Autistica Discover Conference 2018

Charli, Janina and Catherine from the SEDAF team attended the Autistica Discover Conference 2018 at City University in London on 06.09.2018. The conference brought together autistic people, family members, researchers and professionals from across the UK. It was organised by Autistica, the UK’s leading autism research charity, who are also funding the SEDAF project.  It was a great opportunity to learn about other research in the field and to connect with other researchers and members of the autism community. 

There was a mix of poster presentations and talks about autism research focusing on mental health, physical health, language & communication, complex needs, social care and epilepsy. There were also key note talks from experienced researchers in the field, including Francesca Happe, Damian Milton, Tony Charman and Sue Fletcher-Watson, who talked about their work and visions for the future of autism research. They raised important issues, including how our understanding of autism has changed over the years, the need for good quality research and methodological rigour, the value of learning from research failures and the need for individualised support.

We presented a poster with some initial findings from our interview study on autism and anorexia and had a lot of interest and some very valuable feedback from other attendees. We also had the opportunity to gain insights into other areas of research.  A lot of the research presented was very relevant to our work on anorexia in autistic women:

Eilidh Cage talked about the cost, context and reasons for camouflaging. The findings of her study found that autistic women were more likely to endorse functional reasons for camouflaging than autistic men and this could be due to the lack of societal understanding of autism in women.

Helen Basu Chaudhuri presented her research on awareness of internal sensations (e.g. feeling hunger) in autistic adults. Her findings suggest that some autistic adults have difficulties identifying these sensations, with implications for consequent problems, such as eating disorders.

Charlotte Frances Huggins presented her work on the differences in the development of emotional granularity - the ability to distinguish between our own emotions. This is important because understanding our own emotions helps us to regulate them, communicate them and understand others. Her review suggested that autistic people had significantly poorer emotional granularity than non-autistic people, and this difference became more apparent as they got older.

Felicity Sedgewick shared findings from a large scale online study on mental health outcomes and eating behaviours in autistic men, women and non-binary people and their neurotypical counter parts. She found that autistic non-binary people are more likely to be anxious and have disordered eating than all other groups, but not more likely to be depressed.

Members of the autistic community co-chaired each sessions and introduced the area of research before researchers presented their work. They spoke with incredible courage about their personal experiences of late diagnosis, mental health, service user experience and what good support and autonomy means to them. These personal accounts put our research into context and emphasised what it is really all about: making a real-world difference to these and many other autistic individuals.