The Female Profile of Autism: A Guide to Clinical Assessment is a book by Isabelle Hénault and Annyck?Martin. It suggests its intended audience is both clinical professionals and autistic women looking to understand how autism presents in women and what the assessment process looks like.
It has three parts. The first talks about autistic experience in the third person. The second is a narrative written by Martin about her experience of discovering she is autistic. Part three is some guidelines for clinical assessment.
I wasn’t too sure what to make of the book. There is clearly a lot of relevant clinical experience here. But is it neuroaffirmative? I’m not sure. It’s not medical model but it’s not the language I would expect to see in a new book. However, it was written in French and then translated to English, so it is fair to say some of the language may have got off point in translation.
It also leverages the work of Tony Attwood a lot. Now, Tony Attwood is a legitimate bigwig with his own Wikipedia page. But some of the language is like “and the magnificant Tony Attwood says…” as if he is the Wizard of Oz. Maybe he is; I’ve not met him. But I would like a clinical book to reference research and integrate ideas a little more. And again, maybe some of this is the translation.
The assessment guide provides a lot of useful questions. I would tweak the language to pathologise a little less, but the questions hit on the relevant issues. Overall, I would say this is a useful book for clinicians working with autistic women and girls.
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Tags: autism, neurodiversity, psychology
This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2025 at 11:00 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.