Axia ASD April 2019 PDSG Presentation Atypically Autistic ‘You don’t look autistic to me’

Axia ASD Post-Diagnostic Support Group presentation by Sarah Hendrickx described as:

Atypically Autistic – ‘You don’t look autistic to me’.

The stereotypical view of autistic people is that we are all like Rainman or Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory; somewhat oblivious to what people think about us and all nerdy loners. More recently there has been an understanding that autism can present itself in other ways which leads to a very different type of autistic personality type than was traditionally thought. This has been termed the ‘female presentation of autism’ and does appear to affect many autistic women, but other autistic people also relate to this autistic profile. In this talk, we will look at how women and others who do not fit the traditional autistic profile have been missed, mis-diagnosed and misunderstood.