Two London psychologists say the claim that autistic masking cannot be scientifically tested overlooks research already underway. In this analysis, their rebuttal matters well beyond the lab, because it bears on the wider argument over whether a single autism spectrum still makes sense.
Dr Louise Legg, a counselling psychologist, and Dr Emma Bede, a clinical psychologist, were answering remarks attributed to Uta Frith, who described masking as impossible to disprove. Their reply is blunt: people have tried.
In their account, Will Mandy's team at University College London produced the questionnaire that serves as the field's benchmark for measuring masking, then spent years publishing its shortcomings. The two psychologists call that self-criticism good science at work, not evidence of a hollow idea.
Meng-Chuan Lai and colleagues took a different route. They compared how autistic adults come across in a clinical interview with how they score on tests of social cognition, a gap the letter writers say no one could manufacture just by claiming to mask.
At Birkbeck, University of London, Jagdeep Wadhwa-Brown is recording brain activity in autistic adults as they complete social tasks, alongside the participants' own descriptions of masking. Legg and Bede concede the work is early but say it is precisely the sort of test Frith considers impossible.
They also point to the neuroscientist Francesca Happé, who has described seeing the mask slip in a tired house guest. That, they argue, counts as an observation rather than a feeling.
A diagnosis at 53
The pair say they see people every week whose autism is sometimes called internalized: people who make eye contact, hold demanding jobs and have been told for decades they could not be autistic. Their core distinction, which this analysis finds persuasive, is between flawed tools and a flawed concept.
But “the measure needs work” and “the phenomenon does not exist” are different claims, and only one was put to readers.
Dr Louise Legg and Dr Emma Bede, psychologists
Louise King of London offers a personal case for why that distinction matters. She writes that she sensed from a young age that she experienced the world differently, was bullied, and has lived since 25 with bouts of depression and persistent anxiety, including breakdowns she now recognizes as autistic burnouts.
Therapies aimed at anxiety and depression brought limited relief, she says, and despite a postgraduate education she has left most jobs because of stress. She was diagnosed at 53, and says the harder task since has been getting others, health professionals among them, to grasp how difficult her life is.
Beyond the labels
King argues that public portrayals of autism rarely get past collecting habits or eye contact. Fuller stories, she suggests, could help experts decide how to support autistic people and how to classify the condition.
Salli Ward of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, who spent years working alongside mental health services, raises a different worry. Describing herself as socially uncomfortable but not autistic, she argues that nearly everyone finds parts of life hard to manage.
Instead of ever-wider clinical categories, Ward would have communities and services respond flexibly to whatever anyone says they struggle with. That approach would sidestep the labeling fight, though in this analysis it offers less to someone like King, for whom a late diagnosis finally made sense of her life.
