. I can't vouch for their
quality, having just used a search engine, but they're at least a starting
point:

\- [https://autismwomensnetwork.org/motherhood-autistic-
parentin...](https://autismwomensnetwork.org/motherhood-autistic-parenting/)

\-
[https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2012/11/17/the_a...](https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2012/11/17/the_autism_project_mothers_with_asd_ask_why_scientists_are_missing_girls.html)

\-
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/15/women-a...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/15/women-
autistic-mothers-undiagnosed-children)

\- [http://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-
opinion/autis...](http://network.autism.org.uk/knowledge/insight-
opinion/autistic-women-pregnancy-and-motherhood)

\- [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/autism-
pa...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/autism-
parenting/526989/)

------
kstenerud
One big issue common with autism is blindness to body language, which
apparently comprises 90% of the (in-person) communication we do.

Does anyone know if there are courses one can take to learn how to recognize
and produce correct body language?

~~~
terminalcommand
I don't know about any courses, but watching a lot of tv shows especially
situational comedies such as Frasier, Seinfeld etc. helped me immensely on
reading people.

The facial expressions usually give away the situation. The downside is that
you need to constantly read the other parties expressions, and that can get
noticed if you're not subtle enough.

It required some energy, but over time you get proficient at it.

Another thing that will help is to find safe topics. Talking about music,
girls, sports are the easiest to learn.

My advice would be not to shy away from social interactions. Practice makes
perfect.

Some people may inherently be born with an intuition to handle social
interactions, but that doesn't mean that you cannot learn it by observing and
mimicking.

I guess this is what the article calls as masking. But masking doesn't have to
be that painful. i believe people can grow and chance. If you put an honest
effort you'll eventually fit into the society.

------
rhexs
This is interesting. The descriptions in the article also seem to describe
what may be identified as social anxiety disorder. I wonder how those two
diagnoses differ?

~~~
kosma
With ASD, social ineptitude doesn't go away when anxiety is sorted out.
Autistic people usually have it the other way round: it's their ineptitude
that inevitably causes anxiety due to repeated failures.

~~~
gt_
Well said. I think this particular mixup makes for a lot of extra confusion on
the part of people trying to understand ASD.

------
stared
See also "On emotional authenticity and masking as an autistic person"
([http://cassolotl.tumblr.com/post/160117558965](http://cassolotl.tumblr.com/post/160117558965)),
which was posted here as well
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226784)).

------
amriksohata
Children at school can be very mean, I am much happier as an adult

~~~
romanovcode
Adults can be plain evil just for the sake of it sometimes. They're not so
different!

------
draw_down
I’m not a woman but I do this too. It really just came from others’ negative
reactions to certain behaviors I would do, which taught me that it’s not
acceptable to behave in those ways around “normal” people. (Like some of the
women in the article I knew I wasn’t normal but didn’t know why.)

Ironically, I have gotten so good at this that I sometimes get annoyed when a
person I am talking to acts “weird”.

I feel “lucky” in that I’m not too far off from normal, whatever that is, on
the spectrum. But I still find it exhausting and depressing, like they do. I
have also had the feeling that certain friendships and relationships are fake
because I act differently to who I am when around those people. I don’t feel
that anyone at work really knows me. I don’t think it is worth trying to be
yourself at work, even disregarding the spectrum stuff.

The bit about the difficulties with diagnosing autism in women is also
interesting. There are many similar situations in regard to mental health, for
example women are diagnosed as borderline much more often.

~~~
watwut
Why are women more likely to be diagnosed borderline?

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I found a googleable meta study about it that concluded that BPD traits were
associated with women, but also that women who don’t express gender normal
behavior are perceived as BPD by men. Although men scored higher in individual
BPD behaviors, they were not perceived as BPD by themselves or others unless
they behaved outside of gender normal behavior (acted more “feminine”).
There’s a genetic component by a twin study, but it’s unknown it’s causative
effect to gender. There’s studies that women score higher in
neuroticism(anxiety, depression, etc) as a personality trait. It is also known
child trauma has a causative effect, and may be related to how women are
sexually assaulted as children at higher rates than men. Basically, a complex
mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and
biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall
significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis.
Interestingly, a disorder on the same axis (antisocial personality disorder)
has an exact opposite gender disparity (3:1 men over women) and that is also
investigated in other studies.

[http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf](http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf)
[2003]

