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Lived experience, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Autistic leaders on the diagnoses that came first and did not fit
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, Christina Chun, Sharon Zivkovic and other speakers described diagnoses of depression and cognitive impairment that, in their telling, did not account for being autistic.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Christina Chun went through postnatal depression before she was diagnosed autistic, and she told the opening panel of Think Autism Sydney in May 2025 that she wished she had known more at the time. She wished, she said, that the overstimulation she felt had been understood as a symptom of autism “rather than just something was wrong with me as a mother”.
Chun, chief operating officer of Social Enterprise Australia, had been diagnosed two years before the panel. She is a mother of three girls, aged two, four and seven. Early in the session she had described a term her partner, Tim, introduced her to, autistic regression in parenthood. With more small voices and more demands, and while working full time, she felt her executive functioning going backwards and could no longer use the coping mechanisms she once had.
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Sources the story draws on
- Higher rates of post-natal depression among autistic mothers (opens in a new tab), University of Cambridge
- A comparative study of autistic and non-autistic women's experience of motherhood (opens in a new tab), Molecular Autism (Pohl, Crockford, Blakemore, Allison and Baron-Cohen), via DOAJ
- Experience of mental health diagnosis and perceived misdiagnosis in autistic, possibly autistic and non-autistic adults (opens in a new tab), Autism (Au-Yeung, Bradley, Robertson, Shaw, Baron-Cohen and Cassidy), via Middlesex University repository
- Autistic individuals may be more likely to use recreational drugs to self-medicate their mental health (opens in a new tab), University of Cambridge
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