Hello.

Welcome back to another wisdom episode.

Delighted to have you here.

And I am welcoming back a fantastic guest who I loved speaking to and I know has got so much more to give.

She was so young when I spoke to her.

She's 22, with such wisdom and insights and already lived a life full of challenges and difficulties, which she put into a book.

Her name is Emily Katie, and she is autistic women with ADHD and ocd.

And she's also an author.

Like I said, she's written her book.

It was her first book called Girl Unmasked How Uncovering My Autism Saved My Life.

It was released back in 2024, and she's also a trustee for the charity Autistic Girls Network.

I would love to speaking to Katie because even though at her young age she'd gone through so much, she'd already sort of gone through the system, seen the pitfalls, seen where, you know, where she needed more help and support and understanding, and is already, you know, challenging and spearheading this campaign towards better understanding of ADHD and autism, specifically in girls.

So in this conversation, we talk about the importance of recognizing and understanding neurodivergence in mental health, especially in young women, how it presents.

And we talk about the tailored need for support systems for neurodivergent individuals in education, which is vital.

We are needing support.

So much more understanding.

We're needing teachers to really be at the forefront to spot those signs.

So girls are getting the help they need.

They're getting the extra care, the understanding, the compassion, but also that push.

And I hope that with this conversation and understanding Emily's journey, advocacy is so important and we can make meaningful change.

So here is my conversation with Emily.

I really hope you enjoy it.

The reason I think I embraced the autism diagnosis so much was because I'd always felt very different.

I'd always felt, like, quite misunderstood and very different to my peers.

And I sort of attributed a lot of my anxiety down to my autism.

So, you know, difficulties in crowds, loud noises, social stuff.

Even though I had a lot of friends, I would overthink everything.

And now I know, I sort of come to understand how ADHD also plays a massive part in that, because my brain is never silent, and obviously that feeds the anxiety massively.

But autism at the time was almost like.

I don't know whether it was like, it was such a relief that actually there was a reason for why I was struggling so much, why I'd ended up sort of struggling at school and not being able to sit in lessons and ending up in the psychiatric unit, it was like, okay, this is why, like, none of this is my fault.

It was almost like an answer that I could put.

Put it on with the ADHD.

So I was referred for ADHD when I think I was kind of 19 and I was about to be discharged from the adult mental health team, and obviously I was very much already in the autism community on Twitter and Instagram.

And I suppose there was always part of me that felt like autism didn't completely fit.

And again, this goes down to, I suppose, the stereotypes, but I've always been very outgoing.

I've always been very chatty, very loud.

Although I've been very outwardly organized, I like things organized.

My brain is just a complete mess all of the time.

And I do know I was just struggling a lot with placements as a student nurse.

I'd get bored very easily and that would make me agitated and anxious.

And I felt like a lot of my anxiety was because my brain was never, ever silent.

And I guess the more that I saw stuff come up on social media and I also got my mental health notes through and there was a question mark of ADHD in there from when I was a teenager that I was like, okay, well, I want an assessment.

At least.

Let's have an assessment.

But I, you know, I went into that assessment literally not knowing what was going to happen and not knowing what the outcome would be.

So when he said I had adhd, I suppose I sort of thought of a lot of the kids that I work with as well, and a lot of the kids that I've known and their children that really struggle to sit still and really struggle to pay attention in class, because I guess they're the ones that are picked up and referred, the ones that people notice as having adhd, whereas I would always be sat in the corner reading a book.

I loved reading.

Books were like my special interest.

And I sort of thought, well, if I can sit and concentrate on reading a book, how can I have adhd?

But actually, I couldn't really focus on conversations that I wasn't interested in in maths and science at school, I would always come home and, you know, my dad would have to go through the whole.

All of it with me.

And he'd say, well, you're not paying attention.

I'd go, I don't know.

Just somewhere between them saying that and them saying that, I just got lost.

And my brain, I was just daydreaming about something else.

And I would just always be so, you know, embedded in my own inner world and my own fantasies and stuff that was going on that I suppose I was just quite distracted.

Something that you've sort of worked on recently is the Not a School Skiver campaign.

So maybe you can explain a little bit where that all came from.

Yeah.

So on 8 January, the government launched their attendance campaign, which was called Moments Matter, Attendance Counts.

And initially I kind of looked at it and was like, oh, you know, it's just another government initiative about attendance.

But then they started sharing these, like, posters, and one of them was like, oh, this morning he had a runny nose, now look at him.

And this morning she was worried, now look at her.

And they made me quite angry because they were putting such a complex issue of school attendance onto something that just seemed.

I don't know, I was.

I was a bit.

I was quite angry by it because kids are not going to school because they've got a runny nose.

They go, they're not going to school because of so many other factors.

And then what happened was Good Morning Britain did a segment on it and it was titled School Skivers.

Whose Fault?

Parents or teachers?

And, you know, that was it.

I was like, why are we being frank?

And I say we because, you know, I was described as a child on the verge of school refusing.

So I was never actually a school refuser and I would actually go to school, but I would hide in the library and I would refuse to go to lessons and there were days I wouldn't go in.

But I just think that, why are they painting us as kids that are school skivers?

That suggests there's a element of sort of choice in it and also maybe maliciousness and as in, like, I'm just not going to school.

And there are so many reasons for it.

You know, 94.3% of school attendance difficulties are underpinned by severe distress, with 92.1% being neurodivergent, and then 83.4% are autistic.