~~~
lulmerchant
How people perceive others is irrelevant to the question. Women are more often
clinically diagnosed with BPD, not simply perceived by others to express it.
The rest of your post is mostly unsupported speculation. Apart from the
parallel you've drawn with APD, which has a lot of similarities to BPD, except
with inverse gender distribution.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Nothing I wrote wasn’t a conclusion of a paper or genetic study, as according
to the meta paper that attempted to understand all facets of why women make
the majority of the BPD diagnosis. I understand that because humans are not
formally mathematically provable, some conjectures may be made from surveys,
genetic relations, and studying behavior to attempt to reverse engineer the
program that produced this societal result.

~~~
lulmerchant
You've started with a presupposition that all of the clinical evidence is
simply a misguided outcome based upon social constructs. How we choose to
define BPD is entirely constructed, but the evidence is not, and the evidence
very clearly shows that this disorder overwhelmingly affects more women than
men. Just as APD and various other disorders overwhelming affect more men than
women. If you're going to assert that this is due to anything other than
genetics, then you're going to have to come up with something better than a
weak meta-data study that barely draws any conclusions. Because to do that,
you'll be going against decades of clinical data.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I'm not the authors. I haven't started with anything. Someone asked a
question, I googled and returned the first paper I could find which cited
several surveys and clinical studies to prove its point, gave a quick TL;DR
because the abstract didn't go into detail.

Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have
beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a
question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have
some serious disagreements with the paper.

~~~
lulmerchant
I'm not going hard on you at all, only on what you've said. The evidence about
BPD is that it affects women far more often than men, the clinical data
overwhelmingly supports this, and so does the genetic research on the topic.
Instead of considering this evidence, you've tried to find some seperate
evidence for gender bias, you found the one paper that examines this, and that
paper doesn't even really draw any conclusions.

Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards
to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in
this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because
men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to
in this case.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I literally just returned the first thing I could find that was a study with
citations and stuff. Nothing in my post said _I_ was attributing anything.
You’re reading into my actions assuming intent that simply isn’t there.

~~~
lulmerchant
>Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are
treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may
contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a
female diagnosis.

By your own admission, with 5 seconds of googling, and 0 knowledge on the
topic, you submitted a comment attributing this to gender bias. If you don’t
want your comments to be scrutinized by others, then perhaps don’t post them
on public forums...

Discussion is the point of the comment section, and the limit of the
discussion you’re willing to participate in is “I posted a random study from
Google along with some of my own commentary, that I’m not prepared to defend
in any manner whatsoever”.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
That comment wasn't even _my own commentary_. It's from the study's abstract.
Nothing about my post was my own commentary beyond "hey I took this off
google". I'm not against scrutiny insofar as I'm against having assumptions of
intent thrown on me for little more than googling something and returning the
first published paper I could find.

------
Snowwombat
"Asteroid to destroy earth! Women most affected!"

Articles like this annoy the hell out of me, because it implies that men with
Autism have it better somehow.

I would argue that society is WAY more forgiving of "strange" women than it is
towards men of a similar strange level.

This coming from a guy married to a high functioning ASD woman.

~~~
grzm
I don't read any implication of better or worse in the article, only that it's
different. Would you point out passages that give you that impression?

~~~
Snowwombat
Pretty much the chunks of the articles that show that women can at least adapt
and have the ability do "fake" social function.

Yes it's very draining in some cases, but at least they can hold down a job,
and function as a "normal" adult for the most part. On top of that people and
employers are more than willing to make all the required accommodations when
asked.

I work in engineering / IT as well as being a geek so I run into ASD guys
pretty much daily and they get no accommodations and are usually brute forced
into complying with the required norms, or they get fired.

Even the most simple accommodations like a bit of work hour flexibly and
working from home are not even entertained in most cases.

They stick them in open plan offices, 8am to 6pm and brute force social
interaction on them which is the opposite of what they need.

I do know a few other female ASD people, and they themselves acknowledge that
they get way better treatment and help then their ASD male friends.

~~~
hyperpape
In a lot of engineering circles, you can get away with hours of having your
headphones on, wearing the exact same cut and color of shirt 365 days a year,
fidgeting constantly, and not making eye contact. It’s not paradise, but there
are much less friendly environments.

------
arcaster
I'm at a loss as to why this article claims being on the autism scale / weird
is only hard for women...?

~~~
lumberjack
Didn't read the article, but autism in men and women are two different
diseases.

~~~
OscarCunningham
The same condition, but affecting people's lives differently.

------
stcredzero
I've always liked "Aspergirls." (This is the term a friend of mine uses for
herself.) As a group, they seem noticeably more attractive to me. I've noted
that a lot of them do not like me, and make it more apparent than most women,
though often this is done in a rational and polite fashion which I find more
intellectually honest and respectful, and so like better. I was also in a
relationship with one. That was quite difficult.

~~~
quickthrower2
> As a group, they seem noticeably more attractive to me

Is that because you like smart girls? Or is it they'd understand you better as
a geek?

~~~
stcredzero
Yes and yes. Also, they seem to smell better. I think in part because they
tend to have a no-nonsense approach to hygiene, and aren't as afflicted by
societal distortions around body odor.

