When Trauma Disguises Itself as Autism
When institutions mistake trauma for traits, autistic youth carry the cost
Alice Quinton’s doctoral thesis at King’s College London takes on a problem too many autistic young people know firsthand: when trauma is written off as just another feature of autism. The work is sprawling — systematic reviews of PTSD studies, twin analyses linking autistic traits to later trauma, clinician surveys, secondary school data, teacher interviews — but the through-line is simple. Trauma shows up in autistic lives, and the systems built to help us often can’t or won’t tell the difference between trauma’s scars and autism’s traits. The thesis does not argue that autism and trauma are the same, but that their overlap is often misunderstood, leading to misdiagnosis or missed care
The Wrong Diagnosis in the Wrong Room
Clinicians appear in this story not as villains but as mirrors of the frameworks they were trained to use. When a child who once spoke freely begins to go quiet, avoids eye contact, or pulls away from activities they used to enjoy, the default is to mark it down as autism’s persistence rather than a response to abuse or victimization. The thesis makes clear that this misattribution has consequences. Autistic young people are less likely to have their trauma recognised, more likely to be treated as disordered rather than harmed, and left carrying pain that never even makes it into their charts.
Classrooms That Compound the Silence
The same logic plays out in schools. Teachers describe pupils who are bullied, isolated or overwhelmed, yet the behaviours get filtered through the lens of autism instead of trauma. A child who flinches at sudden noise is told to toughen up. A student who avoids group work is read as inflexible. The result is a double bind: autistic difference is pathologised, and trauma is missed entirely. Quinton’s interviews underline a grim consistency. Educators want to help, but the categories they are given turn trauma into a footnote rather than a headline.
Naming the Harm, Not Just Measuring It
This is where the thesis shows its protective value. It refuses to treat autistic distress as an inherent burden. Instead it documents how systems of care and education reproduce that harm by refusing to see trauma when it is present. Autistic youth are not the problem, but rather the diagnostic blinders worn by adults who hold institutional power. That naming matters. It gives clinicians and teachers evidence that what feels like confusion is actually a structural issue, not a personal failing of the child in question.
Why It Stops Short
Still, the thesis could have gone further. Autistic young people remain case material rather than framers of their own narratives. Their voices are mediated through surveys, coding and practitioner accounts. Protective intent is evident, but power still lies outside autistic authorship. For AAB, that distinction is not nitpicking — it is the hinge between supportive allyship and genuine narrative sovereignty. Until research begins not with how others perceive us but with how we frame ourselves, even the most careful ally work remains incomplete. Despite this gap, the thesis is a significant contribution to righting the deficit framing of autism research, which has gone on for far too long.
The Better Questions Left Hanging
If trauma can be misdiagnosed as autism, what happens when the reverse occurs — when autism itself is treated as trauma to be erased? How would services change if autistic framing power was embedded from the start, not retrofitted at the analysis stage? Could classrooms be restructured so that recognizing trauma is not an exception but a default expectation? The thesis alludes to this possibility but does not address it directly.
The Last Unanswered Question
Quinton’s work deserves attention because it marks a turn. Instead of asking how autism causes trauma, it asks how institutions cause trauma to go unseen in autistic lives. That shift is protective, and it matters. But the question that lingers is one the field still avoids: when will autistic young people be allowed to define the terms of recognition themselves?