Late-diagnosed Autistic Children: Mental Health & Social Difficulties

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.19889
In this podcast, we talk to Will Mandy, Professor of Neurodevelopmental Conditions at the research department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London (UCL).
The focus of this podcast is on the JCPP paper, ‘Mental health and social difficulties of late-diagnosed autistic children, across childhood and adolescence’ (doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13587)

Will is the first author of this paper and sets the scene by clarifying what constitutes as ‘late diagnosis’ when talking about autism in children, before turning to the paper itself and providing a summary of what they looked at in this study.
Will talks us through the methodology used and shares an overview of the findings, including further insight into why some children get missed and the role of diagnostic overshadowing. Will also mentions that girls were overrepresented in the late diagnosis group and explores why this might be the case.
With this study showing that the late diagnosed group had milder problems in early childhood, presumably making them harder to identify, Will comments on what more could be done to find, assess and correctly diagnose children, before discussing what the implications are of his findings for CAMH professionals.