Josh’s mum finds it hard to understand him. At school, her son is puppyish, friendly: a 12-year-old who still has the excitability of a primary school child rather than the jadedness of other Year Eights. But at home, his mum …
The invisibility of autistic girls
“Let’s go to page seven,” says the psychologist.
I flick through the papers on my lap. There it is, at the bottom: “Autism, without accompanying intellectual impairment and without accompanying language impairment.” I read that I fulfil all seven diagnostic …
Who decides if you’re mentally ill?
Abby walks into my office, sits down, and tells me she has been struggling with “sex addiction”. When I ask about this, she tells me of sleeping with a handful of people in the past few months at college. I …
Inside Britain’s psychiatric nightmare
There were still grim Victorian-era asylums dotted around Britain when Penelope Campling started out as a young psychiatrist almost 40 years ago. She began her career in The Towers, one of two such places in Leicester. It was bleak: filled …
There’s nothing Punk about autism
After months of staff allegations of toxic bullying at Scottish beer company BrewDog, the company’s chief executive has finally explained the cause of his “intense and demanding” behaviour: he suspects he has “light-level autism”. In an open letter published last …
Mental illness doesn’t make you special
Marianne Eloise wants the world to know that she does not “have a regular brain at all”. That’s her declaration, on the very first page of her new memoir, Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking. The book catalogues her experience of a …
