Archive for May, 2025

Under the Radar: An Essential Guide to Autism and Girls is a book by Dr Emilia Misheva.

It’s a short book at arounf 140 pages which makes it a nice easy read. There are not enough short books in the world. It is written for a general audience and would be a good read for anyone looking to understand a lot of the key issues for autistic girls. Clinicians might want something a little more technical but it would still be a good overview.

Today, Holbeck College is launching its first YACEP courses.

As I discussed back in February, we are now a Yoga Alliance Certified Education Provider. All registered yoga teachers with Yoga Alliance need to complete CPD as part maintaining our accreditation. Since February, we’ve been working on adapting our courses to to be suitable for CPD.

The first two go live today: Mindfulness Teaching and Meditation Teaching, with hopefully more to follow this year.

The Adult Autism Assessment Handbook is a clinical guide to carrying out autism. It is written by Davida Hartman, Tara O’Donnell-Killen, Dr Anna Day, Jessica K Doyle (Author), Dr Maeve Kavanagh, & Dr Juliana Azevedo, most of all of which are connected to the Adult Autism Practice of Thriving Autistic.

Although it is typically a guide to assessment, it’s a brilliant book to help anyone understand autism. It has a guide to neuroaffirmative language, in-depth explanations of what it is like to be autistic, up-to-date research on models of autism, a critique of current autism assessments and a guide to conducting collaborative assessments neuroaffirmatively. Well worth a read.

The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women and the New Research that’s Changing the Story is a cognitive neuroscience book by Gina Rippon. It looks at the gender disprepenacy in autism. Previously, it was thought that it was mostly a “boy thing” with a 4:1 ratio. But increasingly, this difference is disappearing, and this book likes at why.

The two key issues the book identifies is that because it was thought of as a boy thing early on, researchers were mostly looking at boys, as well as girls that confirmed to a traditional male presentation. Women and girls who presented in a female way or non-traditional way were not spotted. Then the criteria and the standardised tests were developed on mostly male populations reinforcing the gender gap.

The second issue is that girls typically engage more on camouflaging and masking. Whereas boys will act out very visible behavioural differences, girls will typically internalise their struggles. This means they don’t display the same outward characteristics of boys but still have the same struggles. As a result of these internal struggles, they are often given a variety of labels such as anxiety, social anxiety, borderline personality disorder and basically almost anything other than the correct one: autism.

Women, regardless of neurotype, typically have more highly developed social skills than boys and are socialised to be more empathic. Autistic girls, like neurotypical girls, often feel a greater need to fit in, speeding more time modelling, writing social scripts, and practising social interactions in front of the mirror.

Having outlined all of this, the book dives into what neuroscience can tell us. I found this hard going without a neuroscience background but some of the possible models of autism that neuroscience is developing are interesting.

Last weekend I attended the Neurodiversity Ireland Summit as part of my role working with a student counselling service. I was able to go to the neuroaffirmative practice talk and the autism in girls and non-sterotypical presentations. They were both fascinating and included a talk and a panel discussion. I was also impressed that a room full of people, many of whom were ADHD, sit still for three hours ?. I’ve come away with pages of notes and interesting stuff to look up.

Good songs this year. I liked Denmark but I was apparently the only person in Europe that did.

There were two points of controversty rearding Isreal’s performance. First was the claim that there was fake cheering added. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) have confirmed that this was true.

Second, multiple countries have now asked for audits into the voting. I think it is plausible that Israel did win the public vote. It’s very easy for the Pro-Israel camp to make a political statement by voting but almost impossible for the Pro-Palestine camp to do the same because there are 24 other options to vote for. It’s the same problem we have in the UK general elections: first past the post does not create a result that accurately represents the views of the electorate.

Well done JJ for winning the thing.

Wild Encounters is located just outside Newcastle West. They have a range of birds, reptiles, meerkats and farm animals. Also, a tanuki, which was both cool and very timely given how popular Animal Crossing currently is in our house. There was plenty to keep us entetained in terms of talks, a hands-on petting of the rabbits and guinea pigs, and ferret racing in which Venla and her team mate Polly took first place!

On Saturday, I ticked off my first parkrun in the compass club. It’s a lovely small parkrun with friendly volunteers and a three lap course around the castle demesne which was lovely and shaded by the trees.

I ran the Sandyford 5k last year but this time I did it as one of the Cabinteely Hill Harriers teams. This year, I was significantly faster, completing the course in 22:33 so happy with that. No prizes for me personally but plenty for the club.

Ulster Museum is composed of three levels: history, nature and art. There is loads of interesting stuff including a piece on The Troubles, the formation of continents since the creation of the Earth, and two discovery rooms with lots of hands-on items for children. It’s also located in the Botanical Gardens so you can have a walk around those as well. And it’s all free.