This is, you know, it's a campaign against neurodivergent kids, I feel.

And so that's where the hashtag came from.

So I responded to basically the government because I wanted to write a letter just to get all my thoughts out.

And then, surprisingly, loads of other people started using the hashtag as well.

And the stories that were shared, a lot of them were really sad, but also kind of gave me a bit of hope because, you know, the kids going through it, they're not alone.

You know, there's people like me that have been there and loads of Other people using the hashtag that have been there and are now doing so much better out of the system.

But actually it's also that drive for we need change.

And through that hashtag I started doing kind of research on actually what are the reasons behind school attendance difficulties.

And over 400,000 children are waiting for a hospital appointment, which is the highest number ever recorded for pediatric services.

Financial difficulties have increased since COVID and there's a link between that and mental health difficulties which have increased.

More people having to use food banks, which links with the mental health and then that.

The school avoidance as well.

Bullying is still a massive issue.

There's over 800,000 young carers in the UK and demand on them and stress has increased since COVID A lot of youth centres, funding has been reduced, so a lot of them have shut down, down and actually periods and the issues surrounding them continue to be the biggest cause of school absence for young people with periods in 2023, which I just think is crazy.

Why is the government not targeting some of these actual things that could help school attendance rather than just, you know, posting offensive posters that are just quite upsetting for people to read?

Yeah, sorry, a bit of a raffle there.

No, no, not, not at all.

I mean, I've written down these statistics from your blog and I'm going to put the link to the letter that you wrote on the show notes so people can read it and really understand, you know, all the different statistics.

And so there's so much to unpack there.

But coming back to, you know, your.

The hashtag not a school skiver, what came from that?

And I guess what have you learned from hearing from a lot of people who are maybe going through this themselves, but also maybe parenting children who are refusing to go to school?

I think what came from it was reassurance for a lot of people that they're not the only ones going through the system and feeling the way they are about education.

I don't think there's been any tangible change.

You know, the people that can help with the system, I really doubt have probably read it.

And I think it's difficult because I don't know what the answer is to our current education system.

You know, there are a lot of children, there aren't enough teachers.

How do you meet the needs of every individual's, of every individual sitting in that classroom?

There are things that can definitely be done.

You know, I had a lot of adjustments and stuff put in place for me at school, so I was allowed to go into the library whenever I Needed to.

I had a timeout pass.

I could just get on with the work on my own.

But I think that the reason I was allowed to do that was because I got very good grades.

I think I was.

I was lucky in that because I.

I think they probably took a different approach with me than they would have done with someone else, which isn't fair.

Other kids, you know, need that too.

But I wasn't.

I suppose I wasn't forced into lessons as much as maybe other children are.

I had kind of regular mentoring sessions at school with, at first the teacher, then the senko.

I didn't have to go into assemblies.

I didn't have to attend unstructured days, you know, like when sometimes there's, like, school events.

I found those very difficult.

At one point, when I went back to school in sick form, I had an agreement with my teachers that they wouldn't give me the grades or the marks of my work because I got very obsessed over them.

So they would just, you know, write what I'd done well and how I could improve.

And it's hard because maybe we need to look at how the education system is set up.

Going to school five days a week was hell.

It was exhausting.

I couldn't do that.

Now I work four days a week, two days I work from home and two days I work in the office and in clinics.

So as an adult, I have so much more control and autonomy over what my week looks like and how I manage my energy levels.

As a child and a teenager, we didn't have that.

You're forced to go into a classroom every single day.

And for those neurodivergent kids, that can be really exhausting and really traumatizing, but yet they're made to go in every day.

And maybe some of them do need a day working from home.

So what?

But our current education system, there's sort of no room for that, is there?

It's such a.

Our system hasn't really progressed with society, I don't think.

Let's go to the book.

What was the book for?

And was the book specifically to start helping to implement change from a grassroots level?

So my book started because I was angry, wanted a way of processing.

I realized so many other young people were going through the same thing.

There were so many especially autistic ADHD girls in the mental health system who weren't being recognized, you know, from that CAMS ward that I was on.

I reckon half of us on that ward were autistic.

And I know some of them have been diagnosed since and probably the same with adhd, but it just wasn't being looked at and wasn't being picked up.

And that has to change because otherwise you've got cycles of young people and adults too being in and out of the mental health system, you know, and every time they're in, in that ward or that unit, they're gathering more and more trauma and.

And then they've got to unpack that and work through that too.

So somehow the cycle has to stop.

And that starts with professionals being able to recognize where there might be undiagnosed neurodivergence and looking at how they can support that and how that contributes to the mental health difficulties.

Because, like, even for me, I know since starting ADHD medication, my anxiety has reduced a lot.

It is much easier for me to work through OCD cycles now.

I don't get so anxious during the day when it's working because my brain is slower and I can apply those strategies to rationalize a little bit better.

And my just my brain is slower so it's not spiraling quite as quickly.

And I wonder what a little bit of what that medication might have done back for me as a teenager, whether it would have helped some of that a little bit.

So, yeah.

So I hope you enjoyed listening to this shorter episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast I've called called it the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Wisdom, because I believe there's so much wisdom in the guests that I have on and their insights.

So sometimes we just need that little bit of a reminder.

And I hope that has helped you today and look forward to seeing you back on the brand new episode on Thursday.

Have a good rest of your week.