“Are you neurotypical?” How autistic people compensate to fi

Post Reply New Topic

Much research into autism has focused on discovering the cognitive and neurobiological atypicalities that underlie the defining behavioural symptoms that we are familiar with. However, there is another interesting question, namely, how behavioural symptoms may change during the lifetime, becoming more or less prominent.

Compensation has recently been conceptualised as:

the processes contributing to improved behavioural presentation of a neurodevelopmental disorder, despite persisting core deficit(s) at cognitive and/or neurobiological levels.
– Livingston et al (2017).

(...) it is clear that compensation, at least in autistic individuals with higher intellectual ability, can be either detrimental to health outcomes or adaptive and positive for overall functioning.

Eloise Stark has a manuscript submitted with Prof Francesca Happé as a co-author, but had no involvement in this project. Eloise is a DPhil student in the Oxford Department of Psychiatry, as well as having a personal perspective on autism and compensatory strategies due to being diagnosed just a few years ago.

Poor mental health outcomes guaranteed!